You look up from the cracked macadam laid out like the world’s flattest murder victim just beyond the illuminated edges of your phone (which has served you these past terrifyingly dark minutes as your only source of both time and man-made light), and hope against hope that the bus which was supposed to be here half an hour ago is arriving.
Updated 2/10/2020 – It’s not, though; in Brewster, Florida, the last bus of the night is almost always late to the last bus stop – sometimes it doesn’t even come there at all.
So you don’t see your bus, but what you do see freezes the blood in your veins.
Something Dark And Frightening Waits At The Benches At Night
She is the stuff of legends, and local sources have it that she has been haunting this particular bus stop for decades – possibly quite a few of them.
No one knows exactly where or when she came from, but those who have seen her have noted that the faintly-glowing garb she wears looks like a thing out of time.
It has been widely speculated that she is the spirit of the victim of a gruesome murder, which took place near these benches during the 1930s, but no one has been able to prove this.
Brewster, which began as a mining town in the early 1920s, is fairly small and somewhat provincial by Florida standards; it seems that everyone knows everybody, and there is little scuttlebutt which doesn’t make its way around the entire town fairly quickly.
However, few people will talk about the ghost, and the occasional person who will generally does so in hushed tones, with frequent glances over the shoulder as if he or she is doing something wrong.
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The Black Madame – as she is known among the tightly-knit circle of believers who claim to have seen her – always appears sometime after dusk has succumbed to darkness for the night, walking barefoot across the ground and coming to rest on one of the benches.
It’s As If She Is Waiting For Someone To Pick Her Up
Although none of the stories which have circulated about the Brewster ghost have indicated that she has ever attacked anyone, she has certainly frightened a number of people out of their wits.
Witness reports have described her as being young and shockingly beautiful, a woman who no doubt died in the prime of her life.
She cuts a tragic figure, to be sure, but that doesn’t mean that it’s the safest thing in the world to attempt to reach out to her; the few who will go on record saying that they made the mistake of speaking to her say that she shrieks inarticulately in response, and will disappear before your eyes.
Unquestionably, the Black Madame is the strangest thing you’ll see in Brewster, at least if you happen to be sitting at the right bench at the right time of night, waiting for that bus which may – or may not – come to take you away to safety.