Sophy's Story, Fall 2025

Interviewer: I wanted to ask you about a story that you have that's affected you in some way.

Sophy: And I've come up with one that happened to me when I was 28, and I had just moved to Brooklyn Heights, New York, with my husband and two little children. And that I say, little children, I mean, they were really little. Sarah was maybe two, and Molly was just a baby. And so, I'm a young mother not knowing what I'm doing, taking care of two babies. And we have this beautiful apartment in Brooklyn looking out over the Statue of Liberty. It has a walnut paneled bedroom, a little dressing room for me, huge bedroom for the two girls. And it's just gorgeous. We had hardly moved to this apartment from Washington when David, my husband, who is working for the New York Times, and he sent out on some assignment someplace, leaving me the second day that we're there to make my own way.

One night, it's about 10 o'clock at night and I was sitting in the little dressing room making a dress for my little girl, Sarah. So I'm working on the sewing machine, making this little bitty dress, and all of a sudden I had this sense that there's someone, have you had that? Where you feel that there's someone in the room, and you look up and there isn't anyone at all. I looked up, and there was a man standing in the doorway. Only I could see through him.

There were three things that I knew about him: that he was good, that he was troubled, and that he was not going to hurt me, exactly. But he's not supposed to be there. He's a ghost. And I turned my back, and I thought, okay, I've been alone too long. I'm going bananas. So I'm sitting there like this, with my head in my hands. And he walked up behind me. I couldn't see him, but I knew that he was walking up behind me. And he put his hand on my shoulder like this, and his hand was cold as dry ice. I burst out and sweat. I knew that his hand on my shoulder intended to comfort me.

And then he went away, and suddenly thought he's gone to see the children in their room. And I shot out into the little hallway before you get to the children's room. And then I stopped. I could not go in the children's room. It was as if there was a hand at my chest. And then I walked into my bedroom, and he appears on the window seat looking at me. I decided I had to take command of this situation. And I said to him, “I don't know who you are, but you are welcome to stay in this house with us. But I want you to know that I love this apartment, and you are not to do any harm to it whatsoever. If I find that you have hurt this apartment, I will exorcise you immediately. If you're going to stay, your job will be to take care of my children and make sure that nothing happens to them. If you agree to these terms, you can stay, and if you can't, then you have to go away.” He listened to me very gravely. And then he got up, and he walked past me and down the stairs into the kitchen and out the back kitchen door. But he was showing me, I think, that he wasn't going to stay. And the minute that he was gone, I felt totally myself again.

I thought, now that was really queer. I checked the children, and they're fine. And I went back into my, back to the sewing machine. And just then the telephone rings. It was my landlady, Mrs. Glass. And she said, I just can't stop thinking about you in that apartment and about my husband and how much he loved that apartment. He was a gynecologist, and his offices were in the basement of the Brownstone. We had the two floors, and they rented the two floors above that. And his special little room was the drawing room, the little dressing room on the other side. And I didn't tell her that I had just seen him.

I've thought about it a lot. He's not the only ghost I've seen. I've seen many, many, many ghosts, but that was the first one that I saw, and the most dramatic for me, who didn't know what I believed about God or life after death or any of it. But I, it's always been on my heart that I didn't tell her that I'd seen him. If I had to do it over again, I would have. But that moment with that ghost did change my life.