THE GHOST IN SEARCH OF HELP

Late at night in his home during a raging blizzard, after a hard day’s work, a doctor is summoned by a persistent knocking at his door.  There he finds a young girl in threadbare clothes who begs him to accompany her to the bedside of her very ill mother.  Although he’s very tired from his busy day, he puts on his coat, grabs his medical bag and follows the little girl into the storm and follows her into what looks like a poverty stricken tenement apartment.  There he finds the mother, gravely ill, and is able to treat her.

When he mentions her daughter who had been insistent on his coming to treat her mother and had disappeared at the entrance to the building – the woman is shocked!

“My daughter died a month ago,” – she points to the girls clothing hanging in the closet, next to the same red coat she had been wearing still damp from the storm.

[NOTE]  Other versions of this story have been around since the early 19^th century.  More modern versions have been revised and repeated, including in a book about angels by Billy Graham.  Another version of this story has been told in England and Russia replacing the doctor with a priest or rector summoned by a ghost to the dying person’s bedside.  In these versions the priest or doctor, unaware of the phantom messenger’s true identity come back to the home the next day, only to learn that the victim has died, sees a portrait of the messenger, and is told that this was the victim’s child or mother who had died many years before.

References: The Truth, 123-136; Too Good, 239-242; Urban Legends, J.H. Brunvand