When I was in high school in the early 2000s, I worked the summers before my junior and senior years at Kay's Ice Cream, located in Maryville, Tennessee just down the road from the high school.
A small ice cream parlor and grill that had been around since the 1940s, it had a long and interesting history. I once served a couple on their 50th anniversary who had stopped in for the first time on their honeymoon.
But I've never been able to find the story behind what I refer to as the Lady in Blue. Kay's Ice Cream was essentially a small, one-room building with a classic parlor interior: simple white walls with red booths, free-standing black tables, and enormous plate windows.
So when I started seeing a woman in blue from the corner of my eye who disappeared when I turned to look, I couldn't quite explain it away. As the number of almost-sightings increased, I caught increasingly better glimpses of her.
She was an older woman, probably in her 80s, in a solid blue two-piece dress and walker. Eventually, I couldn't help but admit to a coworker and longtime friend that I was seeing things, laughing sheepishly about my "descent into madness."
I started to tell her about the lady I kept glimpsing, only to watch as her face paled.
"The old lady in blue with the walker?" she asked.
It became clear that we were almost-seeing the same woman. Over the next few weeks, it came out that all of the teenagers working there were seeing her, along with several older coworkers, but we were never able to figure out who she was or why she was there.
