If you saw her, spent a little time around her, then you’d find that she was a sweetheart. A mean word never slipped out of her mouth. She smiled a lot, offered to help the other kids pick up their toys, and always gave her teacher a hug at the end of the day.

But there was also something frightening about her.

Nobody, not even the teachers, could look at her for very long. It was like staring into the sun; blinding, painful. It made your eyes water. The other kids spoke to her with their eyes lowered, staring down.

She was a beautiful girl; snow-white skin and a light brown bob, but the scary feature that turned everyone away was her eyes. Her right eye was a very normal blue-green, but the left one was a very dark, milky sapphire blue.

The catch? She had no iris. Her entire left eye was blue. No black spot dotted the center. Her parents said she was born that way – some kind of rare eye condition, but it was still a creepy sight to behold. It was like staring into the eye of a ghost.

About a week before school ended, the little girl’s teacher was taking attendance when she found that the girl was not there. The teacher thought nothing of it – she was probably just home sick. But when she was absent a second, then a third time, a slow, scary feeling crept down over her.

She got a call the night of the third day – the little girl had died.

It was a car accident. She’d been riding her bike home from her friend’s house when she was hit by a drunk driver. They brought her to the hospital and pronounced her dead; a brain concussion. It left half the school speechless.

Later that day, a large card was passed around, and everyone in the school signed it. The little girl’s teacher was asked to bring it to the parents’ house, since she lived in the same neighborhood.

The teacher thought of it as no big deal. In the car, she opened up the card and studied the signatures. Most were very messy, coming from young children, but there was one well-written, loopy, signature that was signed in blood-red ink. She couldn’t tell whose it was, but as she stared at it intensely, she saw small red drops of ink run down the paper, as if the signature was crying.

The girl’s teacher threw it in the mailbox and drove off.

A few days later, she was invited to the funeral. It was a nice but somber place, with the little girl sitting in a dark maple casket. She was wearing a yellow lace dress and clutched a blue beaded rosary. Her face was pale.

Yet, the teacher was grateful she couldn’t see the sapphire-blue eye.

Three days after the funeral, on the last day of school, she was in the teacher’s lounge during lunchtime, drinking a cup of coffee. The school principal had left his car keys on the counter while he went to go get lunch. The teacher ignored them.
Until they started to shake.
It was a tiny little vibration at first, but then the jingling mass of keys began to shake and tremor violently, as if it were in the middle of an earthquake. Confused and horrified, the teacher tossed her coffee cup in the sink and ran from the room.
The incident was quickly forgotten. School ended quietly, and the teacher took a job working at a summer camp. The thought of the dead schoolgirl was still fresh in her mind, but since she was so busy, she found herself thinking of it less and less.
One afternoon, in early July, she had her elementary-aged summer camp kids make collages of their favorite things by cutting pictures out of children’s magazines. During lunch break, she’d hung them up on the wall.
Now, it was the end of the day, and the teacher was just getting ready to leave. She glanced back over at the collages. They were messy but cute, except there was a strange one on the end, one that she didn’t recognize.
In scratchy handwriting was the name of the little girl that had died; Erica.

There was a single picture posted to the white sheet of paper. With her mouth open and her body shaking, the teacher hesitantly stepped closer and saw a photo of a familiar-looking champagne SUV.

A horrible, wretched feeling of bewilderment and panic ripped through her body, as the young teacher let out a full-on shriek and dove for the supply closet, fearing that there was some kind of dead, vengeful ghost skulking nearby.

There wasn’t. But as the teacher glanced over at a maple-colored teddy in the corner of the closet, she noticed something else bizarre.
Usually that particular teddy had white eyes with little black pupils. But now, one of the eyes was entirely one color; a milky, sapphire-colored blue.
“WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME!?!?!?!?” the teacher exploded out of the closet, landing smack on the floor. She scampered up and grabbed her bags, petrified, fleeing from the empty classroom.
Two months later, school started back up again. The young teacher was going to instruct a third-grade class. But on the first day, she didn’t show up.
Or the second day. Or the third day.
The school had no idea what to do. The principal immediately hired a substitute, scrambling to keep the word from leaking to the students. But, on the fifth day of absence, the elementary school got a call from the local police department; the young teacher was dead. She had been murdered.
The substitute immediately became the permanent teacher, the students were told that their former teacher had transferred, and every adult in the school shook in their shoes at the thought of a cold-blooded killer slaughtering an innocent teacher.
A court case was held in October, after they had found a suspect they believed to be the murderer. One of the people assigned to be on the jury was the mother of the little girl that had died almost five months earlier.
And the entire case, pieced together like a puzzle, shocked her.


Here’s the facts:

The principal of the school, Dr. Robert Mallory, was tried and convicted with the murder of 28-year-old Deborah Baker. He was also convicted of DUI and the accidental killing of 7-year-old Erica Dunfrey.

The principal had been driving drunk when he killed the little girl in a hit-and-run. He had become aware that Erica’s ghost was out there, trying to hint to her former teacher who her killer was. Scared that he would be caught, he snuck into the teacher’s house before school started and shot her with a hunting rifle.

Things have returned to normal. The school’s principal was replaced, and two maple trees were planted in front of the school in Deborah’s and Erica’s memory. Dr. Mallory was sentenced to life in federal prison, where he claims he hears the voice of a young child in his head and sees images of a milky blue eye in his mind.
But nobody believes him.