Standing Dry in the Rain

by Michael DeVault

I don’t believe in ghosts. A child of the 1980s, I grew up on Captain Planet and The Day After Tomorrow. I had a microscope at eight, a chemistry set at ten, and by twelve, Fat Man and Little Boy ranked among my favorite movies. I was a nerd, a geek, and I dismissed out of hand the notion that spirits wandered the ether longing to finish their unfinished business. I read physics books. The ether wasn’t real.

That all changed one humid Saturday evening in late August of 2003.

I was at a barbecue on the grounds of Layton Castle, a historic home in Monroe, Louisiana. The antebellum home had originally been the center of a mulberry and silk plantation belonging to the Bry family, who later became the Laytons. Over the centuries, the home evolved to meet the family’s ever changing needs. By 2003, Layton Castle was both the home to Carol Layton Parsons, the current matriarch and occupant, and a handful of apartments which she let to renters. A friend of a friend—his name escapes me—was one of the residents, and our mutual acquaintance, Mary, had invited me to join the festivities.

At first, we were gathered around the barbecue grill, which resides on a brick patio beneath an ancient live oak by the old carriage house. Carol had recently invested in renovating the carriage house, with an aim to hosting weddings and events. A net of twinkle lights swayed gently overhead, casting a nostalgic glow over the affair.

But this is Louisiana in June, and what began as a clear, if humid, evening quickly transformed into a balmy night. Around eight, the rains came.

They fell suddenly and without any fanfare. Somewhere in the distance, thunder clapped and the clouds opened in the kind of monsoon downpour that is an almost nightly affair. Ten or so stragglers at a barbecue scrambled to gather the plates of food, the ice chests, the cups and rush to a small alcove beneath one of the castle’s arcades. The closest cover was the covered landing at the bottom of stairs, which led to the kitchen of Carol’s second-floor apartment.

“We’ll have to be quiet,” our host told us. “Mrs. Parsons is home.”

I knew Carol in passing, only recently having met her through my work with DeltaStyle Magazine. I had written a feature on the castle’s history, and in researching and preparing the article I had spent two days with her, studying the painting of Nelson at Trafalgar and examining the pair of slippers given to her father by the raj. I was also aware of Carol’s reputation among apartment dwellers. Those who had lived at the castle reported a landlord whose temperament could vacillate unpredictably between gracious host, bon vivant, and vicious house mistress. Were we merry revelers to disturb her evening, there was simply no way to gauge which Carol would arrive at the bottom of the stairs. In deference to our benefactor, once boisterous free-for-all conversations fell into hushed tones. A funereal silence blanketed the porch, broken only by the patter of rain on the pavement and the occasional murmur about the Saints new quarterback or a request for a beer from the cooler.

Within the first moments of the shower, the torrent of the initial downpour had softened. Now, large raindrops plopped onto the pavement with a hypnotic cadence. Where once there had been white noise to drown out consciousness, now a thousand staccato beats lulled my brain into a dream state.

I turned to stare into the rain, and that’s when I saw the little girl in the rain.

Georgette Layton.

She was young, somewhere between six and eight years old, with cascades of curly hair framing her face and falling down her shoulders onto the frills of an Edwardian nightgown. The little girl was scanning the gathering almost imperiously, as if to ask who these people were and why they were here at all. When she saw me, our eyes fixed. That’s when I realized two curious facts about the little girl in the rain.

She was colorless. And she was dry.

“Hey, did you hear me?” my friend, Mary, asked. “You all right?”

I turned to her with a start.

“Sorry, I was…,” but my voice trailed off. “You didn’t see the little girl?”

Mary shook her head. There was no little girl there, they insisted. She was just a daydream. As my mind slowly turned back to the party and away from the little girl, I tried not to see the small spot of dry pavement where she had appeared. The next morning, I put away the memory for a decade, happily returning to the world of atoms and science and forgetting thoughts of the little girl in the rain.

But spirits aren’t so easily satisfied, are they?

Just a few years later, I was a regular fixture at the castle. A couple times a week and at random intervals, Carol hosted an informal salon. A few couples, almost always dragooned into attendance after dinner at the country club or a show at the theatre, would gather on the sleeping porch or in the living room. On this particular evening in mid-December, Carol’s daughter, Pam, was in town visiting her mother for the holidays.

Carol had invited a few friends over for “drinky drinks,” as she called cocktails. It was my date’s first trip to the castle, and she was fascinated. For those from Monroe who’ve never been to the castle, the building has grown a mystique and its own mythology. When Carol met us at the door, she thanked her for the invitation and expressed her enthusiasm.

“Well aren’t you just darling,” Carol said. She turned to me and waved her hand dismissively through the air. “You know about all this stuff. You show her around.”

We were in the library, where Carol was at the bar, mixing gin and tonics. My companion leaned in and mumbled “I’ve always heard this place is haunted.”

“Oh it is!” I said. “I’ve seen the ghost.”

I began to tell the story of the barbecue, of the little girl standing dry in the rain. Carol stopped mixing.

“What on earth are you talking about, Michael?” she demanded.

“The ghost. I thought I’ve told you about the ghost.”

As I described the little girl, the curly hair, the Edwardian nightgown, Carol’s eyes lit up. She became excited and smiled.

“That must be Georgette!” she exclaimed. She grabbed her daughter, Pam, and dragged her into the library. “Pammy, this is my friend Michael. He’s telling me how he’s seen Georgette.” To me, Carol added, almost conspiratorially, “She died when she was a child. She’s buried over there,” waving that same, dismissive hand in the direction of the family plot.  “Tell Pammy about Georgette.”

And then I told the story again.

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Georgette may have been my first brush with the spirit realm, but she would hardly be my last. Don’t get me wrong. I’m still all science and data and atoms. The ether still isn’t real, but my beliefs have mellowed into something resembling spiritual agnosticism. Whether it’s seeing Georgette standing dry in the rain or experiencing a shared dream with a close friend, I’ve come to believe that ghosts are real, or at least something we experience as ghosts exist.

And in a universe of quantum entanglement, bosons and quarks, and the strange, almost mystical behavior of light, even I have to grant as possible that spirits roam the ether and phantom girls stand dry in the rain.