In Canada, popular belief in ghosts and the supernatural is withering, to say the least. Modernity has uprooted most convictions our society has in specters or otherworldly events. Which is why I think what happened to me as a kid only occurs in places like my very small hometown in Ontario.
Everyone lived in the same street, a stretch of road between farms and crops. I loved growing up there, a tightly knit and peaceful community, close to nature and far away from the city.
One afternoon, my best friend James' grandfather invited the whole neighborhood to a cookout. It was a hot summer day, and shortly after arriving with my parents, James and I stepped away and headed to a nearby forest to play.
We walked for a long time, going deeper and deeper inside rows of pine trees. At some point we arrived at a grassy clearing, very similar to a small meadow. There, James and I threw a baseball at each other, increasingly widening the distance between us to make the game more difficult and exciting. Once it got boring we sat in the shade of the nearest tree, one of the many that outlined the reentry to the forest that surrounded this miniature field, which we so often visited.
We sat and chatted under that shade for a good while. It had been an ordinary vacation day, until James turned his distracted eyes to the meadow, and noticed something in the distance.
“Hey, who’s that?”
On the other side of the tiny field, coming out from the forest, someone walked towards us. A woman.
It was my mom.
I got up to get a better look. Mom shielded her eyes from the sun with one hand, and waved at us with the other. We waved back and asked her what she was doing there, but she didn’t reply. She simply kept walking towards us, smiling. She had now come close enough for us to be able to detail her eyes squinting from the sun, and her cheeks raised by that smile.
She suddenly picked up the pace.
“What are you doing mom?”
She picked up the pace again, and when she was only a few meters away, she began to run. Her squinted eyes opened wide and her arms stretched towards us, never ceasing to smile.
James and I bolted, without really understanding what was going on. We laughed with that playful fear kids experience when they chase one another. They are aware it is all play, and yet they are also scared of being caught.
In less than fifteen minutes we had sprinted our way back to the cookout. Some adults noticed our agitation, and asked us what we’d been up to in the last couple of hours, so we told them we saw my mom at the meadow, and how she had run to chase us. All of their faces became confused, at the same time I heard my mother’s voice on the other side of the yard.
“What are you talking about Matthew? Who did you see?”
We hadn’t noticed her, but mom was indeed sitting at a table. She even had a plate with burgers and corn on the cob, which she prepared for me and kept ready for whenever I returned from playing in the forest.
Any feeling of thrill James and I had suddenly disappeared.
Our families and neighbors, reasonably alarmed, asked us for a detailed account of what happened, stressing out that we’d give them an exact description of whoever chased us. But my friend and I agreed: without a doubt, it had been my mom who we saw in the meadow.
Thinking we were simply fooling around and testing their patience, they discarded our anecdote as a “childish prank”. Nonetheless, perhaps out of precaution, everyone agreed to end the cookout while there was still light outside, and to inform the local sheriff and park ranger that we’d seen a stranger to the community in the near vicinity.
Later that night, at around 3 am, the house phone rang and my parents woke up, feeling confused by the time of the call. I can’t recall another occasion where someone phoned us that late. I woke up to my mom picking up.
“Hello?… Phil, hi… Is everything ok?”
Phil was a neighbor who was very close to my family. Whatever he said to mom, it immediately made her sound more awake.
“No. We’ve been home all night, why?”
She listened to his reply, in what felt like a prolonged silence, before rushing to my room, and to my bed. I pretended to still be sleeping.
“No, he’s here. Safe and sound” she said as she softly brushed my hair with her fingers.
Mom took a couple steps back to my bedroom door, where she held the rest of that brief phone conversation. Even with my eyes closed I could feel her staring at me.
She hung up, and Dad walked to her side. They spoke in whispers, so I wasn’t able to make out everything they said, except the urgency and worry in their voices. Dad hurriedly got dressed and left the house, and mom, after securing all the doors and windows, sat next to me in my bed. I pretended to get up, and asked her what was going on.
“Your Dad went to help mister Phil find someone who got lost in the forest. Don’t worry about it, go back to sleep”. Even at that age, I could tell she was struggling to sound calm.
We stayed quiet for many long minutes. Mom continued to sit by my side, looking out my bedroom window. I was drifting back to sleep, when I heard it:
Someone calling me from far away, from deep inside the forest.
“Matthew…”
I sat up and instinctively looked at my mom. Just by seeing her face I knew she had also heard those serene screams, yelling my name.
“Matthew…”
Mom held my hand. We both recognized whose voice was that in the forest: hers.
I’ve never been so terrified. Sitting right next to me was the mother I had always known, protecting me with a hug. And out there was someone, something, with her exact same voice, looking for me.
The both of us remained silent, listening to the distant screams.
“Matthew… Mathew… Matthew…”
