The wife of my brother-in-law has a Navajo for one parent and a Hopi for another. She was raised Catholic, though tribal beliefs remain with her, perhaps as a result of being raised on a “res,” as she calls it. The event I am about to relate comes at second hand, for it was to my wife that she told the story.
Katerie was sitting in front of her make-up mirror late one night when she was in her twenties and living in a house rented by the parents of her husband, my brother-in-law. She was the only person awake in the house, nobody else interested in watching her go through the laborious process of plucking her eyebrows.
When she was almost finished she got up from her seat and returned after a minute and was seated before she again looked into the mirror. When she did so, she let out a gasp, for instead of her familiar face looking back at her, there was an aged woman gazing steadily out of the mirror, her dark eyes fixed on Katerie’s, only her head visible.
Katerie jumped out of her seat and ran into her bedroom where her husband lay sleeping. She called him awake and dragged him out of his warm bed to go look at the mirror which by now only reflected his face.
“What did it look like?” he asked.
“It was wrinkled; the hair was matted and long; her eyes were staring but expressionless.”
“You know, time does funny things sometimes. You might have been looking at yourself fifty years from now,” was all he said turning to go back to bed.
“She was white!” Katerie exclaimed to his back. But he kept going.
Katerie returned to her mirror and sat down before it without daring to look into it.
When she did, she let out a scream and jumped to her feet, for there was the old hag looking out at her again. She turned out the light and ran into the bedroom and quickly snuggled in bed next to her husband, swearing to herself never to use that mirror again.
As it turned out, it wasn’t the mirror as such that was to blame for her fright. One evening, months later, after the house was again unoccupied, I was asked to retrieve a piece of furniture my mother-in-law had forgotten in the basement when they left the house. As I looked around for it with a flashlight, I distinctly heard the floorboards creaking as if someone were walking across the floor from the far side of the room towards the spot directly over my head.
“Can’t find it,” I admitted to my wife as I joined her in our car seconds later.
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