A Woman In Red

by Erin K. Moore

About two years ago I was at my friend’s grandmother’s house for a bonfire.  We both grew up in this area, and many people (some who were non-believers) are positive that the area is haunted…too many strange things have happened out there for it NOT to be.

Well, here’s one story to stack on top of that pile:

At this bonfire was a good sized group of our friends.  Everyone was having a good time, but as it got late the group began to dwindle until the only people who were left were my friend, myself, her two cousin’s Haus and Tony, and my now ex boyfriend.

Let me paint a bigger picture for you:  The property my friend’s grandmother owns is HUGE and in the middle of nowhere on a dirt road.  On her property there are two house’s, one she lives in and the other is a two story house she rents out to people.  All of this is surrounded by a corn field.  Beyond this cornfield is what we like to call “the woods”, but otherwise known as a forest….a forest that NOBODY dares enter at night.  Well, not anybody sane anyways.  (Yet another reason not to go into the woods)  To the right of all of this, separated by a line of trees is a gravel pit that has been closed down for years now; it’s full of sulphur and limestone.

Back to our activities that night:
We began recalling our experiences with the “strange” out there while also including other’s experiences that we’d only ever heard about.  (Who doesn’t love telling ghost stories around a fire?)

The next thing I remember is my friend’s cousin Toni daring my ex to walk by himself all the way down to the end of the cornfield (which ends by the woods), walk around the edge all the way until he ends up back in our little area, but on the other side of us.  All of that for ten dollars.

I found this amusing until my ex agreed to it and then something hit me in the pit of my stomach.  Suddenly, to both my friend and myself, this was a bad idea.  As he neared the beginning of the cornfield I ran out to try and talk him into coming back with me, explaining that this was a bad idea.  I didn’t know HOW or WHY it was a bad idea…I just knew it was.  So after five to ten minutes of reasoning with him he finally decided to come back with me and forfeit getting ten dollars.

Of course Haus and Tony had to poke fun at him, but while one of the two were in mid-sentence I happened to look back toward the cornfield.  That’s when we all noticed that a very thick fog was suddenly present and had stopped like a wall at the very edges of the cornfield.  It seemed to have come out of the woods.  Haus had a maglight and used it to judge the thickness of the fog.  The fog was so thick even the light wasn’t getting through it.

Okay, that’s definitely strange, but not enough to spook us…yet.

We then hear a woman’s voice calling for something…but we couldn’t make out what she was trying to say, and we didn’t see anybody outside.  It did sound like it was coming from my friend’s grandmother’s house so we figured it was time to call it a night.  We successfully put the fire out and began to walk towards the house, when everybody stopped, and Tony told us all to stay together.  Tony then points the light at the “thing” he was looking at.  We all see this woman in a red night gown with crazy black hair.  When the light reaches her eyes her jaw drops lower than I’ve ever seen a person’s jaw drop before, and her eye’s are reflecting the light like an animal’s would.  She almost looks like she’s hissing, but there’s no sound coming from her.

This is when Haus takes off after her and she takes off into the house.  Now when most people run, they bob up and down even when you can’t see their feet-not her.  She glided into the house at an undeniably fast pace.  At this point the rest of us are standing in view of the only two exits from the house…and she never came back out.

Unfortunately though, everyone else who HAD been sleeping in the house came outside to find out exactly what the hell was going on.  (They had been wakened because Haus tore through the house wailing like a banchee)  After we told them what we saw they tried to tell us that we were just imagining things ( because apparently we were having one of those group hallucinations sans the drugs) and the other theory they came up with was that we had seen my friends Aunt outside.  So we all pile into the house to talk to her, but she’s fast asleep.  She had the black hair and the red night gown but none of that was anywhere close to what we had just witnessed.

Beaten down by the doubt of the family, we all hung our heads and headed back outside…to discover the fog was gone.  Not a trace of it ANYWHERE.  Go figure-we didn’t even have THAT part of it to back us up.

Next we find out why Haus chased the woman in red-apparently he thought this woman was going to steal his motorcycle.  I couldn’t tell you where that reasoning came from if I tried.

The next morning Haus was still very pumped up and on a mission to prove that the woman we saw was not their mother (my friends aunt).  So he conducts an experiment and asks her to run into the house-but she can’t get around that well or that fast.  At this point she’s arguing with him telling him that she’s not going to run because she can’t…when she tries she’s just sort of waddles and it’s obvious she’s having a hard time.

To this day none of us can come up with an explanation for what we saw.  We take comfort in knowing that it’s not out of the ordinary to have something like that happen out there…even if we’re the only one’s who believe each other.

Recently my friend came up with a theory of her own.  She thinks it’s possible that the woman is a demon…and she thinks it lives in a tree in the front yard of her grandmother’s house.  As strange as that may sound, she has reason for that theory.  The same year this happened one of her friend Chris’ bonehead buddies wanted to show off for everyone.  So the two hooked up a rope to the back of Chris’ truck and tied it around the bonehead’s neck after looping it around a branch in the tree.  This guy had apparently done this many times without anything going wrong…until that night.  Bonehead gives Chris the “go ahead” and Chris hit’s the gas pulling the bonehead up the tree by his neck.  He is semi-saving himself by holding onto the rope so it doesn’t tighten around his neck….but his arm gets stuck and the rope is caught on the tree and now the guy is being strangled a good 20 feet up in a tree.  So even though Chris backed the truck up, this guy was stuck because of the rope was still tangled and caught up in the tree, leaving the rope tightened around the kids neck.  The only thing Chris could do was climb up the tree and cut the kid down.  Luckily the bonehead survived with little injury-but the worst would have happened if Chris hadn’t acted so quickly.

Maybe it’s coincidence, maybe not.

We still have no real explanation for either of the two incidents.  No descriptions (paranormal or otherwise) match up to the woman we saw that night…I also have no proof that the two incidents are in any way linked.