January Poems #16: Haunted House Dream #2

I've encountered ghosts in real life (most benign, some not so much), but more often in dreams, where the undead (spirits or zombies, choose your flavor) like to play with alarming frequency. This is one such dream. (And for the curious--yes, there is a "Haunted House Dream #1," but I have no idea where it is as the moment--at the bottom of some storage container in La Casa del Terror, I'll wager.)

A female friend (whom I don't really
recall as being someone in my life,
now or not) gives me a tour of her
new apartment, which is on the first
floor of what had, at one time, been
the house of a prominent Chicago
family. The house is reputed to be
haunted, presumably by the ghost
of a servant girl who'd died on
the grounds, which include a garden
with large, square concrete steps. As
we move from room to room, I'm
surprised that I don't feel any sort of
presence, either good or bad.
We step outside to have a look
at the garden,but are interrupted in
our tracks when the screen door
suddenly flies open and we are
pushed aside--not violently, but
as if by someone in a great hurry.
We're startled, of course, but that
becomes fascination when we
see the fleeing figure of a young
redheaded woman, skin porcelain,
dressed in a kimono rushing through
the garden. We follow. She literally
bounds down the concrete steps,
arcing high into the air with each step.
We presume her to be the spirit
of the dead servant and her kimono
to have been borrowed (stolen?) from
her mistress (for a rendezvouz with a
lover?). The redheaded young woman
reaches the final step, bounces higher
than ever before, and plummets below
the step to some sort of empty
concrete pond or swimming pool,
screaming horrifically all the way
down. We recoil, but not enough.
The young woman rises, floating on
a tarp, lying on her side, the red of
her hair had been replaced by
another shade entirely. We turn, only
to find a display set up by some
enterprising ghost hunter, detailing
the haunting and the young servant's
demise, including a replica of the tarp
on which her bloodied body had been
dragged from the premises. Behind us,
the dead woman still floated, screaming.