When Ghosts Speak - Mary Ann Winkowski [67]
It was a night in late summer, and my husband and I had returned home late after a dinner party. Our two girls were sleeping over at their grandparents’ house. As we pulled into the driveway, I could hear the phone ringing inside the house. I dashed in and managed to catch the call. It was one of the officers from the state highway patrol. I’d worked with him before, and he didn’t waste any time with pleasantries.
They had a “situation” on their hands, he said. There had been a crash involving a family from out of state as well as the son of a prominent local family. The boy was already on the way to the hospital and three members of the family were dead, with the fourth in very bad shape. Could I come right away?
The night had cooled and a thick fog had come up, making driving very hazardous. Although I’d been nervous on the drive home from the party, I knew I had to get to the scene quickly. My husband turned the car around and about twenty minutes later, we were pulling up to the scene of the accident. It was horribly sad. The ghost of the father, who had been driving, was standing next to the ambulance as his wife was being loaded. He was cradling a child in his arms. It was clear that the ambulance would be leaving in a matter of minutes, and I knew that the distressed ghost would want to follow his wife to the hospital.
I went straight up to him and said, “I can see you. I need to know what happened here.”
The ghost was dumbfounded. “You can see me?” he repeated.
“Yes, I can. And you need to tell me what happened so I can let the officers know,” I said urgently.
He told me that he was sure, absolutely sure, that he’d been on his side of the road. It had been so foggy that he’d been using the shoulder as his guide. It was a winding country road and he wasn’t familiar with the area, so he’d been navigating by keeping the passenger’s-side tire on the dirt shoulder. He couldn’t remember seeing lights or hearing brakes screeching. All he could tell me was that the children were nearly asleep, strapped into their car seats, and his wife had just unbuckled her seat belt to turn around and comfort their younger child, who had started to fuss when he dropped his pacifier.
I looked at the child in his arms. It was a little girl, maybe fifteen or sixteen months old. And then I realized he’d said children. “Where is your other baby?” I asked. The ghost gestured with his head to a spot just behind him. When I looked closely, what I saw was so strange that I couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed it as soon as I arrived. I guess I had just been so intent on getting whatever information I could get from this family before they disappeared that I had failed to notice the spirit of a tiny baby—maybe two or three months old—that was floating in midair slightly behind the father’s right shoulder. As far as I could see, there was no one holding the child.
Nevertheless, I couldn’t see the baby’s face. It was as if he were being held against someone’s shoulder. “Who’s holding the baby?” I asked the father, as casually as I could.
“My grandmother,” he replied.
I asked him how long his grandmother had been dead. He told me about twenty years, but oddly, she appeared younger than he remembered her looking when she had died. In fact—and he was quite specific about this—he recalled that