My grandmother grew up on a cocoa estate in Piparo. Even today, Piparo is still distant - in the second and third decade of the twentieth century, it was truly remote. Her father had come from India as a child, worked as an indentured labourer, and eventually bought a cocoa estate from a Spanish family. He was well enough off that he sent at least three of his sons to attend Howard University. Her mother, his third wife, was Trinidadian-born, herself the daughter of Indian immigrants.
As the story goes, she was sitting in the gallery with her baby brother when an older Indian woman, all dressed in white with bangles to her elbows, came up to her and asked to have the baby. My grandmother refused to give her the baby, but she was insistenty, and even tried to take the baby away from her. There was no one else in the house - the nearest adults were in the kitchen, which was a separate buliding, detached from the main house.
Eventually the woman relented, and left. I'm not too clear about that part of the story. But when she later related the story, the woman fit the description of a childless aunt* to whom my great-grandmother had always promised "the next baby". The aunt had died, and the story was that she had come to claim "her" baby.
That night, my grandmother related, she came down with a high fever. She may have imagined the whole thing. But that's really the key to a good ghost story - not a bold claim, but rather, a story that asks the question "what is imagination?"
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