Happy Halloween, everybody! Here is my entry for the ‘True Spooks … Share Your Ghost Story’ Blog Carnival. Enjoy!

These events took place a few years ago while I was living in Port Townsend, Washington in a rental house that we came to discover was inhabited by a friendly entity:

The first time we visited the house, I glanced up at the attic window while the landlady showed us the yard. For some reason, I vividly imagined a woman in white looking down from there and wondering who we were. This reverie was broken by my boyfriend’s comment, ‘I feel like someone’s watching us,’ he said, ‘don’t you?’

Still, I didn’t think much about his remark, or my little daydream, until one of our first nights living there, when my boyfriend suddenly sat up in bed and said, ‘Turn on the light!’

He was visibly shaken, and reported that he was just about to fall asleep when he felt someone in the room with us. When he opened his eyes, he saw a woman standing at the end of the bed. The woman was in her sixties, with shoulder-length hair and glasses, and she had spoken to him, which was why he sat up in fright.

‘What did she say?’

‘You’re gonna laugh,’ he told me. ‘She said if I ate breakfast, I wouldn’t be so cranky.’

‘It’s good advice,’ I replied. Only later did I realize that his description matched the woman I had imagined looking down at us from the attic window.

My boyfriend often worked late, and our roommate usually stayed at his girlfriend’s house, so I was often alone in the house at night. One evening as I was falling asleep by myself, I heard a woman laughing in the hallway. I got up to see if my roommate had brought his girlfriend over, but no one was there.

A few days later, I met a woman who had once rented the same house. ‘Have you seen her yet?’ she asked.

‘Seen who?’ I replied, although I was already getting goosebumps.

‘Everyone who’s lived at that house encounters a female presence,’ she told me. ‘My brother knows two other families who lived there, and they all either saw or heard her. I thought he was just trying to scare me until I had some experiences of my own.’

‘Do you know what the ghost looks like?’ I asked.

I wasn’t too surprised when she described the same woman my boyfriend and I had seen. She went on to tell me that the woman who had originally built the place had lived there by herself, raising goats and making her own cheese. After that, my boyfriend and I referred to her as ‘the goat lady.’

And so it continued. Every now and then I would hear the goat lady chatting happily, and/or laughing, late at night, and every now and then, my boyfriend would say that the goat lady was standing at the end of our bed.

Eventually, I ended up taking some time off of work because I’d had my wisdom teeth pulled. I’d been put under general anesthesia and was really groggy. Our bedroom was upstairs, but it was too much effort for me to climb the narrow staircase, so I camped out on the couch on the first floor. To top it off, the light for the staircase had burned out, so it would have been stupid for me to even try to go upstairs.

Our roommate was gone as usual, and my boyfriend had to go to work, so I was going to be alone for a few hours in the house. Before he left, my boyfriend told me that he was going to change the light bulb when he got back. It had been burning out fairly frequently, so he wanted to swing by the store and get an energy-saving bulb to use this time.

He even said, ‘Don’t you dare think about changing the bulb while I’m gone.’ True, I was usually the one who changed the light bulb, but his comment was strictly a joke. Changing that light bulb was a precarious operation, in which I would stand barefoot on a ledge, grip a door-frame with one hand, and lean out with my other hand to reach the light fixture. It made my boyfriend so nervous that I would often wait until he was at work to change it. This time, however, it was a ridiculous suggestion. I was so weak from surgery that simply walking to the bathroom took tremendous effort.

You have probably guessed where this story is going, haven’t you? My boyfriend came home from work a few hours later, and after checking on me, was startled to discover that the light bulb had been changed while he was gone. Not only that, but whoever (or whatever) had changed the light bulb, had used an energy saving bulb! As a result, I never needed to change the bulb again during the remainder of the time we lived there.

What do you think? Did the goat lady do us a favor? Perhaps, as my boyfriend suggested, ‘She probably just hated watching you change that damn bulb as much as I did.’