the girl in the yellow dress...

for many years i lived in my little 1926 bungalow that sat in the middle of a beautiful pecan tree covered lot - before i bought the house, for several years, i drove past it every day enroute to work and every day, i could not help but slow down and look at it - there was a qaintness and charm about it that set it apart from its neighbors although the houses in this subdivison were all early 20th century homes with big trees and lots of flowering shrubs - for some time it sat empty with no one living there - for me there was always a kind of familiarity - i had such an affinity for it so one day i tracked down its owner who lived in another town - and long story short i told him i wanted to buy the house - when i sent him my initial proposal by mail, i outlined all the things i envisioned for it and for me and my family and based upon that letter, he told me, he sold me the property in which he had raised his family -

when i moved in, i immediately began restoration of the main floor - the house also had an upstairs which had been finished out from attic space back in the 50's by the previous owner who had also, when he moved out, left upstairs all of the junk and debris from his years of living there - in any event, i began work downstairs first - at the center of the bottom floor sat a square island which housed a large closet and the stairwell - the closet door opened into a rectangular hallway space from which sat the other downstairs rooms - this closet door was directly opposite the door of the "mistress [in my case] bedroom" -

during this time, one of my daughters and her two small children lived with me - on this particular night, the children were in their beds and my daughter and i decided to watch television from my big bed where we sat with the overhead light out as we watched the movie - apparently, we both fell asleep and when the movie was over, the tv turned itself off - then i was awakened by a bright light in my face - and i looked up to see "my daughter" standing at my hallway closet with the door open and the light on - she had her back to me - her long hair was down - and she had on a yellow dress that i had not seen before - i was startled to see her there and asked her what she was looking for in the closet - and then i asked where she had gotten that yellow dress - the dress had a very fitted waist, a ruffle around the shoulders which dropped off the shoulders a bit with a full skirt gathered at the waist, a tied sash in the back and it was floor-length - i called her name several times - she didn't answer, but continued to stand there at the closet opening with her back to me - then, my daughter said to me, "mom, what's the matter?" and i turned to look at her and realized that she, cindy, my daughter, was on the bed beside me and she was not wearing a yellow dress - cindy had fallen asleep beside me and had never left the bed - when i quickly turned my head back toward the closet, the girl in the yellow dress was gone and the closet light was off with the door shut - cindy and i talked often about that night - and laughed about it at times - but it remained very real to me - and i never forgot it -

several years later, i was living alone again and my sister relocated to shreveport from dc and took the upstairs of my house as her space - we called in a contractor to come in and do some renovation and to clean out all the "junk" from the remaining attic space which we also planned to open up - the crew worked long hard days piling all the previous owner's leftover stuff and junk along side the curb for pick-up - one day, i had prepared lunch for the work crew and we were all sitting around my dining room table when something came up about all the things that they had pulled out of the attic - i had shared with my sister the story of the girl in the yellow dress and somehow the subject came up about other "spooky" incidents that had happened to me and to visitors in my home and then she said to them, "oh, so has jenean told you the story about the girl in the long dress?" - and the foreman responded, "was it a yellow dress with a big shirt and a big sash?" - then, he said "cause if it was a yellow dress, then, it's out there at the bottom of the junk pile - i pulled it out of the eaves in the side of the attic wall, the wall that runs along your bedroom outer wall" -

while we did not retrieve the dress from the junk pile - it was a huge junk pile of lumber, old air conditioners, furniture, big boxes of books, etc., and would have taken hours to "undo" to find the dress - the guy went on to describe the ruffles on the shoulders and other details i had seen on the girl at my closet -

the sad thing is that i never saw the girl again - nor did the other ongoing occurrences continue that had frightened so many visitors to my home - but i do wonder about her still - i researched court records and discovered that the home had been originally built by two women who both came from old prominant shreveport families -