The experience that I'm about to relate is true. It happened to my sister Debbie. She and I are very close and I know that it's true because she is a fundamentalist Christian who isn't prone to dabbling in the occult. She had never believed in ghosts until this happened.

She remarried in 1993 after a nasty divorce. Her new husband and three young stepsons had been living a free and unconventional lifestyle on a sailboat that was anchored in the Banana River at Merritt Island, Florida. This sailboat was a single-hull racer that was too small to accommodate the addition of my sister and her six-year-old daughter to the family, so it was traded up to a larger boat, the 42 foot trimaran L'Chaim, or "To Life". It was also anchored out in the river, and the family commuted back and forth to shore by dinghy, for jobs, school and errands.

They had been living on L'Chaim for about 3 weeks when they began to notice some strange things. It started simply enough, with sharp knocking sounds that came late at night from the cockpit in the upper midsection of the boat. They were accustomed enough by now to the boat's own noises: the waves lapping against the hull, the wind in the rigging, and the fish that made little booming noises underneath, to know that these sounds were different. A few times, on those rare occasions when either Debbie or her husband was alone on board late in the evening, they heard the low, soft sound of whispers coming from somewhere in the forward section, too muffled to understand words but too distinct to be anything else. On two of these occasions the night was still and the river calm, with no other boats in the vicinity to account for the sound. Sometimes they would hear what sounded like footsteps in the early morning hours that would start in the cockpit, pace back toward the stern along the upper deck and then double back again toward the bow of the boat. More than once they got up to make sure that no passing stranger had boarded their boat. There was never anyone else on board and there were usually not even any other boats in the vicinity. Their cat seemed to be more sensitive to the unseen occupant than any of the humans aboard. Many times her hackles would go up and she would hiss and run from something no one else could see, even on evenings when everyone was home and the river rang for hundreds of yards in all directions with the carried sounds of four children playing.

One night my sister was awakened at about 3 AM by a sound to the right near her head. She rolled to face that direction and opened the privacy curtain that separated her bunk from the rest of the room. On the step next to the bunk was the figure of a person who was headed toward the galley (kitchen). At first she thought it was the oldest boy, 12 year old Jason. The figure was dressed in a short-sleeved, hip length white shirt, and had collar-length gray-looking hair. Jason had shoulder-length blonde hair and usually wore a white T-shirt to bed. Since her bunk was in the central room of the boat, in between the galley and toilet areas toward the stern and the bow up front where the boys slept, the boys had to go through that room past her bunk to get to the bathroom and the galley for a drink of water. She closed her eyes and waited for him to walk back through on his way back to bed. When she heard the sound of dishes clattering in the galley, that was okay. He was getting a drink. The sounds stopped for a few minutes, and when he didn't walk back through on his way back to bed, she opened her eyes and said "Okay, back to bed now." No answer. She turned on the light, sat up and looked out into the galley. She had a wide open view of the galley and the bathroom area from where she sat, but there was no one there, or anywhere in that end of the boat When she checked, the boys were all still asleep.

On thinking about this experience later, she realized that the figure had been of a man, taller and not at all slightly built like Jason. He had also been wearing long dark pants and the white shirt had not seemed to be of soft cotton T-shirt material but something crisper, like a lab coat. His hair was shorter and coarser looking than Jason's. In doing some checking about the boats' history she contacted the broker they had bought it from. It turned out that its original owner had been an old doctor who retired after a long career to a life of sailing around the Caribbean with his much-younger wife and a hired sailboat captain who did all the driving. The good doctors' wife and the captain ended up having an affair and left the doctor marooned in some West Indies port one day. It was two years before the doc caught up with them and his beloved L'Chaim again. The boat was much the worse for the wear and it was eventually left in a boat graveyard in Fort Pierce. Sis could never find out if the doctor was still alive or not, but we have a feeling that he is not.

Since then, Deb and Paul sold the boat to a couple of guys who were going to fix it up and live on it. They must not have lived on it very long, and they never did fix it up, but it's still here in Brevard county, anchored in the river, abandoned, waiting, at least until the next hurricane or until someone comes along who's willing to restore her and doesn't mind sharing the space with the owner who loved her best of all...