The Gesturing Girl

Witness: Connie Ash
Location: Springfield, Ohio
Date of Encounter: Spring of 1966

The house was on Kenton Street and my family had lived there since I was two years old. The "white elephant" still stands and has gone through many changes since my father lost the house sometime in the 1980s.

There are some very interesting stories that centered around that house. The earliest one, my first encounter with a spirit, took place when I was five and my sister was three.

My father and mother were divorced. A Judge declared my mother unfit to raise my sister and I, so our father received custody. All three of us slept mainly downstairs in the living room on the two couches. Our "bed" was against the side window. That night, my sister and I had just received a little spanking because we were not going to sleep. My sister cried herself to sleep and I was awake and staring out the window.

If you looked out that window, you would see a line of bushes, broken only by a very large maple tree. The bushes had been planted many years ago as the property line.

As I stared out the window that night, the maple tree and the bushes seemed to fade away and there stood a young girl with an updo and a red dress with white spots. She was gesturing with her hands and she seemed to be trying to tell me something. I could not hear her and finally she faded away and the tree and bushes reappeared. I eventually fell asleep.

The next morning I told my father about what I had seen. He never laughed at me. He listened to my story and at some point he did some investigation into the past. He even told me what he had found out. The following was told to me by him and the two of us were in our right minds. Though it may sound like an urban legend, it is not.

My father had bought the house from a Springfield Police officer whose last name I believe was Miller. Officer Miller had purchased the house from a German couple. The German couple had no longer wanted to live in the house because of the death of their only child, a daughter. My father had stated that the girl had been out late at night with her boyfriend. That the vehicle they were in broke down on the railroad tracks and a train had made impact. She was wearing a white dress that had been covered with her blood.

Even after all these years, I never checked that story in the micro film of the Springfield News and Sun at the Warder Public Library. But, for many years after that visit in 1966, I had seen and heard many things in that house. I think the German lass had made her presence known with laughter from upstairs, whistling, humming, singing, and whispering.