THE WOMAN IN WHITE

The first time Joe Peacock saw the woman in white, something made him glance up at the windows on the second floor of the carriage house on Cumberland Island. This is a two story, hundred-plus-foot long building with a steeply pitched gray roof, and the whole is constructed of tabby concrete, a crushed oyster shell mixture with sand and lime common to the ocean front homes of South Georgia and Florida. Dormer windows line the roof of the eighty-plus-year-old building and give it an old English manor style of architecture. It was March of 1979. He knew that no one had been in that area all morning, so when he saw the white face of a woman with long dark hair peering out of the window, he was amazed and shocked. He knew that no one ever went up there. The area had been used as storage for saddles, bridles and other riding gear that had become outdated. Now the first floor of the carriage house was home to tractors, saws, trailers and other equipment necessary to maintain the island’s paths and keep the landscaping in shape. He was bothered that he couldn’t make out her features or identify who she was because there weren’t many strangers on the island that day.

"Her eyes appeared to be only dark holes in her face. That’s when I realized that she must be a ghost," he remarked. "Huge black holes. And this made identifying her even more difficult."

That wasn’t the only time he saw her. He spotted her on four different occasions, and each time she appeared a little changed.

Once she was walking past the windows one by one, and he waited and watched for her appearance at the next window. She glanced out of it for only a few seconds and then moved on to the next as a heavy, white, cloudy form that seemed to be blown out of shape by some breeze.

Two other times she seemed to be peering out at something and just stood at the window for along while without moving before she simply faded away. The forth time he had been looking for her for several days wondering if she might make an appearance. On one afternoon she seemed to be watching him, too; only this time she appeared to be floating up to the full height of the window. When he walked on, she moved to the next window as if she were following him. It gave him shivers up his spine, and he couldn’t get her vision out of his head for weeks, he confessed. He imagined her to be rather tall because her head reached the top of the window, exposing her long, wavy white flowing dress. He wondered who she had been and asked many of the residents over the years, but her identity remains a mystery.

Joe was very cautious whom he told about the vision because he didn’t want anyone to think he was crazy. But after he confided in several of the other staff members about his sighting of the woman, they confessed that they had seen her also. Evidently, she has been seen by quite a few other people.

No one ever goes up to the second floor of the carriage house anymore. It’s an attic where old carriages, harnesses and other paraphernalia associated with the horses are stored; some items date back to the 1890s. The door is always kept locked.