Skip to main content

The White Dress

 It was the night before the senior prom, and one girl didn’t have a dress to wear. She was poor and lived in a section of town where there were many immigrants from Haiti and other islands in the Caribbean Sea.

She had gone to the neighborhood funeral parlor that same day to pay her respects to the remains of an elderly neighbor. While she was in the funeral home, she had seen a young girl about her age and size lying in state in a casket in one of the many rooms, which she had entered by mistake. As she looked down at the casket, she noticed that the dress was very pretty and brand new. It had been bought just for the burial.

While she was in the room, the funeral director came in and said it was time to close the casket. He sealed it with a big key – kind of like a wrench – and said that the casket would remain closed from then on, and that the burial would take place the next morning.

After the director left, the girl went on down the hall to the room where her dead neighbor was laid out. While she was in the room paying her respects, she heard a lot of crying and wailing down the hall. Someone had collapsed with grief in one of the rooms, and everyone, including the funeral director, ran down the hall to help that family.

As the girl ran by the room with the sealed casket, she had an idea. She went into the room, opened the sealed casket with the huge curved wrench, and quickly slid the white dress off the girl. She put the key back in the socket and the casket lid and sealed the lid again. Stuffing the white dress into her school bag, she slipped out past the room where all the crying was coming from.

The next night, she put on the dead girl’s white dress and went to the dance.

As she danced with several different boys she knew, her joints began to get kind of stiff. As time went by, her muscles began to stiffen, and she began to walk and dance awkwardly. She thought maybe there was something wrong with the dress, so she went into the girl’s restroom and slipped into a stall. She took off the dress and searched all over it, but couldn’t find anything wrong with it. So she put it back on.

Girl wakes up in coffin.  From The White Dress, ghost story by Richard and Jody Dockery Young

As she danced, she became colder and stiffer until she was as stiff as a board. The ambulance was called, and she was rushed to a hospital. The doctors pronounced her dead – but she was alive! She could hear every word everyone said, and see everything that was happening. She just couldn’t move or speak.

Soon, she was lying in state in the same funeral parlor, with her family and friends coming by and crying. She tried to move or cry out, but she couldn’t.

The funeral director came in and closed the lid on her casket. And the next day, the casket was taken to the graveyard. And she could hear the gravediggers working: “Did you hear what happened at the funeral home this morning?” said one of them. “No, what?” said the other as they threw shovel fulls of dirt onto her casket. “A young mortician’s assistant heard a knocking sound in one of the caskets. Well, he opened it up, and a young girl in a slip climbed out. She said she’d been the victim of a voodoo ritual. Someone had given her a dress dusted with that zombie powder, so she seemed dead when she wasn’t.”

“Huh,” said the first gravedigger. “I wonder what happened to that dress.”

And then the girl couldn’t hear anything else….

– THE END –

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

McDow Hole – Anatomy Of A Texas Ghost Story

  Spooky Texas legend of the McDow Hole, where ghost sightings of pioneer woman Jenny Papworth and her baby have long been reported.  Written by Bob Hopkins . I first heard the legendary tale of the Ghost of the McDow Hole in the fifteenth year of my youth. It was near Halloween in October 1975 when a friend related the tale of the ghost that haunts a creek bed in rural Erath County and naturally I believed every word of it in the twilight of an evening spent with friends telling ghost stories. I would again hear the tale over the years while living in North Central Texas. It wasn’t until my chance encounter of meeting an author of the legend in 2002 that my curiosity began to peak and like any good investigator I felt it my duty to dig deeper into the hundred year old tale of pioneer folklore to see how much of the story was true and how much was fabricated. I would discover many similarities in fact and fiction that I believed would leave any reader with the same curiosity t...

Mama Coon Coon: A Louisiana Swamp Folktale

  Now I’ll just bet that none of you have ever heard the story of Mama Coon Coon and the blue waters of the bayou, have you? Well, we know the story, and I think we need to tell it to you right now. Once upon a time, the waters of the bayou were black – as black as ink. Now, even though these waters were black, they were still filled with lots and lots of fishes, shrimp and crab. And all of the fishermen would wake up early in the morning, long before the sun had even come above the horizon, and they would cast their nets down into the deep, black water. And what a wonderful sight it was at the end of the day to watch those fishermen pulling in their nets overflowing with all kinds of fishes, shrimp and crab. Dulac Louisiana Bayou by  Clem . Licensed under  CC BY-SA 2.0 . Now all the fishermen fished early in the morning, with the exception of one fisherman – or should I say fisherwoman. Her name was Mama Coon Coon. You see, that is the name the local village children gav...

Belle Boyd, Confederate Spy

  One warm spring day, I left my home in Washington, D.C. and took a long drive through the rolling, peaceful farm country in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. I worked in the city as a tax accountant, but most of my co-workers didn’t know about my secret hobby – I was a Civil War collector. Ever since I was a child, I had collected old Civil War books, maps, clothing, and in later years, weapons. Now as a middle-aged man, my interest had grown to what some would call an obsession. Although it’s hard to believe today, this peaceful Virginia valley was the scene of some of the bloodiest battles of the war. Driving through this historic land not only satisfied my hunger for history, but calmed my nerves far away from the hustle and bustle of home. Some folks say that ghosts wander the earth in places where horrible deaths took place, their lives suddenly ripped away from them before they knew what happened. So it’s no wonder that so many Civil War ghost stories come from the Shenandoah V...