The Little Girl In The White Dress
I grew up in a haunted house. And I don’t mean in a metaphorical sense. The house had been built in 1490, so I guess it isn’t surprising that we weren’t exactly alone.
There was the thing on the stairs, nothing so defined as a cold spot or even a shimmering in the air, just a distinct sense of dread that lurked above the first landing, teasing you with the unpleasant idea that if you turned around you might actually see it. There was the poltergeist that generally confined itself to the laundry room, doing things like turning the wash off in mid program or starting the dryer in the middle of the night when, to add insult to inconvenience, it was empty. There were the footsteps in the upstairs hall that we often heard when everyone in the house was sitting downstairs watching TV, and the cold feeling in the downstairs hall that made dogs growl – although, I always assumed this was only the thing on the stairs amusing itself with a change of scene. There was John, or at least that’s what my mother called him, who was fond of opening and closing doors. And there was the little girl.
I don’t know what I think about ghosts. I suppose, in some sense, I’m an agnostic on the subject. But I do know there were things in that house, and that, somehow, they ranked in terms of ‘seriousness’. The footsteps in the upstairs hall, the machines that went on and off – the poltergeist also occasionally wandered into the kitchen and amused itself with the mixer, and occasionally, the electric kettle, or maybe it just wanted a smoothie or a cup of tea – the fact that once I walked into the living room and saw a fire blazing in the hearth that, when I turned to look at it again was empty and stone cold, none of that every really bothered me. They were just facts about the place, marks of time like the Roman numerals you could still see carved in the blackened oak beams so four hundred and seventy-five earlier the carpenters would know which was which. Time builds up. The ghosts were just things that had been left over. Traces of the past that occasionally rose up, like reefs and ledges at low tide.
And yet, like reefs and ledges some of them could be perilous, not only at low tide when you can at least see them, but even more so when the tides are changing and they sink, just below the surface. I know that I have never felt anything like the sheer, unreasoning terror I felt more than once on the staircase of that house. It usually happened at about four o’clock in the afternoon, and it was utterly malevolent. That’s the only time in my life I’ve ever felt that word actually applies.
The ‘things’ were usually more active when my mother was present, and I am not actually surprised by that. The grand-daughter of an Apache Medicine Man, she traveled in a cloud of psychic disturbance.
My mother was born on a reservation in Arizona, raised White in her father’s family, and more or less orphaned when she was thirteen. Put into a convent, she climbed out the window, ran away, and began a long career as a shape changer – a woman who walked between worlds. Her teen-aged years were spent in the servant’s quarters of the Hotel Del Coronado on Catalina Island where she slipped down corridors, prowled the attics, eavesdropped, acquired ideas above her station and occasionally stole things. After a brief stint in University, where mostly she was interested in diving, she ran away again. First to New York, and then, to join the circus. Which was where she was on July 6, 1944, when the Big Top burned in Hartford, Connecticut.
There are a number of things about what was known in our family as The Fire. There is the story of Robert Dale Segee, the fourteen year old who lied about his age to get a job on the Ringling work crew and who was accompanied by his secret ‘friend,’ a red man on a horse who visited him in dreams and told him to “Burn! Burn! Burn!” There was the fact that for weeks before, all the omens had been bad. Whistling had been heard in the dressing rooms. Costumes had been lost. Trains had been delayed. A show had to be canceled. And then, on the night of July fifth, there was a Blood Moon.
A full moon is generally known to be bad luck, but for the Apache, a Blood Moon is worse. My mother saw it first when she stepped out of the mess tent. There had been an ‘All Hands Call’ coming into Hartford when the circus trains were delayed because of troop movements. The evening show had to be canceled, and even so, everyone would be working through the night to get the rigging up and the bleachers erected and the animal chutes and stands in place. Mr and Mrs Gargantua, the gorillas, had been screaming at each other all day, which had upset the cats, which had upset the horses, who had upset the elephants.
The Apache can sing down a Blood Moon, but it takes a great deal of work. My mother had only seen it done once, when she was very small and her grandfather had brought the whole village out and they had sung through the night to ward off the danger, because otherwise a Blood Moon means that many are going to die. On that night in Hartford, however, no one was singing. There was screeching and whinnying and stamping. The mess tent was running around the clock. You grabbed what they had when you could. My mother didn’t get a break to eat until well after ten pm. And when she came out, there it was. Above all the rumbling and pacing and the rigging crews still working under lights, the moon hung huge and full and bright red, as if, she always said, it was already on fire.
My mother was standing with one foot in a bucket outside the wash tent when, at 2:44PM the next afternoon the band, which had been playing Waltzing Matilda for the Wallendas suddenly burst into Stars and Stripes Forever. Her head snapped up. The Sousa march was the circus cue for disaster.
My mother always said she thought at first that it was the moon, that somehow it had come back and was rolling up the side of the tent. Like others, she saw that ball of flame. And then she was running. The bucket line had already formed by the time she reached it. Because of the cancellation the night before, the matinee was a sell-out. Over seven thousand people were inside the Big Top. One hundred and sixty-eight of them died.
The morgue filled up, and there weren’t that many funeral homes in Hartford, so the dead were taken to the Armory and laid out in rows, where they waited to be claimed. All that afternoon, and all the next day, lines formed. Wives, husbands, sisters, friends, brothers and cousins stood in the broiling heat waiting to walk up and down the silent rows, searching for their dead. For a reason that my mother never fully explained, she stood in the line too, more than once. Over the next day and half, she walked the rows of the Hartford Armory, and always, she came back to the same person – a little girl, dressed in white, her hair carefully tied in bows and her face completely unblemished except for a single smudge of soot.
The little girl in the white dress would become known as Little Miss 1565, the number later assigned to her when she was moved, on July 7, to the Hartford morgue. Where she stayed until she was buried without a name a week later. My mother described her over and over again, precisely and in exact detail, as if she could see her. Then, thirty years later, she began to appear.
There was a room in our house that was reputed to have been a nursery. It was generally used as a guest room. The curtains were blue and green and had birds on them. I spent hours trying to draw them, to copy the furls of the leaves and the beaks and claws. But I never spent a night in that room, and I never saw the little girl. Other people did. A friend of my parents who came to stay, a middle aged Englishman who, mid-way through breakfast, looked around the table and asked where the other child was? Another guest inquired whether the ‘sick little girl’ was feeling better, because she had wandered into the room, obviously looking for her mother, in the middle of the night. One of my cousins, a 1970s surfer dude from Newport beach who was very definitely not overly burdened with fanciful imagination said she’d woken him up three nights in a row, standing at the end of the bed in her white night gown patting his foot. He hadn’t mentioned it because he thought we all saw her, all the time.
She was never, in so far as I know, seen in another room. And after my mother died, she was never seen again at all. The disturbances themselves seemed to still after that, as though they missed her. The poltergeist, admittedly, was long gone. It had given up or moved on years before, abandoning the mixer for more updated kitchens that had microwaves. The doors didn’t open and close as much, and I don’t recall any footsteps in the upstairs hall. Our sadness drifted down to quietness, and we sold the house not long after.
When I think now about ghosts, I am still agnostic. But I know what was there. I know what I saw, and heard, and felt. The front stairs of that house are still my barometer for fear, and I have never liked late afternoons. To be agnostic about ghosts, however, is not to doubt being haunted. The reefs and ledges are just under the surface, and the past is always with us, whether we notice, or like it, or not. If we are haunted, we are haunted by memory, and by versions of ourselves. The little girl at the circus was somewhere between six and eight years old. A child lost in time, she was never claimed. No one ever came for her, and she has never been identified.
In one of the few photographs I have of my mother as a child, she stands with her blunt hair cut, in white knee socks and white leather shoes, palpably excited, wearing her best white dress. It is the day of her first communion, and she is six years old.
If you enjoyed this journey: I suggest you visit the single best blog spot on All Things Ghost. Hosted by the wonderful Duncan Fisher, it’s a treat. Find it at www.beckoningfairones.blog