The Ghost of Tamara Park

Tamara Park is set against the backdrop of a small city skyline with big city envy. The name of the small city is also Tamara Park, which leads one to believe that someone didn't have a lot of imagination when they named the playground at the city's center.

Aside from the four rusting hunter green benches that serve as both resting places and a separation barrier, there is also a three-child swing set, one slide and a jungle gym. Time and weather have peeled the once colorful paints from the wood and metal structures. These days few, if any, of the local children come to Tamara Park to play. Not since that day last March when Molly Becker claimed someone grabbed her from a swing and threw her to the ground. The only problem with Molly's story is that when she looked up from the ground, not one other person was around, except for her mother, who sat a way's off on one of the benches knitting a winter hat.

Since Molly Becker's fall, several people have made claims about seeing the swings moving on their own, when it isn't a windy day and hearing the thunk of a fall near the bottom of the slide, when there is no child coming down its shiny slope.

This afternoon, Tommy Hickland, a 5th grader, decided to walk into the park after school. It was on a dare. Mike Marietta and Felix Garcia said there was a ghost in Tamara Park and Tommy said "If there's a ghost in there, then I'm going to scare it off, so we can have our park back."

When Tommy walked into the playground, he noticed that wet, rotting leaves covered almost every spot of the ground, even though there had not been any rain in weeks. He saw the play structures and thought they looked lonely and abandoned. He noticed that garbage lay strewn about and that the one city-issued garbage can overflowed with refuse. He wondered how long it had been since anyone cleaned up the park. He wondered if even the sanitation crew was afraid of the Tamara Park ghost.

About 10 feet behind the benches, Mike and Felix watched as Tommy bravely made his way around the empty park. Mike's heart was beating furiously in his chest, but nowhere near as much as Tommy's. "I can't believe he went in," said Felix to his classmate. "Well, he showed us! Now we'll never hear the end of it. If we thought he had a big head before, well..." Just as the boys started to giggle quietly, they heard a loud rustle and then Tommy cried out for help.

In Mrs. Kendall's classroom the next day, all the talk was about Tommy's encounter with the Tamara Park ghost. "And his knees got scraped when he tried to run away from it," Molly told a few of the other girls in the class.

"Well, I don't believe it. My mom says there's no such thing as ghosts," said Francine Herbert, "She said if there was really a ghost the town would have written something in the local paper, or at least it would have been on the news." Molly rolled her eyes. "Hello? It was on the news. Remember when I fell off the swing? A reporter came to the house and asked me a couple of questions about what happened. And when I fell, I know I felt someone...or something yank me off the swing. How do you explain that Miss Smarty Pants?"

"You don't." The girls all turned in their seats and looked right into Cynthia Sader's hallow, dead eyes. Molly and Francine felt a chill run through them at the exact same time. Cynthia Sader was so strange. No one really knew much about her. She kept to herself, ate lunch by herself and lived outside of the town with just a grandmother. She didn't have any friends and she always seemed to be looking passed you, if you spoke to her at all.

Just then, Mrs. Kendell tapped on the blackboard with a piece of chalk and asked the class to settle down. Molly raised her hand. "Yes, Molly? What is it? I want to take attendance. Can it wait?" Molly lowered her hand and shrugged.

At 8 p.m. that night Molly Becker's father William, along with Mike's dad Jacob, went into Tamara Park. The men were sick and tired of the weeks of terrorized wives and children, since Molly's encounter. And now, since Tommy also claimed that he had been grabbed and pushed, they wanted to get to the bottom of things.

"You go around by the swing set and I'll check around the benches and the garbage pail," William said to Jacob. "Sure thing, man. But if you ask me, this is a wild goose chase. There ain't no ghost here." William smiled. "Maybe, but all I know is my little girl can't sleep at night thinking about the day she was yanked and thrown from the swings. And Tom Hickland's kid was also grabbed just yesterday. So whoever the bastard is playing jokes, it stops now." The men separated to walk around. "Hey," Jacob yelled across the playground, "What exactly are we looking for, anyhow?"

William, who was pushing an empty swing back and forth, replied, "Anything suspicious...strings attached to these things that could be pulled to toss off a kid. Some kind of trap linked to one of these things. I don't know. Whatever is here that shouldn't be in a playground."

About 10 minutes after they started to look, a force that seemed present and then gone instantly, pushed Jacob Marietta to the ground. He fell hard, landing on his hands and scraping both palms. William ran over, having seen just the shape of the man in mid-fall with nothing behind or around him to explain it. William was by him in a second. "Hey, man! You okay? What happened?" Jacob got to his knees and wiped the leaves, gravel and trickles of blood from his hands onto his jeans. "Shit! I don't know what the hell that was, but I can tell you one thing: There's something in this place that we're not tough enough to take on. C'mon, let's just leave."

Across the park, sitting on a small mound of grass shadowed by large oak trees, Cynthia Sader watched the men, shaking their heads and leaving Tamara Park. She had seen the entire thing. She remained perfectly still until the two hopped into Mr. Becker's Jeep and sped away, spooked, as it were, by whatever they thought they felt. Once they were gone, she got up and went home to tell her Grandmother Constance what she had witnessed.

Constance Isabelle Sader has raised her granddaughter since birth, when her own daughter Izzy died bringing the child into the world. Constance never knew who Cynthia's father was because Izzy never came clean about who she had relations with, when she suddenly came home with a bun in her oven. So Constance simply tacked on her own last name to the child and raised her as her own, even though she always was truthful to the girl about her beginnings.

When Cynthia was about three years old, Constance had figured out that the child also had her special visionary gift. She cried when she learned it because she knew the girl would have as tough a time as she had, while she was growing up in Tamara Park. She tried not to dwell on it, but as Cynthia grew, the girl became more suspicious of her ability to see what her classmates did not see. The time to tell her was approaching.

It was 1940, when five-year-old Connie Sader walked by Tamara Park Center with her mother. They were on their way to pick up some groceries when Connie felt a rush of wind and a hard tug on her arm. Then she watched as a little girl fell into a construction ditch where the city was digging a new playground. The small, dark-haired girl was beautiful in that way of exotic, far off places. The child seemed to fall in a slow, methodical way, as if part of her body was suspended in time and part was moving in real time. The girl looked right at Connie, just before she disappeared into the cavity in the earth.

"Mommy! Mommy! A kid just fell into that hole," Connie screamed, as her mother reacted to her daughter's pleas. The two walked over to the ditch and looked down into it. The mid-morning sun was shining brightly and the sky was a crisp and clear blue. They stared and stared but the ditch was empty, the earth unmoved, the hole as it had been before, the earth and gravel undisturbed. "You must have imagined it, sweetheart," Connie's mother said to her.

Connie looked about the empty place and saw no other mommies, or daddies and no other children. She must have imagined it. The next day and the day after that and in the weeks and months that followed, Connie waited to hear of someone who was missing a little girl, but no one claimed they were. She must have imagined it then, right?

After her 15th birthday, it happened again. The park had been built and was always a bustle of activity in the town. One day, a boy from the elementary school reported a similar encounter with a rush, a tug and then the child was falling. "Someone pushed me," he frantically yelled. His mother scolded him for telling tall tales, since no one was near the boy when he fell. Constance and her mother were at the park that day, too. She was reading and her mother was feeding the birds. When the boy fell, Constance looked quickly at her mother about to state the obvious, that she saw the image of the little girl fall again. However, her mother, who did not see as she did, warned her not to say a word about her encounters now, or when she was a child. Reluctantly, Constance kept quiet.

When she turned 21, Constance became entranced with searching for the girl's identity. Since no one ever heard her story, she was on her own to search for answers. One unremarkable day, as she was about to give up, she came across the piece of information she had been searching for all along.

Before Tamara Park was a city and before it was even named Tamara Park, it had been a simple town of traveling gypsies. They remained in the area for the better part of 24 months, which was a lifetime in gypsy years. Though records were sketchy and no official information was recorded, someone in the small gypsy tribe had thought to leave behind a scribbled note about a lost little girl named Estrella Luz. The note had been tucked carefully into a crevice of a large stone. The stone had been painted a deep red, before the gypsies departed. No one ever came back to see if the note had been found, or if the little girl had returned. When the town was developed, the red, faded stone was discovered. The note was salvaged and kept as part of the area's historical background.

Sometime in the early 1960s a local reporter wrote a brief piece about the gypsies and the little girl and the note, which was said to be kept at the town hall. It was reprinted as a kind of space-filler for a newspaper short on real happenings. The note read:

Estrella Luz
Light of our lives
Where did you go,
when the Earth opened wide?

We waited so long
Your pretty face missed
You never grew up
Not once were you kissed

If ever you return
Know how much you were loved
Don't think you're abandoned
We watch from above

Constance copied down the letter from the town archives. She folded the paper carefully and placed it into her pocket. That night she put it into a diary for safekeeping. Every night after that, she read it. One day she knew it by heart and would only recite it quietly, like a prayer before bed, hoping for the little girl's spirit to be free.

But Constance knew that the child was not free. Every 15 years or so, her spirit would return and visit Tamara Park. Children would be pushed, shoved and knocked to the ground by an invisible force they could not explain. Sometimes, an adult would also experience the odd shove.

Though none of Tamara Park's modern-day residents had even heard of the gypsies and Estrella Luz, the child seemed to not want to go away from the last place she ever knew. In her unsuccessful attempts at play, which Estrella Luz wanted so desperately to do with the children, she would be more aggressive than she had to be. Estrella Luz never knew she was gone from this world and continued to behave as if she still belonged in it.

Every 15 years, Constance would walk the park at night and see Estrella Luz. The little girl's long wavy black hair hung down around her tiny face. A thin glow encapsulated her small frame. She sat on a swing, forlorn and forgotten and waiting for her loved ones to come get her. Though she tried to get the child to understand that she was dead, in many ways Estrella wanted to remain in her suspended unknown.

Now Cynthia Sader had seen the child, not once, but twice. She knew no one else could see her, but not why. She knew she was different - "weird" as the girls in her class said to her. It was now up to Constance to tell her the story. So that evening, right after Cynthia had slid into her bed, Constance pulled out her old diary and walked over to her granddaughter's room.

She sat by her and took out the crumpled old piece of paper. "We have a very special secret to keep. You and I see things other people do not. People here, they don't want to believe in things and that's fine for them. You and I know better." Cynthia nodded. "I want to show you something and then I will tell you everything. Promise me that after you know, you'll keep the secret, too!" Again, Cynthia nodded.

As promised, Cynthia did not tell anyone about Estrella Luz. A few more times that month, she and Constance walked by the park at night and watched from the shadows as the lost little girl went down the slide, played on the swings, or climbed the jungle gym. They watched her like parents, ready to leap if she should fall. She never looked at them. One night, they went and she was gone. They went once more and they did not see her.

"She'll be back," Constance said knowingly. "When?" Cynthia asked her. In another 15 years." Cynthia thought about this for a moment. "Will she be a teenager by then?" She asked Constance. Her grandmother solemnly shook her head. "No, my darling. Estrella Luz will forever be a five-year-old girl."

Some more time passed. Little by little, Molly Becker, Tommy Hickland and Jacob Marietta's falls were forgotten. Families started to make their way back to Tamara Park for rest and recreation. Some of the older kids would jog around for exercise. The town cleaned up the trash and swept away all the rotting leaves. The mayor ordered the playground structures re-painted in bright, friendly colors.

Cynthia Sader was glad of it. She knew that some day Estrella Luz would return to Tamara Park. She knew that some kids would fall off swings and be knocked off the slide or jungle gym, but she also knew Estrella Luz would never really hurt any one of them. Cynthia knew that even after she married and moved away, even after Constance passed on and was buried, Estrella Luz would be stuck here for all eternity. After all, it was the only home she had ever known.

She felt sad for the girl who would never know a life past the first five years. And really, how much living do you do in five short years? It saddened Cynthia deeply for the lost little ghost. Yet she knew that, however temporary, she and the living children had their park back. She knew that it was a park they would always share with a tiny gypsy girl who wanted to play and never knew she was a ghost.