A ‘ghost’ woman?
By Manuel Alberto Ramy
HAVANA, May 18, 2013 –(Radio Progreso Alternativa/RPA-Progreso Semanal)– Remedios the Beauty rose to heaven after drinking a cup of chocolate. So wrote García Márquez in that marvelous book that he has given us forever: “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” Really magical or magic realism, who knows?
Latin America is full of urban legends. Now, reality is possible but the opposite of what Gabo wrote. The lady does not want to rise; she remains.
In Bogotá, Colombia, three security cameras have detected and filmed a woman who appears and disappears before their electronic eyes. So far, there has been no proof of trickery and the images have been sent to experts “to rule if the image comes from The Other Side,” said the announcer in a newscast presenting the occurrence.
The woman, wearing a black skirt and long hair that covers her face, “appeared and disappeared without explanation as she walked past the building” in Bogotá’s Lisboa barrio, said Camilo Prieto, night watchman at a nearby apartment house. Camilo says he no longer goes to the bathroom at night. He’s afraid.
Says Prieto, pointing at the screen as the video plays: “I saw her here, and I was there. I hurried over so I could see her up close – the lady seemed odd and I had never seen her before – and suddenly she disappeared.”
All that happened last Monday at dawn. The mysterious disappearing woman did not seem to be hurrying to work. Or was she returning home after working elsewhere on Sunday?
The residents of the Lisboa barrio in the northern area of Bogotá say that at that place, in an old garden, “some dark things are hidden.” One of the news accounts shows a house, apparently abandoned, where years ago a woman was murdered. The crime has not been solved.
Interviewed by the local TV station, the priest Álvaro Mejías, a theologian at St. Thomas University, said: “What happened at dawn that Monday has no scientific explanation. It’s an apparition of something strange, one might say a paranormal phenomenon.”
The priest, who is following the case, confesses that “I myself was startled, because it is evident that something strange – something that defies a rational explanation – is happening before the cameras.”
Father Mejías opines that the woman may be someone who died but refuses to leave the area.
“It may happen that a dead person – her energy, her spirit – is still attached to something here. That’s why the Church prays for the dead. We believe in the power of prayer,” he said.
A paranormal phenomenon? Fiction? Reality? While we await an opinion from the experts, someone should leave a cup of hot chocolate at the spot where the mysterious lady disappeared. If it works, we can positively state that Remedios the Beauty did indeed rise to heaven.
Manuel Alberto Ramy is Radio Progreso Alternativa’s correspondent in Havana and editor of Progreso Semanal, the Spanish-language version of Progreso Weekly.
