The Ghost of Octavia
In a small cabin near Spokane, a widower finds comfort in a persistent, loving vision of his long-dead wife.
In the little cabin near the town, Cyrus lived alone. His wife, Octavia, had been dead and buried twenty years, yet in the quiet of a June night, a vision of the woman he loved came to him. She held his hands and ministered to him tenderly—a gentle spirit, for it seemed more loving than the living counterpart had ever been. From that night, the vision never left him. He clung to the idea that Octavia was his wife, that she lived in the little house near the town, tended the flowers in the garden, and watched the bees in their hives under the apple trees. When upright souls tried to convince him that his wife was but a shadowy creation of his own mind, he only shook his head pityingly. 'Don't ye never see her when ye was to the house?' he would ask. 'She's a master-hand at watchin' bees.' He would even sit at a little distance from the end of the pew in church, and share his hymn book with a woman invisible to eyes but his own. He lived content and cheerful in a world of his own creating.
“He lived content and cheerful in a world of his own creating. Why grieve for him, and why pity him? Is he not blessed above his fellows?”
This story captures the profound loneliness of the frontier era, where the line between grief and reality often blurred. Today, Spokane still grapples with the isolation of its elderly population, though we now have more formal social structures to address the 'ghosts' of loneliness that haunted early settlers.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.