Years ago, I lived on an old estate on the Lake Erie shore. I rented the carriage house of an old mansion that a doctor and his wife owned. They were wealthy with multiple properties, so they weren’t around that often. I liked the solitude of the place, having just gotten divorced, and even though the carriage house was slightly decrepit, I loved living there. The mansion looked over the lake, and my house was closer to the road, off a private drive that went from one side of the estate to the other. The carriage house had been servants’ quarters for whoever lived in the mansion at the turn of the twentieth century. There was an enclosed courtyard outside my door bordered by the back of my house, the carriage barn (which had stored carriages back in the horse and buggy days), a row of empty horse stalls, and a brick wall with an entrance into the courtyard.

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It was a very cool place to live. The rent was cheap, and there was a huge private beach hardly ever used by anybody but me. But it was very isolated when no one was staying in the mansion. There weren’t any close neighbors because all the houses along the road were big estates, and many of the rich people living in the area weren’t full-time residents. But I was young and brave, and it was a large estate full of decaying spookiness, and I’m a weirdo that likes that kind of stuff. I was overjoyed to find the place.

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One night I was coming home after midnight from a friend’s house. Driving down a road about a mile from my house, I saw a dark figure up ahead, standing close to the road. I thought that was odd because it was late on a weeknight, not exactly party time in the rich suburbs.

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I started to get a little nervous because the person was standing as if they were waiting for someone to pick them up, and as I got closer, I could see they were wearing an unusual, black, shroud-like thing. It was long and dark and draped, with part of it wrapped over the person’s head to look like a hood. Similar to someone wearing an abaya and a hijab, only much looser—like a bunch of material just wrapped around someone’s body. It seemed totally inappropriate to what I knew of the people that lived in the area to see anybody wearing anything like that, and certainly not outside at one o’clock in the morning on a Tuesday. The person was just standing by the side of the road, looking stooped over and old.

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I slowed down to a crawl, worried that the person needed help. Maybe it was an old senile person that had walked out of their house in the middle of the night, confused? When I got close enough to really see the person, she lifted her head and looked my way, and I saw that it was my ex-mother-in-law. I was absolutely, positively sure it was her. The same gray-brown hair, the same eyes, the same enigmatic smile that had always made me wonder what she was thinking about but never saying. She raised her hand and waved at me. Not a stop-and-help-me-wave, but more of a gosh-it’s-good-to-see-you wave.

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It scared the hell out of me. My mother-in-law had been dead for three years.

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I sped up and kept driving, my hands shaking on the wheel. But after a few minutes and a few deep breaths, I told myself I should go back and take another look. My mother-in-law had loved me. I couldn’t imagine her ghost would appear seeking revenge on me for divorcing her son, who had not treated me well. I drove in a square by making left turns, and went down the road again. There was no one there.

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I was too freaked out to go back to my spooky carriage house with the weird sounds and hundred-year-old history, with nobody there but me and the ghosts I was convinced inhabited the place. I drove to the local all-night diner and sat there for an hour, drinking coffee and calming my nerves.

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When I finally drove home and into the courtyard, I could see that something was wrong. My door was standing open; the glass windows were broken, and the door cracked almost all the way through from one side to the other. Someone had destroyed the door to get into the house. The next day I found a crowbar in the courtyard, thrown off to the side. The only things I noticed missing from the house were a few pieces of my clothing (super creepy), a jar of loose change, and a knife from the kitchen. I didn’t have much of anything worth stealing.

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It’s very scary when someone breaks into the house where you live alone in an isolated spot. They must have driven right into the courtyard and would have been hidden from view while they broke down the door.

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I called the cops. They never caught anyone.

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With all the upset of the break-in, it wasn’t until hours later that I remembered seeing my dead mother-in-law waving at me from the side of the road, dressed like the grim reaper. I’m convinced that she somehow appeared to delay me from going home. That if I had driven straight to the carriage house, whoever the person or persons were who had broken my solid wood, one-hundred-year-old door practically in half with a crowbar, might have still been there when I got home. And things might have turned out very differently for me.

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I know; I wouldn’t believe it either if it hadn’t happened to me. But I swear on my mother-in-law’s grave that this story is true. Honest to God.

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I recommend people should remember to be nice to their mothers-in-law. She might help you out even after she’s dead.