Witness: Darlene Caban
Location: Chicopee, Massachusetts
Date of Encounter: Winter 1970
My sister and I used to spend the weekend at my great-aunt's house in Chicopee, Massachusetts. She had an old two-story house with a glass door to the stairs leading to the second floor. This door was across the hall from the bedroom we always slept in. One night, we both saw a lady in a long, frilly white nightgown walking down the stairs. She raised her hand to turn the doorknob and disappeared only to come walking down the stairs again. She was glowing a faint bluish-white and we couldn't see her face. It was like her face had been smudged out. She walked down the stairs four or five times and then stopped. This would be repeated several times over the next three or four years, and then we didn't see it anymore. We told my mother who insisted we imagined it.
In 1998, my great-aunt's house was sold and I found the deed to the house. While talking to my father about the house, he said that his aunt's family had bought the house cheaply in the 1920s because it had been taken by the city for non-payment of taxes. The house had been a bordello at that time, and while the city wasn't thrilled at the activity in the house, they were more concerned about the money they were due in back taxes. Originally my great-aunt's brothers had slept upstairs, but after they moved out, the second floor was kept closed and became storage space. It was always cold up there — even during the summer. It had a creepy feel to it and my sister and mother would not go up there alone.
I'm pretty sure that the woman my sister and I saw coming down the stairs at night was a "working girl" coming down the stairs to get another "customer". The house also had a large parlor with an arched doorway and gaudy, ancient rose wallpaper. That experience gave me an interest in the paranormal, and taught me to trust my own perceptions regardless of what other people said about them.