Amber balances a busy corporate career with her hobby- refurbishing old furniture to resell. When her partner brings home a beautiful antique vanity, Amber is at once drawn to the piece and repulsed. Soon after, her daughter befriends The White Lady - a sinister spirit hellbent on driving a wedge between mother and daughter.
Amber balances a busy corporate career with her hobby- refurbishing old furniture to resell. When her partner brings home a beautiful antique vanity, Amber is at once drawn to the piece and repulsed. Soon after, her daughter befriends The White Lady - a sinister spirit hellbent on driving a wedge between mother and daughter. As The White Lady grows closer to her young daughter, she also begins to launch physical attacks on Amber. Amber realizes that if she has any hope of freeing herself and her daughter from the spirit’s grasp, she must destroy whatever brought it into her home… even if it costs her everything.
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Find episode transcript here: https://a-ghost-ruined-my-life-with-eli-roth.simplecast.com/episodes/the-white-lady
Eli Roth [00:00:00] Hey, everyone, it's Eli Roth here, and this is a terrifying episode. Not only did our victim have to battle a malevolent spirit hell bent on hurting her, she had to keep it from latching on to the thing that mattered most: her daughter.
Amber [00:00:17] I'm walking out of my bathroom, walking through my bedroom, and I get to the door frame of my bedroom where it meets the living room and I cannot get past my door. Something stops me in my tracks like physically stops me. And this isn't me mentally stopping myself. And all of a sudden, this huge force pushes me to the point where I go flying backwards and I land on top of my bed, and I feel something choking me. And it's just getting tighter and tighter and I black out.
Eli Roth [00:01:03] As many of you know, I've spent my life telling scary stories. But imagine if those stories were real. What if you found yourself tormented by an evil spirit? And no one believed you? Who would you turn to? How do you deal with it? What do you do when everyone thinks you're crazy? That's what we're going to dig into with this podcast. These are the actual accounts of terror told to us by the victims themselves who came face to face with their demons and survived. You'll be hearing from the actual victims and the actors who recreated their stories for my Discovery Plus series A Ghost Ruined My Life. This episode is the white lady.
Amber [00:02:00] I wasn't anticipating the horror that I was going to go through. My name is Amber Gilmore and this is how it ghost ruined in my life.
Eli Roth [00:02:21] When we interviewed Amber as she spoke, we could tell from the look in her eyes that this experience had truly traumatized her. Few ever fully recover from something so completely inexplicable and terrifying. The whole crew could feel it in the road. Her tale starts six years ago, with Amber balancing a new career and a new boyfriend, James, while raising her young daughter Rowan in Mississippi.
Amber [00:02:48] Everything was pretty much perfect. James and I were inseparable. Rowan was a little firecracker, but she was also very, very good kid. We ended up moving into the log cabin of where the events unfolded. I ended up landing a really awesome fun job for a Big Tech corporation as an inside sales coordinator. And then on the side, I like to refurbish furniture antique furniture specifically, and I could sell it for anywhere between 400 to a thousand dollars apiece. I loved making that money and doing something that I loved. I was on a buy sell trade website where I found this antique vanity and I thought it was gorgeous. It had a lot of Victorian style character to it. I asked James if he would be willing to go pick it up for me. It needed some work, definitely, but it was it was a beautiful piece of furniture. And then once I got home, I saw the vanity on the front porch, and at first I was really excited because it just looked so gorgeous. It needed some work, definitely. But it was it. It was a beautiful piece of furniture, very crafted, just gorgeously. And when I got close to it, it just felt different. Initially left me with a sense of confusion.
James [00:04:21] Hey, hey, you OK?
Young Amber [00:04:24] Yeah, I'm fine.
James [00:04:26] Do you like it?
Young Amber [00:04:28] I love it... Let's put it in the bedroom.
James [00:04:34] The bedroom. It's a first.
Young Amber [00:04:38] Is it a problem?
James [00:04:40] No, no, no, not a problem, just surprised.
Young Amber [00:04:47] Maybe I don't sell this one. Maybe I'll keep it.
Amber [00:04:53] I was always excited to flip my furniture, but this particular piece, I just could not quite get myself to start the process. I had originally had plans on fixing it up within two, three, maybe four days a few days ended up turning into about nine or 10 days. Is just something about it, which is telling me not to touch it. Just walking through the house starts to have a sense of heaviness to it. It just felt really dark, heavy, cold at times, not the normal light and airy feeling that I typically got when I started noticing things out of the corner of my eye or even hearing things. I thought you know what? I'm hallucinating. Maybe I'm going a little crazy, and it was a lot to take in. My daughter's room starts to have a sense of heaviness to it. It just felt really dark, heavy, cold at times, just different. .
Rowan [00:06:21] Would you like some tea?
Young Amber [00:06:24] Rowan, who are you talking to?
Rowan [00:06:25] The white lady.
Young Amber [00:06:27] Who?
Rowan [00:06:28] The late lady.
Amber [00:06:31] I did not see her, but my daughter was pointing to the corner and telling me that that's where she was. There is nobody else in the house. The doors were locked. What does this lady look like? She's dressed in white and really nice. My daughter starts telling me that she sees a white lady, a tall woman all dressed in white and had a pale white face, and that every night this woman would just either stand in the corner of her bedroom or sometimes sit at the foot of her bed and talk to her and have conversations with her.
Rowan [00:07:13] She asks a lot of questions about you.
Young Amber [00:07:17] What kind of questions?
Rowan [00:07:22] The white lady says you should play with me and you're bad if you don't.
Young Amber [00:07:27] Is the white lady here now?
Rowan [00:07:31] We're going to have a tea party. You can go now.
Eli Roth [00:07:41] This is where it starts to get freaky. Amber Gilmore's daughter, Rowan, began having regular tea parties with the white lady, an entity who seemed very real to the young girl but was completely undetectable to amber. And the white lady started asking questions about the people in her life and began making judgments. It was starting to drive a wedge between mother and daughter.
Amber [00:08:05] I didn't know how to feel, I was just put off guard and scared, but my daughter had never been introduced to any type of Scary Movie or TV show. My daughter just said that that everything was fine, that she enjoyed talking to this woman, that they had good conversations. She never felt scared. And for me, that was scary because it's not a person in their...I. My daughter's talking to something that I can't see, but she can definitely see her, and I didn't know how to handle that. Regardless of my daughter being scared or not. I was. I didn't want anything to happen to her. I asked James if he had noticed anything different about Rowan if her Moods Changed or, if she's talking about the white lady or anything just different, and he told me that he hadn't noticed anything different with Rowan, but he definitely noticed changes in me and that was concerning to him.
Young Amber [00:09:23] Have you noticed anything different about Rowan? I mean, lately she's talking to an invisible friend.
James [00:09:32] You mean, like how she's a kid and using her imagination? No, I can't say I have Amber. Sorry. I've noticed some weird things about you lately, though.
Young Amber [00:09:42] Such as?
James [00:09:46] You really want me to say.
Young Amber [00:09:49] No.
[00:09:51] Over the course of the next few weeks, I felt sick all the time, drained my energy, started just depleting, my mood started changing. I just was not motivated to do anything at all. My whole life was sucked out of me.
Eli Roth [00:10:08] For sure. Intellectually, people can talk themselves out of the idea that something strange and supernatural is going on. But our bodies that gut feeling, that's what tunes us into something from beyond.
Amber [00:10:20] I felt a pretty negative and dark energy coming from my daughter's room. And when I started feeling that it, it honestly scared me. I didn't know how to take it. I didn't like the idea of keeping my daughter in her room in such a terrible feeling, and it made me feel bad that I left my daughter alone in there at times, even though she wasn't scared. But there was one night in particular where my daughter told me that the white lady stayed in the corner of her room when I was actually in there. So once I realized that the white lady was talking to my daughter on a regular basis. I started to think that maybe this was a sign of a threat, that she wanted me to know that she could touch whoever she wanted whenever she wanted, and I needed to be made clear of that. I started noticing things in the house, moving around cabinets, opening up in your kitchen and things falling off tables. A lot of little tiny things started unraveling and happening around me. We would have stuff fall off of the table. A lot of breakables. At one point in time. A plate had broken another time there were glasses that came out of the cupboards and nobody was in the kitchen at the time. It was just it happened by itself and it was really at that point for me. It was explainable that there was more in our house than just what we could see. When I started noticing this shadow figure, it it really gave me a sense that I didn't understand what was happening at this point. I didn't know if, like, what if I was seeing was real or if my anxiety and depression had finally gotten to me that I was started to hallucinate. I couldn't really differentiate the two.
James [00:12:29] You realize how you sound, don't you?
Young Amber [00:12:32] James, I'm worried. OK, I'm afraid.
James [00:12:37] I. Yeah. What do you want me to say? What you think it's a ghost? My God.
Amber [00:12:51] He thought that I was just crazy. It was just all in my mind. That's that's the way he rationalized everything and never really took it into consideration that what I was seeing and experiencing is real. Something was off. I was scared. I just felt like I was being controlled and I didn't have any control of myself. I lost it. I didn't know what was going on around me, but I knew that I was threatened. Even after everything that I started to experience. It still didn't dawn on me that things were going to continue to get worse. I really didn't know how to handle my emotions. Is this what's the rest of my life is going to be like just being perpetually haunted? It just it consumed everything about me, and I just felt like I was being controlled and I didn't have any control of myself. Sometimes I would get to work and I would just lay my head down on my desk and. Ignore phone calls, ignore emails. I was so mentally and physically drained, exhausted I couldn't think. I didn't know what to do.
The White Lady [00:14:17] Amber. Amber Amber Amber/
James [00:14:29] Are you OK?
Amber [00:14:35] I had a mental breakdown, I was hyperventilating, it was one of the worst anxiety attacks I'd ever experienced in my life. I couldn't control my emotions and I didn't know what was going on with me. And at this time, I gathered a box that I had. I put all my personal belongings in it, and I never went back to work after that day. After I quit my job, James was mad at me. Things started to progressively get worse.
Young Amber [00:15:11] Rowan.
Rowan [00:15:39] The white lady says hi.
Young Amber [00:15:51] Honey. This white lady, she's not nice to me.
Rowan [00:15:57] That's because she never had kids of her own.
Amber [00:16:01] She did tell me that the white lady never had any kids of her own, and she liked kids.
Rowan [00:16:08] She loves them, and she wants one.
Young Amber [00:16:12] She told you that.
Rowan [00:16:13] Uh-Huh.
Amber [00:16:16] Did she tell you where she came from?
Rowan [00:16:19] You asked James to bring her home.
Eli Roth [00:16:30] We'll be right back after a short break.
Eli Roth [00:16:43] Amber learns from her young daughter, Rowan, that the white lady told her that Ambers partner, James brought the white lady to their home. Then it all starts to make sense.
Amber [00:16:54] I finally put two and two together that the white lady had something to do with the vanity.
Eli Roth [00:17:01] So Amber decides to get rid of the vanity, hoping to banish the evil spirit residing within. But that's easier said than done.
Amber [00:17:14] I couldn't do it. I felt like the vanity was telling me, don't come close to it. It had a hold on me. It was a sickening feeling. And. I hated that I couldn't fix it. I knew something was in the house. I just wanted my baby to be safe. So my parents decided that they would take our daughter for a little while to let me have a couple of nights to myself and I told them, not take take her, please. I just want to sleep and sleep and sleep. They took her. And then it was about when I'd say probably around 11 o'clock at night. When I got it, I got to my master bathroom and I try to turn on the light and the light didn't come on. And I thought, OK, maybe the breakers blown or something, because sometimes breaker switches flip for no reason. I'm walking out of my bathroom, walking through my bedroom and I get to the door frame of my bedroom where it meets the living room and I cannot get past my door. Something stops me in my tracks like, physically stops me. This isn't me mentally stopping myself. And all of a sudden, this huge force pushes me to the point to where I go flying backwards and I land on top of my bed. And I feel something choking me. And it's just getting tighter and tighter. And I essentially I blacked out after a few moments. I felt this thing just grabbed me by my throat and lift me up, and it really just threw me across the room like a rag doll and. And there really wasn't any other way to describe it. But I just I felt this huge force just going backwards and I landed onto my bed and and in the moments of me, like flying backwards, like I could just feel all the the air and everything, just going by me as I'm going backwards just from how much force it was. I was tossed and it it was scary.
Young Amber [00:19:43] *choking noises"
The White Lady [00:19:52] The child is mine. The child is mine.
Amber [00:20:00] After I blacked out and came back, the bath water was running. The sinks were all turned on. I really didn't know what to think. I was just so confused and I was petrified. I was shaking. I was cold. I needed to get rid of the vanity. That's what was causing all of this mayhem in my life. I wanted to burn the vanity. It's the first thing that came to my mind. I should dispose of it by burning it and completely getting rid of it. I took it to this burning pit and set it on fire and made sure it burned completely after the flames would die down. I would fire it up again and just really made sure that every little piece of it was just. Done with. After that day, like I automatically felt a sense of relief, it just felt so good again, like I can breathe. Things felt optimistic again, and I felt like myself, I felt hope. It was honestly the most traumatic experience I'd ever gone through in my entire life. I do fully blame the vanity or whatever was attached to the vanity. After this happened, James and I were always just finding things to get mad at each other about. And I honestly feel like it had a lot to do with this entity, this demonic possession that took over the whole household tearing us apart. I've since learned that it's easy for a demon to attach itself to an inanimate object just to try and have some sort of way to stay here. I don't work for a tech company anymore, but I do a bartend now, which actually makes fairly decent money.
Young Amber [00:22:23] Ok. Now no staying up.
Rowan [00:22:23] OK.
Young Amber [00:22:25] Goodnight.
Rowan [00:22:26] Goodnight
Amber [00:22:27] Rowan has always been a relatively compassionate and open, caring kind of person. And so I would say that even though her and the white lady had some sort of relationship, it never really changed who my daughter was.
Eli Roth [00:22:51] Even though the vanity had been destroyed, Amber and Rowan still experience paranormal activity to this day.
Amber [00:22:59] She talks about things that happen all the time. She'll say she sees stuff from the corner of her eye. It was pretty chilling that something like that happened. I was just praying once I got rid of the vanity, that particular entity would just leave. I do continue to experience things today, but nothing like what I was experiencing during that moment in time. I think I'll always be cautious just given what I've gone through. I'm on edge a lot and I don't feel as safe as I used to. Growing up, I never once in my life imagined that what unfolded that night would have ever happened to me. I never pictured myself being physically assaulted, essentially especially not by something I couldn't see. That was one of the most terrifying moments in my entire life.
Eli Roth [00:24:14] In movies, you always see scenes where children and animals can see the spirits. The adults can't, but it's really incredible to hear a story with that actually happened in real life. I hope things get better for her and Rowan. It's absolutely terrifying that the story is still an open ended one. I've always been fascinated by the idea that a spirit can attach itself to an object. I mean, these are not the things we think about when we go antiquing. But could you imagine if you brought that into your home and then not only does it attack you. It starts winning over your child and turning your child against you? Truly, truly terrifying. I'm so thankful to Amber for sharing her story. It is not easy to come forward with a story like this because everyone thinks you're crazy or they think you're making it up. But the more people that do, they realize that other people have had very similar experiences. If you want to hear more real, terrifying stories like this, go to Discovery Plus and check out my TV series. Eli Roth presents A Ghost Ruined My Life. And check us out at Travel Channel Dot Com Slash a ghost ruined my life to learn more about the podcast TV show and what we're up to. A Ghost Ruined My Life with Eli Roth is produced by Cream Productions for Discovery Plus for Discovery Plus, our executive producer is Marissa Lucy for Cream Productions are executive producers are Eli Roth, Johnny Kalangis, Kate Harrison and David Brady. See you on the other side.