Laurie (Strange Things Happen) · Dickey Lee · 1965

  Play the song.

A few days ago, as I was passing a group of grandkids watching TV in the afternoon, I overheard one of the children’s cable networks publicizing a “Halloween In April Week.” The station was apparently reprising some of its October programming—six months later—to get a little more milage out of it.

So anyway, that got me to thinking like a kid again, and I remembered a ghost story that I read as a boy. There are many variations of this tale. This is a version that Reader’s Digest published many years ago in its “Treasury For Young Readers” (1961 The Reader’s Digest Association).

A Girl Named Lavender

By Carl Carmer

Only a few miles northwest of New York City lies a hilly wilderness through which flows the Ramapo River. A few years ago the postmaster in a village that lies beside its lonely waters talked often about a slender girl with eyes like hyacinths and wheat-yellow hair.

The postmaster taught a boy’s Sunday-school class in a tiny, weathered church in the Ramapo hills. His boys were a shy lot, but wild as woods animals are wild.

When that girl was around, she went through the class like a sickness, the postmaster said. A boy would be absent from Sunday School for a month or two. Then he would come back, looking sheepish, and one of his schoolmates would be absent for a while. The postmaster would sometimes see him and the girl picking blackberries on a hillside — or, on a Saturday night, walking along the road to a country dance.

One Wednesday night, three barrels of old clothes from a New York City church were to be given out after prayer meeting. The girl came just as the preacher beat in the head of the first barrel. She was barefoot, and wore a patched calico dress which was much too small for her. She sat in the back pew and paid no attention as the usual shabby garments contained in such barrels were shown.

There was a gasp when the preacher pulled from the second barrel a lavender evening dress covered with sequins that glinted like amethysts. No one spoke up for it. But, without saying a word, the girl dashed forward. She grabbed the dress and raced out of the church.

From that time on, no one saw the girl in any other costume. Rain or shine, day or night, she was a brush stroke of lavender against the green hill slopes and the khaki-colored shirts of whatever boys strode beside her.

Mid-December brought a cold snap. It was 18^o below zero one morning when the postmaster opened his window for business. The people who came in that day were more eager to give him the news than to get their mail. The body of the girl in the lavender dress had been found frozen stiff a few miles up the road. The beautiful dress had proved too flimsy for such weather.

The postmaster said that after this tragedy all the boys in his class came regularly to Sunday school. And that seemed to be the end of the story of the girl.

The girl died in about 1939 — many witnesses have testified to this fact — and for ten years nothing more was heard about her. Then a strange story began to go the rounds of upstate towns.

As I heard it, one Saturday evening two boys were driving to a dance at Tuxedo Park in the Ramapo hills. On the road that runs through the river valley, they saw a girl waiting. She was wearing a party dress the color of mist rising above the dark stream. Her hair was the color of ripe wheat.

The boys stopped and asked if they could give her a lift. She eagerly seated herself between them and asked if they were going to the square dance at Sterling Furnace.

Her thin, tanned face, her yellow hair and flashing smile, her quicksilver gestures enchanted the boys. And they persuaded her to go with them to the dance at Tuxedo Park.

When they presented their new friend to their hosts, she said, “Call me ‘Lavender.’ It’s my nickname because I always wear that color.”

When they started home after the dance, the girl was cold, so one of the boys helped her into his tweed topcoat. She directed the driver through dusty woodland roads. Finally she bade him stop before a shack that would have seemed deserted but for a ragged lace curtain over the small window in the door. Promising to see the boys again soon, she stood beside the road waiving until they had rolled away.

The boys had gone some distance before one of them realized that he had forgotten his coat. They decided to return for it in the morning.

Next day, when the boys knocked on the door to the shack, a scrawny white-haired woman peered at them out of piercing blue eyes. They Asked for Lavender.

“Old friends of hers?” she asked. The boys, fearing to get the girl into trouble by telling the truth, said yes.

“Then ye couldn’t a-heerd she’s dead,” said the woman. “Been in the grave yard down the road for near ten years.”

The boys protested that this was not the girl they meant — they were trying to find someone they had seen the evening before.

“Nobody else o’ that name ever lived around here,” said the woman. “‘Twan’t her real name anyway. Her paw named her Lily when she was born. Some folks used to call her Lavender on account o’ the pretty dress she wore all the time. She was buried in it.”

The boys started for the highway. A hundred yards down the road the driver jammed on the brakes.

“There’s the graveyard,” he said, pointing to a few weathered stones in an open field overgrown with weeds. “I’m going over there.”

They found the stone — a little one marked “Lily” — and on the curving mound in front of it, neatly folded, was the tweed topcoat.

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