The Tadpole's Ghost

My older brother Dennis began his military leave from the US Army in December of 1970, a few days before my tenth birthday. He used this time to visit our parents and me when we lived in a small rural region in Florida known as Cubitis, which was north of Arcadia.

I first became aware of his stay after disembarking from my school bus and walking into the carport of the cinder block house my parents and I lived. I heard his voice cheerfully call out to me from inside the house, “I hear footsteps!” I had not known of his arrival earlier that afternoon while I was in school.

On my birthday, Dennis gave me a small flashlight that was identical to the one he had. It was metal and shiny silver, with a corrugated surface.

In the evening after my birthday, Dennis walked into my bedroom late at night and woke me. He told me there was something “really weird” that I needed to see, though “really weird” was a phrase he used often. It was an opportunity to use my new flashlight, as the electricity had gone off earlier.

We walked to the end of the hallway and into the unoccupied southwest bedroom. A light mist came up to just below my knees, like the feature of a dream. Dennis stood on one side of the bed, and I on the other. A wispy glowing shape was floating about one foot above the bed. The eerie form was wavering like a little pennant caught in an oceanic breeze.

Its appearance was like a ghostly tadpole hovering in the air, partially transparent but with a trace of blue, about the length of my hand. Its eyes darted side to side, continuously alternating its view from Dennis to me. “Really weird,” Dennis repeated. It sounded as if he was muttering other words related to what we were seeing, but they were unclear.

The beams of our flashlights shone through its semi-transparent body. Since our entry into the dark bedroom, the mysterious denizen had not moved from its original location above the center of the bed.

That would soon change, though. The ghostly tadpole began to keep its gaze more on me. Without expecting it, it turned about and sailed quickly through the air, straight into the bulb of my flashlight. The light immediately went out.

From that day, I stored my flashlight in the southwest bedroom’s walk-in closet, but it never worked again.