Imagine, for a moment, that you are walking on a deserted country road. The wind whips through the trees, gently, but just loud enough that you can’t be certain if you’re hearing the sounds of rustling leaves or… Something else. A chill tried to crawl down your spine, as sweat drips. The night is warm and a bit sticky, leaving you feeling uncomfortable.
Also, even if you won’t admit it to yourself, just a bit off. Scared. Only a little bit, of course. You’re an adult after all, not a child, to hide your head under the covers as if a thin blanket offered real protection from things that can bypass the security systems of your day to day life.
You feel it, however. Just a bit, at the edges of your mind. The night is dark, lit by only the moon above. You can see the clouds moving in front of it, rapidly. You keep walking. Hoping to make it home before it rains, or perhaps something else happens. There are no cars. You haven’t seen anyone for hours. Only the sound of the leaves, if it’s that, is there to keep you company at all.
Then you look up. Just with your eyes at first, and see… Something. A reflection that shouldn’t be there. Perhaps it’s a bush catching the light. Maybe it’s… No, you see in now, or rather through it. The form of a woman. Standing there, in the distance, about sixty or seventy feet away. You freeze. Going still, as you watch her. Standing there. Gently moving.
Your heart pounds and the sweat increases as you debate running. After all, there’s no help for you out there, on a lonely country road. Then you pause. After all, this, obviously, is just a woman, out in the night. Probably for the same reason you are or something similar. Not moving, you watch her for a moment. Then, in an instant, the translucent form is gone.
You’ve just seen a ghost.
The white lady…
La Llorona, if you are in the southern part of the world.
Fear take you then. You run back the way you came. You think about what you saw. The sounds… Was the wind actually a howl? A moaning in pain and grief? Possibly. Did she move closer to you at one point? That bit of white on the right, that could have been her reaching out. Seeking to sink you in the water, in vengeance for her lost, drowned children, or beckoning you to you doom, if you seek to lie with her, being unfaithful to your wife.
The white, that might have been a wedding dress…
Your head spins as you run, trying to survive the night. Not knowing if you are cursed forever, and being hunted now, by a force you cannot hope to understand.
The trouble is, while very common, this wasn’t a ghost. Not most likely.
No, this is the White Lady illusion. In low light conditions, when looking at an upward angle, people tend to see a bit of whispy whitness. Not everyone, and not all the time, of course. Indeed, I’ve seen this hundreds of times myself. Sometimes it can even be pretty convincing as to what you’re looking at.
So, not so much of a ghost, as the start of one of the most famous urban legends. One that spans most of the world, including cultures where women have never dressed that way. You are, in this one case, safe, given that.
Unless, you know, you took a picture and she showed up in it. In that case, well, then it probably wasn’t an illusion at all.
*This year I’m starting with the harmless things and working up to some things that you might not want to know about, in the last week of October. You’ve been warned.
Statistics: Posted by PS Power — Tue Oct 04, 2022 12:45 am
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