As a man in his late twenties, I went through a fair amount of stress and upset in my life, like most of us. Having supported my wife and her family during a long period of illness and loss on their side of the family and having a stressful job working in healthcare, I never had time to take care of myself. Over the years this became worse, and my depression and stress increased but I would never let them know how I felt as they had enough to deal with without worrying about me.
One night I took myself on a drive to clear my head, I was driving alone and just got over a bridge about ten minutes from my house. I saw a woman standing in the opposite lane of the road facing me, and she was gone in a blink of an eye that felt like a lifetime. She was around six foot, her hair that was shoulder length but on end with a brilliant white at her roots leading to a beautiful autumnal orange at the ends. She had deathly pale skin and eyes that appeared sore from crying, and all she was wearing was a long, dirty white sleeveless summer dress that dragged on the floor. She was looking straight at me, connecting my gaze with hers. I pulled over to collect myself, I check the rearview mirror and saw only the empty road behind me. I felt a horrible sense of fear in the pit of my stomach hoping this was the only time this would happen, I was wrong.
Three months went by with no other sightings of her, but I had been having a sense of someone watching me when I was alone, at the time I put it down to my poor mental health. However, one evening as I was passing through the kitchen to the next room and she appeared again, three feet away from me in my own house. Just like before there was crippling eye contact but this time I froze in place, it felt like an eternity staring at each other, but like the first time I saw her, she was gone in a flash without a single noise from either of us. It was so intense that I felt utterly drained and collapsed to the floor, coming to with my wife trying to wake me.
I never told my wife any of this as I didn’t want to worry her, or for her to think I’m breaking down, but it felt like the most real thing that happened to me in years. The sense of fear and dread that I had from these experiences was overwhelming and I had many sleepless nights thinking about that woman. How pale she was, the soreness of her eyes and that hair, the brightness of the white and the intenseness of the orange. It’s been a couple of years now and I have since separated from my wife and now live alone, but I sometimes feel I am not on my own. I’ve found it challenging to live on my own and it has been a stressful time with my mental health suffering and I haven’t thought about the woman with the wild hair for some time.
That all changed last night, I woke up in the middle of the night, which is typical for me, but as I woke up my eyes were wide and I was frozen in pure fear. I was on my side facing the wall, and not only could hear shallow breaths, I could feel them on the back of my neck, so cold they stung my skin. I started to shake as I knew it was her, after these years I knew it was her. My body tensed to the point of pain, I closed my eyes as I felt her getting even closer, her cold hand started to gently run over my ribs and I could feel her wide hair tickling the back of my head. At this point, I screamed and jolted my entire body. It was then that I woke up in a sweaty mess, I spun around in bed, I was alone, and my breathing calmed, it was a nightmare. But as I looked around I found a dozen or so wild white hairs with orange ends on the pillow next to me and an imprint of where someone was laying.
I will never be alone.