Published in the West Marin Citizen, Halloween 2008

I’ve been driving a school bus for Shoreline Unified School District a few years now, but this isn’t my first such job: I started in a little district about the size of this one in a rural county of Northern California. In fact, the route I started with was quite similar to the one I have now, going out to the lighthouse and back—there were mostly ranches on either side of a twenty-mile two lane road, and the students I chauffeured were children either of ranchers or of their employees.

I took over the route from an old guy named Hal, who had been driving it since about the Truman administration and was retiring. He gave me the standard ride-along introduction, then rode along himself to watch me and make sure I had it down. On our way out in the morning, to pick up the first student at the far end, I remarked on a little run-down faded-blue house I hadn’t noticed before, on our left as we drove out. It didn’t seem to be part of a ranch, but instead nestled in a quarter acre by itself, with a drooping barbed-wire fence around it. One solitary tree hung down over the house, a few of its branches actually resting on the roof.

I said to Hal, “I just noticed that blue house. Do we ever pick up anybody there?” Hal looked at it for a long moment, then looked away, saying nothing. I figured his mind was somewhere else and went back to concentrating on learning the route.

I did learn the route, and drove it every day after that, out as the sun rose to get the first child at the far end, and then working my way back to the school; out again in the afternoon to take them all home, starting with the ones who lived closest to school and ending with the one I’d picked up first in the morning. The kids were bright, energetic and fun to be around, just like the kids here, and I began to really enjoy the job. Caught up as I was in learning the route, and the students’ names, and everything else that came with the territory, I rarely even noticed the little blue house.

Then came the red-letter day of the school year—Halloween. The bus was full of Spidermen, witches and zombies in the morning, who by afternoon seemed to have multiplied, excited as they were about the coming evening’s festivities. With a “Have fun!” or “Don’t eat all your candy at once!” I let each child off on my way out to the end of the road. Then I was on my way back in, empty and ready to call it a day.

That’s when I saw her, in my rear-view mirror, sitting about halfway back in the bus, a little girl with blond hair and light blue eyes, costumed not as a ghoul or a demon or a superhero but as an angel or a fairy or something, in a gauzy sort of dress and holding what looked like a magic wand. She looked to be about six or seven. I’d never seen her before.

I pulled over to the side of the road, afraid I’d missed her stop and not wanting to go any farther until I knew where it was.

“Who are you?” I asked, looking at her in the mirror.

“Glinda. I’m the Good Witch of the North,” she answered solemnly.

I laughed. I turned around in my seat, facing her.

“No, I mean what’s your name when it’s not Halloween?”

“Lisa,” she replied in the same somber tone.

“And where do you live, Lisa?” I asked.

“In the blue house.”

I had it now. This wasn’t the first time that a child who didn’t normally take my bus had appeared without introduction or preamble. I just wondered how I’d missed her getting on.

“Okay, Lisa,” I said, “I’ll drop you there, but tell your parents they should have given you a note to show me, ‘cause that’s not a regular stop.”

“Okay, I’ll tell Mommy,” she assured me.

So I put the bus in gear and proceeded toward her house, about two miles ahead. In a few minutes we were there and I flipped on the amber warning lights as we slowed down, then the reds as we pulled to a stop by the side of the road.

“Here we are,” I said, opening the door with its pneumatic switch. “Have a good time tonight.” I looked in the mirror…and couldn’t see her.

Great, I thought. It’s the end of my day, I’m tired, and a kid I never saw before wants to play hide and seek.

“Lisa,” I called, getting up out of my seat. “Come on, don’t play games. I have to get back.”

She didn’t answer. I looked at the seat she had been in, but she wasn’t there. She wasn’t in the seats next to it, nor under it. I crossly got down on my knees and peered under all the seats: no Lisa!

I was beginning to get scared. Had she somehow jumped out? The roster of school bus drivers’ nightmares began to well up from my unconscious: maybe the alarm on one of the emergency doors wasn’t working (though I checked them every morning, along with all the things things bus drivers are supposed to inspect) and she’d fallen out; maybe she was somewhere back on the road, severely injured…I felt nausea stirring as I started looking wildly everywhere on the bus, about to do a three-point turn on the narrow road and drive back as fast as I could.

And then I saw the woman, on the sagging front porch of the little blue house, a young woman with blond hair, and eyes that looked a lot like Lisa’s. She was just standing there, with her arms crossed and a sad smile on her face. Lisa’s mother, I figured, numbly making my way to the entrance door of the bus while trying to find the words to tell her I had to go tearing back up the road to look for her daughter.

I stuck my head out the bus door and opened my mouth, with no clue what was going to come out of it, when she said, just loudly enough for me to hear, “You had a little girl on your bus, didn’t you? And now she’s gone.”

Dumbstruck, I just nodded. She stepped off the porch and slowly walked up the weed-choked path, stopping on the other side of the rickety wooden gate. Her voice got even quieter, but she spoke clearly and with a certain resignation, as if she had this conversation before, and expected to again.

“Lisa used to ride this bus every day,” she said, “when Hal was driving. She rode it since kindergarten. Then five years ago, when she was six, it was Halloween and she was so excited about going out to trick-or-treat that she didn’t wait for him to walk her across the road, she just ran across by herself, and just then a car came by, too fast…”

She paused.

“The driver was drunk, and wasn’t supposed to be passing the bus anyway, and he’s in jail now, but still, Lisa’s gone.” She looked at me with what seemed, strangely, like sympathy.

In a voice I didn’t recognize I asked, “Was Lisa dressed like the Good Witch from Wizard of Oz?”

She nodded. “Yes,” she said, “that was Lisa. Every year, on Halloween, she appears on the bus, wearing that same costume.” She smiled wanly. “I guess she’s trying to come home.”

I don’t remember what I said as I numbly climbed back onto the bus and drove away, with a last look at Lisa’s mother standing quietly at the gate, looking off across the road and into the distance.

I left that job soon after that, and moved down here. I didn’t tell my replacement driver about Lisa, as Hal hadn’t told me—how do you tell someone something like that?

But when anyone tells me there’s no such thing as ghosts, I tell them the story of Lisa and the Halloween school bus.