Does Rosie the Riveter have a doppelganger at Seaboard Station?
I needed a part to fix our broken dishwasher so I drove over to Seaboard Ace Friday morning before work. On my way out of the store, I spotted an African American woman slowly walking toward me from the north in the parking lot. I did not want to keep her waiting as I backed out of the space so I wasted no time in getting going. Sure I was out of her way, I headed towards the lot’s exit. In the time it took me to reach the stop sign in front of Logan’s Trading Company the woman had somehow made it into the next parking lot, where the Phydeaux store used to be.
I was stunned. I was sure I backed out of the space before this woman could’ve reached my car, and somehow she had beaten my car to the stop sign? How?
Not wanting to seem like I was stalking her, I continued left to Halifax Street, then turned right to go back down the little one-way alley between Phydeaux and 18 Seaboard. The woman was still in the Phydeaux parking lot, this time slowly walking west.
Just to make sure I hadn’t mistaken the woman for another one dressed similarly, I drove back down in front of the hardware store. No other similarly-dressed women were around. I turned around just past Peace China and headed back towards the woman.
This time when I reached the Phydeaux parking lot the woman was gone. I drove the counterclockwise loop from Logan’s back to the one-way alley but could not find her.
I still couldn’t believe what I had just seen. How did this slow-walking woman suddenly leap ahead of me? And where had she gone? What had just happened here!?
Not sure what I had just seen, I later emailed the hardware store owner (an acquaintance of mine), asking if he may have captured video of the encounter. Unfortunately, his cameras pointed the wrong way. How else could I rule things out, I wondered.
I had to make another trip to the hardware store this afternoon and took the opportunity to time how long it would take for the woman to travel that distance. At my usual, typically brisk pace it took me 80 seconds. I then tried driving it the way I did yesterday. Even though I had to wait a moment when some rude driver insisted on passing me while I backed out, I still made it to the stop sign in 48 seconds.
I should have beaten the woman to the intersection by roughly half a minute, give or take. That’s a long time. If it were a race it would have been no contest.
I never saw her cross behind my car as I was backing up (remember my goal was to get out before she reached me). If she had opted to take the sidewalk instead of the lot this almost certainly would have added 5-10 seconds to her trip as she navigated the steps. So that’s unlikely.
Then I recalled my coworkers’ stories of ghosts that hung around the nearby, century-old Pilot Mill offices where I work. Pilot Mill and Seaboard Station have been around for many decades and might be unsurprising places to find ghosts. Was this a ghost I had seen?
Both times I saw her she looked like any person would. She was a medium-complexioned African American woman, stocky build, who wore a long blue denim dress, dark-rimmed glasses, and had a headcovering, perhaps a blue handkerchief. She was moving somewhat slowly, hobbling really, and did not at all seem like anyone capable of sprinting ahead of me even if she had wanted to. Her clothes were a little homely but not entirely out of place. They looked like work clothes, and could have been in style from 80 years ago to today. Rosie the Riveter comes to mind.
Was “Rosie” a ghost? If not, how the hell did she make it to the next parking lot so astonishingly fast? And without me seeing her? I can think of few rational explanations. The world is a strange place indeed.