Grandmom Visits Brown Eyes

Grandmom Visits Brown Eyes
As told to me by Brown Eyes, a Waitron where I go to write.
Written as narrated to by T. Fox Dunham (Enjoying Martini Monday at Molly's)
Perkasie, Pennsylvania – 1998 & 2008.

(I have much fun collecting stories in person, people who have never written professionally or even for fun. I sit down at the bar at Molly's, and the word spreads around the place that there's this professional author collecting true ghost stories; eventually, I have a queue of people eager to share and all requesting I use pen names for them. Here's a waitron I interviewed today as she shared a tale of comfort, while we drank martinis. This is the essence of collecting folklore.)

I lived in an apartment in Perkasie at the age of four to fifteen. I was about four when this happened. I shared a bunk bed with my brother, and I slept in the bottom bunk. Naturally, I filled my bed with all sorts of plush and stuffed animals.

My mother had married an Italian national, Raff, and we lived together in the apartment. Raff had an extended family in Italy, and he often spoke of his relatives coming to visit America.

One night, I woke up after midnight from a nightmare, and I could see an old woman plain-as-day lying in the bed next to me: wearing blue flannel pajamas, flowing white hair and a wrinkled face. Instead of being scared, I felt comforted after my nightmare. I assumed she was my step-father’s relative from Italy who must have arrived on a late flight and would share my bed, so I moved over to make room for the kindly old woman to sleep. I fell back to sleep, no longer scared of nightmares with the old woman watching over me.

When I woke up the next morning, she wasn’t in my bed. I got up and asked my mother in the kitchen what had become of her? My mother explained to me that no relative was visiting the family, and she asked me to describe the old woman. I told her about the blue pajamas, wrinkles and hair, and she looked shocked. I had described my own great-grandmother’s appearance when she had died.


I saw my great-grandmother again when I was 14. I had a really bad virus, and I stayed home from school. My brother had a guitar, and I was woken by the sounds of his loud chords, even though he wasn’t home. It was probably a dream. When I woke, I saw my great-grandmother again, wearing the same outfit she had worn when I had previously seen her. This time, a haze floated around her face, so I couldn’t make out her facial features, and she glowed with an angelic aura.

Fox asks: Why do you think she came to visit you?

Brown Eyes: She always came to comfort me, though I’d never met her in life.