The Worried Mother-By Nancy German

My Aunt Marion, who was 85, lived in a rambling, three story, 1840’s, house in Maine. It was white with green shutters and the property had orchards, vineyards and lots of fresh country air.

I loved to go visit her from time to time and she always had me stay in a small bedroom at the end of a long , dark, hall, at the top of the back stairs where hardly anyone ever ventured.

It was Christmastime and the window panes were frosty and drafty in the old house. To get into the spirit of the season, my aunt had put those horrid plastic candles in the windows with the fake, dripping, off-white wax and orange glowing, unreal flames. The room was full of old , ticking clocks, antique dolls with dead eyes, ringlet curls and creepy expressions. There was an old steamer trunk in the corner.

In this tiny bedroom with the single canopy bed and homemade quilt, I shivered under the covers and added another wool blanket. Did she even heat this room tonight? I wondered. The canopy always made me feel like a child, looking up at it before I slept. Tucked in tight. Cozy.

Where I was laying, the window with the candle was straight ahead of me if I sat up. The wind that night was swirling with fresh snow, howling through the cracks, blowing against the panes and making the house sound as if it were moaning.

I feel asleep easily, accustomed to these sounds in her house, but awoke in the dark freezing. The fake, new Christmas candle was inexplicably out but the light of the moon was coming through the frost covered window. It was illuminating the space a little but leaving very dark corners. Why was it so very cold in here? I said to no one. My teeth chattered.

I was laying on my back looking at the canopy above me and closed my eyes again trying to fall back asleep. A few minutes passed and I was in that luscious place of almost asleep.

Then, the bed creaked though I had not moved. I felt a weigh on my right leg as if someone was leaning against it and the bed lowered under an unseen weight.

My heart quickened. What the hell is that?! The weight moved up towards my torso, leaning on my side and then a freezing “hand” was placed in my forehead and I felt light air like breath cross over my face. I wanted to scream. I wanted to look upon it but clenched my eyes shut. I knew in the near darkness what I saw would be terrifying.

What did it want? The energy felt like it was checking on me, worried.

I heard nothing but silence and the wind had stopped, the house was still. How long would this thing be upon me. It was unbearable. Then I heard it, the quiet crying of a young woman coming from above me. The freezing hand again brushing my brow as I had done with my own child years before when he had a fever.

“Oh, you are a mother”, I whispered. I decided to talk to it but still lacked the courage to open my eyes and look at it.

I stammered, “Listen, I know you are checking on me but you are scaring me badly. I’m o.k. but I want to go back to sleep. I’m sorry about what ever happened to your child but they are not here anymore. Please go in peace.” My heart felt like it would explode from sheer terror as I said the words.

In what seemed like an hour but was probably only twenty seconds from when I spoke to the entity , the bed creaked again and lifted as did the pressure of the thing laying against my leg and side. The freezing hand on my brow was gone. And the room was slightly warmer. It felt so much like what my own mother had done when she checked me at night, when I was sick, putting her hand on my brow like that. Although hers was warm and alive.

I smelled a whiff of lavender as that ghostly mother left me and the room.

The next morning at breakfast I asked my aunt about the room. She was drinking coffee and held her cup suspended as I finished telling her my story.

“Well, dear”, her eyes twinkled when she said it. “You had a worried mother on your hands”.

“Did someone die in there? I asked.

“Not that I know of, but it could have been a sick room away from the others. Someone may have died in there,” she answered, noncommittal, with the slightest smile coming to her lips as she sipped her coffee. Did she know this ghost?

I wondered why that night? Who was she? Did her child live?

I have stayed in the little room many times before and after that. The worried mother has not returned. I know now she meant me no harm.

I imagine her in a long, white nightdress, with her braided, brown hair cascading down her back, on snowy nights, in that little room. She would be holding a real candle, the flame flickering from the drafts. She will sit on that canopy bed, year after year, winter after winter, reaching for the brow of her child who will never hop out of bed and run off to play ever again.

Frozen in time, weeping.