The Singing Lady

After my divorce, I moved into a small gated neighborhood where every house bordered a man made lake. Most of the residents knew one another, but I kept to myself. The only neighbor I knew well was a former military member who lived next door and was very protective of the community.

My young daughter stayed with me on weekends. Her bedroom window faced the lake and the backyards. During a period when the power was out, I slept in her room with the window open and the screen closed so the breeze could cool the house. When power returned and my daughter resumed visiting, she began complaining about a “singing lady.” She said she no longer liked the woman and asked me to make her go away.

One night, my daughter woke screaming and hid beneath her covers. She pointed toward an empty corner and repeatedly begged me not to let the singing lady come back. I checked the closet and under the bed, found nothing, and eventually calmed her down. She went back to sleep, but soon ran into my room shouting that the woman had returned. She refused to sleep in her room, so I let her stay with me.

The next morning, I bought a baby monitor. I showed my daughter how it worked so she would know that I could hear her and would respond quickly. The following weekend, she was staying with her mother. I was asleep when a woman’s voice began humming a soft nursery rhyme through the monitor. The singing grew louder and clearer, as though the voice were approaching the device in my daughter’s room.

I heard the woman softly singing lullabies. Then she said, “Sweetie, are you awake?” I was terrified. I locked my bedroom door and called my neighbor. He immediately came outside and shouted for the person not to move. I followed him and saw him aiming a shotgun at a woman crouched outside my daughter’s window, the same window I had left open during the power outage.

The woman was a member of the neighborhood maintenance staff. She acted as if she did not know why she was there. She claimed she had not been singing and did not even know my daughter’s name. She said she had been checking the lake for alligators and thought she had seen one approaching the house.

That explanation made no sense. She had been singing through the monitor and had addressed my daughter by name. My neighbor and his wife clearly did not believe her either. The next day, my neighbor helped me install metal bars over the bedroom window.

I never learned how long the woman had been watching the room or how she had learned my daughter’s name. What frightened me most was that my daughter had been warning me about a real person while I assumed she was having nightmares. I moved away soon afterward and never met the singing lady again.