2016, October 8: An Extra Child

The following event is something that happened to a personal friend of mine in the state of California, USA, and, as I was watching some of her children on the night of the occurrence, I took the account and drawing the same night. You'll have to forgive me for preserving her privacy.

        On October 8, 2016, Mrs. S had spent the day with half her kids at a boating event in the San Francisco area; they were watching the Blue Angels fly, among other cool things. I was babysitting her other kids that day... so when she got home, I immediately made note of what occurred to her as she had driven back.

        The group had arrived back to the town of Petaluma around 7:30 PM, after it had become dark. Part of their route through town took them past the Clover Stornetta Dairy building near the north end of Lakeville Highway... and as they crossed over the Petaluma River that runs under the road in that area, Mrs. S saw out of the corner of her eye a child sitting in one of the seats behind her where no one should have been. Assuming her youngest daughter in the car had switched seats while she was driving, Mrs. S turned to tell her to get back in the right seat.

        Only it wasn't one of her children. And the child wasn't fully there.

        All that was directly visible was from about the shoulders up of what she took to be an about three-year-old girl; the rest of the body simply appeared as a shadowy area under the head. She sat like she was just going along for a ride with the other kids. She had a round, cherubic face, and very wispy hair; her eyes were sunken in, dark, and seemingly unseeing... though she did turn her head to look straight at Mrs. S when she was noticed.

The child, as drawn by the witness on the night of occurrence [Larger version here]

        The small figure appeared to have a patterned shirt or dress visible around the neck and shoulder areas, featuring a repeating pattern of red flowers and blue spots, with a white collar. She was wet, and her shirt and face had "very very green gunk moss" on them, more pronounced to the left side of the face, and there was mud in her hair. Overall, the impression Mrs. S had was that the girl had drowned and been underwater for a very long time.

        Now Mrs. S doesn't tend to react to matters like this in a normal way; she's seen too much crap to be unnerved by a straight forward ghostly apparition. Nevertheless, she felt herself develop goosebumps and she could "feel them like they were crawling up" her body. As she attempted to explain to her kids in the car what she was seeing -- and it became clear she was the only one seeing it -- the girl faded away. Her oldest son, sitting in the front passenger seat and seeing the goosebumps on his mother's arm, told her to just pull over and park and get out of the car for a moment because he was worried she wasn't in good enough shape to drive safely... and, later on, she basically agreed with that assessment.

        About fifteen minutes later, with Mrs. S home and describing this to me as she sketched the figure above, she thought a little more carefully about what she had seen. Nothing in the clothing on the girl or the style of hair she could see gave a clue as to a time period that the ghostly child might have been associated with in life. Given they had spent the day on the ocean, and that the girl appeared as they were crossing a river implies someone who drowned at one of those two locations... but that's not enough to track much down. So, assuming the girl was in fact a ghost, it's unlikely the identity of the child will ever be known.

        Overall, Mrs. S felt the girl was just very, very sad... "her sadness seemed to be a combo of me noticing her and that she was lost and needed to be seen. To be made aware that she was something."