The House on Maple Avenue - Part 2: The Gray Lady

During the summer of 1984 we moved into the house my family would spend the next 10 years in. My baby sister had just been born in July and we were a growing family. I was getting ready to go into the 2nd grade.

Our house was the first house built on our street 95 years prior. It had been inhabited by a Latvian family who had moved to Michigan to farm the land and in those 95 years, 4 generations of the family had lived there. The most recent was the original builder's great grandson and his wife, who had raised seven children in this three bedroom home. When we bought the house it had been converted to electricity and running water but the wires and pipes ran on the outside of the walls.

During the 10 years we lived in our house on Maple Avenue we remodeled every room at least once. The major construction work that took place at our home included knocking down walls, putting in new wiring and plumbing, putting a whole new roof on the house, building a deck, and various manifestations of yard work. We did everything from cutting down trees to putting in a pool. Any experienced ghost-head knows that when you remodel, it brings out the spooks. I don't think the spirits enjoyed the changes--or the noise. That year and for many years following, my family experienced eerie visions, disembodied voices, apparitions, bangs on the walls and floors, footsteps, and other random odd phenomena. This is just one of those stories.

Sometime in May of 1994 my parents began to remodel our kitchen. We were getting our first dishwasher (good news for we chore-burdened children) and the change required pipes to be run, electricity to be installed, and of course, new everything else! The project took about 2 weeks of work for the family and this was one of the rare projects I was asked to take part in. I was about 16 years old.

On this day I was helping my dad run water pipes for the new dishwasher. The pipes were a relatively simple job but the dishwasher required a garbage disposal to be installed so we finished the pipes and got started on the wiring for the disposal. We were working together between two rooms, which sat side by side off the living room.

Through the heater vent dad asked me to meet him in the living room and help carry something outside. We both walked into the living room from our respective rooms at the same time, both walking in the same direction (the doors to the two rooms were on the same wall) and we both saw a lady standing in the middle of the living room. She was wearing a long floor-length gray dress and had her hair in a tight bun on the back of her head. She had her arms at her sides. Dad and I looked at each other, stunned. When we looked back at her, she turned her head, looked at us, and promptly vanished. My dad said, "Did you just see that?" I certainly had! We just stood there, looking at the spot where she had once been, holding our breath.

When the gray lady vanished it wasn't like a mist or a fog blowing away. She didn't fade out. It was just like turning off a television. She blinked out as though she'd never even been there at all. The whole thing probably lasted all of 5 seconds, but take a moment and count out 5 seconds... 1... 2... 3... 4... 5. It's longer than you might imagine and it's surely long enough to get a really good look at something that's right in front of you. It was also long enough for dad and I to look at each other, to silently communicate our emotions, and then look back, and for the gray lady to look at us before she disappeared.

It's an experience my dad and I still talk about and I don't think we'll ever forget it. In fact, it was one of those rare moments when we experienced something together, just the two of us, which no one else in our family shares. Others have seen the gray lady as well, but never in pairs, almost always early in the morning or late at night, and never with eye contact. This time she appeared to us in the middle of the day and she looked right at us... or through us.