Friday, April 6, 2012

I saw Jenny jump to her death

by Susan Pillsbury:

Over fifty years ago when I was a very young girl (perhaps seven or eight) my aunt took us to Jersey where there were historic sites of sorts, a kind of outdoor museum. It had been an indian stomping ground. I was walking along the road, my family members ahead of me, when I had the strangest displaced sensation (which later I would identify with haunted places) and suddenly I saw something upward to my left... way up on a high cliff; it was a little girl in a light colored old fashioned dress and pinafore, about my age, running in terror directly toward the edge of the cliffside, a very fit brown indian with long black hair chasing her. I saw her plummet to the ground far below. There was a little old house there too, as I recall. I will never forget the sight and how it made me feel, how she was shrieking, so terrified not to be caught by this indian that she didn't hesitate to keep running out into the air and fell straight down. I felt her hit the ground way below. The experience shocked me, but I knew it was something I was seeing from a very long time ago.
What made this sight all the more memorable for me is that just as I was about to tell my aunt and my mother what I had seen, my aunt read aloud the little plaque stationed at the end of the slope which lead to this cliff, but couldn't be accessed by the public because it was roped off. The plague read that a little girl had fallen to her death fleeing an indian in her pursuit precisely in the spot I had just witnessed. I remember telling my family what I had seen over and over, and I think they believed me. The eerie and yet compelling feeling which had accompanied the whole experience was something I would experience at different occasions throughout my life around certain old houses or an area of woods or something from centuries like a vacated well or an old bridge....and I would know that this place had a story to tell, so traumatic or powerful that it was imprinted onto the atmosphere all around it. That if I stayed there long enough I would glimpse a part of whatever had happened there. Usually these places are heavy with sadness or human drama. The feeling I get is that I've been transported to another time for some reason and that this particular place holds memories still intact, and just waiting for me to encounter them.
I had told my husband what I'd seen that day in Jersey numerous times, but for some reason we were discussing it again tonight, and for the first time it occurred to me that the place in Jersey might actually be verified by googling. He is good at finding things online, so he went searching armored with just the information of a little girl in Jersey who fell from a cliff to her death fleeing an Indian.
And he found a sight entitled Jenny Jump Ghost sightings in Jersey....which described the incident I had seen....a place in Jersey that was notorious for others seeing this little girl ghost about nine who was dressed in a light blue or white dress. But mainly they just see her around the area, nobody having registered they actually saw her fall as I had. The other thing is that the description of this particular ghost place has only been online for several months, and only now had it dawned on me to check it out. I hadn't known until this evening that her name was Jenny.
That just strikes me as too strange.
It stays with me. That's the way you know something is real which defies logic; it leaves its memory with you.

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