I kept the information about the floating woman to myself until Andy was in high school. He came downstairs one morning to ask if I had been upstairs, as he thought he had seen, or sensed, someone in his bedroom. And then he thought he may have sensed a woman standing behind him as he was looking into his bathroom mirror. When I asked him to describe what he had seen, he hemmed and hawed and then said only half-jokingly, “I may have imagined the whole thing. Maybe it was a ghost.”
He said that the apparition was not terribly frightening to him. He sensed no ill will from it. He told me it was a young woman and proceeded to describe her clothing, exactly as I had seen it. Andy was somewhat amused that, in addition to his mom, only he and our dog McKinley had seen the woman. If he ever saw her again, he never spoke about it.
Eventually, I decided to tell Matt about our additional resident. He has never seen her but was very entertained whenever the dog or I did. Before she passed away in 2015, McKinley used to sit at my feet when Matt and I would watch television at night. Occasionally, something would catch my eye, and McKinley and I would look upstairs at the open balcony at the same moment. McKinley would whimper or bark, clearly seeing the apparition, just as I did. McKinley would not look away until the woman had floated out of our view.
To my knowledge, the only other person who has seen the spirit was a friend of Mallory’s. When Mallory was fourteen or fifteen, she had a group of five or six friends over to our house one Saturday night. They were all crammed together on our couch watching a movie when suddenly one of the teenage boys screamed, “What is that!?” He was looking upstairs at the balcony, pointing and screaming. None of the other kids saw anything. He was truly terrified, though, as evidenced by the fact that he wet his pants and went running and shrieking from our house. Although he and Mallory remained friends, he would never set foot in our home again. It was after that episode that I decided to fill Mallory and Jeremy in on the fact that someone, or something, was living upstairs with them. They were fine with it, though, to my knowledge, they have never seen her.
My sense of the spirit upstairs is that she is seeking something. She reminds me of myself just after I was struck by lightning, when I was “hovering” until Jeremy and Andy were safely inside the synagogue. My hovering, I believe, ceased when I understood that I was dead and knew that my children were safe and in the hands of people who loved them. Knowing that, I could get on with being dead, and that’s when I went to the Garden. Because of the way she acts, I sense that she is caught somewhere between realms. Her marginal status is what may explain her movement from place to place. I think it is also why she does not appear to direct her movements with any purpose. She doesn’t appear to see us, nor does she attempt to interact with our household in any way.
I think it is significant that the woman never comes downstairs. We built our current house in 2003, higher off the ground than our previous house that sat in the same spot in order to now be up out of the flood zone that too frequently ravages Houston neighborhoods. Before the new house was built, we never sensed or saw any apparitions. Perhaps the woman is a leftover remnant of energy, a scrap of charged matter, the residue of some memory encoded into the space where the upper part of our house now sits. I don’t know.
Elizabeth G. Krohn and Jeffrey J. Kripal of Changed in a Flash: One Woman's Near-Death Experience and Why a Scholar Thinks It Empowers Us All (North Atlantic Books, 2018). Krohn received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “The Eternal Life of Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts from Changed in a Flash.
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