April Slaughter by Ghosthunting Texas Page B

were displayed. I remember commenting to Allen that if we could come that far in communicating with each other as living, breathing human beings, certainly we had hope of establishing a better connection with those on the “other side” someday.
    Little did I know that a couple of years later, I’d be researching Fort Concho for a book about Texas haunts. The story that I first ran across was that of a little girl named Edith Claire Grierson, the daughter of Colonel Benjamin Grierson. He had been post commander and lived in Officers Quarter’s #1 (also referred to as OQ1) with his family. In 1878, at the age of thirteen, Edith became seriously ill with typhoid fever and died after thirteen agony-filled days. Apparently, she wasn’t ready to leave the house even then.
    Sometime in the early part of the 1990s, B.D. Shaffer, a delivery driver assisting local florist Tom Ridgway, arrived at Fort Concho to help deliver flowers following a funeral. As B.D. entered Officer’s Quarters # 1 (the former Grierson residence), he was asked to place one bouquet in two of the upstairs bedrooms while Tom continued to work downstairs. B.D. placed one arrangement in the west bedroom and walked across the
hall to the east bedroom to place the other. He had lost his right eye in a previous accident, which helped him to develop excellent peripheral vision in his left eye. As he entered the second bedroom, he noticed a young girl sitting on the floor to his left. After putting the flowers on the dresser, he turned toward the girl, but she suddenly disappeared from sight.
    When B.D. returned to the fort for their Christmas program the following December, a docent working in OQ1 approached him and they began talking about the house. After B.D. told her about his experience with the little girl in the bedroom upstairs, the docent escorted him into another room to show him a picture of Edith Grierson. The girl he had seen months earlier was the same girl in the picture.
    That incident was not the only one where someone encountered the little girl’s ghost. In June 2003, the new assistant city manager for San Angelo, Harold Dominguez, and his family stayed in OQ1 as they waited for their permanent home to become available.
    As reported by Perry Flippin in an August 2003 article published in the San Angelo Standard Times , Harold’s wife, Andrea, had come face-to-face with the specter of a little girl in OQ1. She had been busy gathering and packing the family’s things when she looked up and saw a young girl about the age of twelve descending the staircase. She was wearing a long, peach-colored dress and had long brown hair pulled back from her face. They stared at each other for a brief moment before the girl’s image disappeared. Neither Andrea nor her husband, Harold, had known about the history of OQ1 or that a girl matching the description Andrea provided had passed away in the house.
    Not being a big believer in the paranormal, Andrea convinced herself that it must have been a trick of the eye, or an optical illusion produced by the afternoon sun as it shone through one of the home’s windows. It hadn’t happened in the middle of the
night, rather late in the afternoon, and so she made no mention of it to her husband until he asked her if she had experienced anything strange during their stay.
    As they discussed it further, more and more strange occurrences seemed to stand out in their minds. A desk chair had been moved out of its position, and neither of them had moved it. As the couple slept one evening, both were awakened at close to midnight by the sound of a loud female voice wailing just outside the bedroom window. After just four days in OQ1, the Dominguez family decided to relocate to a motel. When Mr. Flippin presented a picture of Edith Grierson to the couple, Andrea indicated that she looked like the young girl she had seen on the staircase.
    Other visitors to OQ1 have often reported feeling dramatic drops in temperature