Headless Lady
Okay, you want'real life' creepy horror stories? This one was not mine, but ithappened to horror comics artist Bernie Wrightson, and I quote it(without permission, I might add), from the retrospective book onhis art, entitled A LOOK BACK, published by Underwood Miller.Check this out:
"My earliest strange experience: The Headless Woman. I usedto think of it as a dream, all through my childhood, growing up,whenever I thought about it I would think of it as the strangedream I had three times as a kid. In the past couple of yearsI've become quite convinced that it wasn't a dream at all, butone of my earliest remembered experiences was a close encounterof the third kind. I had an experience with a ghost when I wasfour years old!
"When I was very young, four years old or thereabouts, welived in the city. We had a comfortable, kind of run-down housein the city -- a row house, one of twenty houses on the block.Each house was a cookie-cutter replica of the one next to it. Welived there until I was about seven years old. The layout of thetop of the house was three rooms. The front room was my parents',the middle room was mine, and to the right of my room in the backwas the bathroom. My room was a kind of combuination room andhallway on which the stairs came from the first floor so that onewhole wall was the stairwell coming up and the bannister. Myparents kept a light on down on the first floor which would shineup through the railings, throwing these long, spoke-like shadowson the wall. Very, very 1930's horror movie stuff.
"It was here that I was visited by a lady on three differentoccasions.
"I've never had a recurring dream. I've had dreams that mghtbe similar but never the exact same thing, never the samesequence of events, before or since. That's what made thisstrange, each time in occurred everything was exactly the sameand everything was crystal clear. Usually when you have a dreamthere are distortions of some sort. At the very least distancesdistort. The room you dream about it bigger or smaller or changedsomehow, more or less furniture, different furniture. A lot ofthings get jumbled up in dreams. The whole thing is symbolism andyour subconscious places elements in your dream for whateverreason. That didn't happen. This was my room exactly. That's whathas me convinced now that it really happened. Also, the fact thatI never dream in terms of dreaming that I am asleep and then wakeup from the sleep to see something or participate in something.But that's what happened here. I would be asleep and then I wouldwake up.
"The way I was lying, I was facing the wall. I just lookeddown past my chest and there was the wall with the railing andthe shadows coming up. I would see her shadow being thrown up onthe wall as she came upstairs, just walking very slowly, verypurposefully up the stairs. She had no head. A very tall womanwoman with no head, wearing a long green gown of some sort. Itmight have been a nightgown. It was very low cut, very simplymade and kind of like green silk. She would come up the stairs.When she got to the top of the stairs she would have to turn tocome into the room.
"The first piece of furniture she encountered was thedresser. The dresser had four drawers. She would start with thetop drawer, pulling it open and then looking in, then closing it.
"She would then start with the second drawer, open it, lookin , then close it. She would then stoop, open the third drawer,and so on all the way down. Opening each drawer, looking in, andthen closing it. She didn't make a sound.
"Then she would walk across the room, up to my bed where thetoy box was. I had a big, maybe two by three foot, toy box with ahinged wooden lid. She would open the lid, reach in, and startmoving my toys around. Obviously looking for something -- andwhat else would a headless woman be looking for?
"This happened exactly this way, that same sequence ofevents, exactly, as if you would run a movie three times. But thethird time, instead of turning around after she had lookedthrough the toy box, then going back and walking down the stairs,she came over to the bed I was in. I was still sleeping in a cribwhen I was four because we couldn't afford a bed. On the sidethat faced the room, the bars were lowered down. But the sidethat faced the wall and the head and foot of the bed had highbars. The effect was like being in a small cage. You have to keepthis in mind -- it's a very important psychological thing. I wastrapped inside this cage and here is this headless woman comingover.
"She comes over to my bed and grabs the mattress and liftsit up and bends over to look under the mattress. I've got myhands over my mouth so I don't scream or vomit or whatever. Asshe bends over, I get my first look at the inside of her neck.Imagine cutting a piece of salam in half. That's how clean thecut was. It was like a cartoon cut -- very clean. But when shebent over and I looked inside her neck, I saw exactly what shouldbe there. I'm for years old, I had no idea. As far as I'mconcerned, when you're four years old, your idea of eating isthat this whole thing your head sits on top of is a hollow tube.You put food in, it falls down. To you, there are no organs oranything, you just don't know about that. A big emptiness and thefood fills you up making you feel heavy as you eat. What I sawwas vertebrae chopped clean. In front of that, a windpipe. Toeither side, large veins. This thing was exactly what you wouldsee in an anatomy book, a cross-section of a human neck. That'sthe last time it happened. We moved away later but not because ofthat."