HbH 002: The Woman Under the Pool

Haunted by Her: Sapphic Paranormal Case Files Presented by Gillian Crowe I collect stories from women who insist something impossible has found them. Some come with photographs. Some come with security footage, strange audio, damaged files, or the kind of testimony people only give after they have already tried very hard not to believe themselves. I do not ask you to accept every claim as fact. I only ask that, for a few minutes, you listen the way I listened: carefully, patiently, and with room for the possibility that some hauntings do not arrive to frighten us. Some arrive because they have chosen someone. This is one of those cases. Case 002 — The Woman Under the Pool The first time Maribel Santos saw the woman beneath the water, the swimming pool was supposed to be empty. The community center had closed two hours earlier. The lights were off except for the emergency strips along the tiled walls. The surface of the pool was still, dark, and flat enough to reflect the ceiling beams above it. Then something moved underneath. Maribel insists it was not a swimmer, not a reflection, and not a trick of the overhead light. “It looked like a woman was standing on the bottom of the deep end,” she told me. “Not floating. Standing. Looking straight up at me.” By the time she unlocked the office door and ran for the night manager, the water was smooth again. There were no wet footprints. No open doors. No one else in the building. But the security camera had captured one still from the far corner of the pool room. And in that image, something pale can be seen beneath the water. Something shaped like a woman. Maribel Santos, 36, works as an evening custodian at the Briar Glen Community Center, a low brick building attached to a closed public pool, a basketball court, and a few meeting rooms rented out for local events. She is practical, direct, and not someone who seemed eager to be believed. During our interview, she laughed several times before answering, not because she found the experience funny, but because she seemed embarrassed by how frightened she still was. “I clean bathrooms for a living,” she said. “I unclog drains, scrape gum off floors, chase raccoons out of trash rooms. I’m not delicate. But I will not go into that pool room alone anymore.” The Briar Glen pool is not abandoned, but it feels older than it is. The paint flakes near the vents. The deep end has a dark blue stain that never fully comes out. The tiles echo every footstep twice. According to Maribel, the room has always felt strangely separated from the rest of the building, as though sound enters it differently. Her first unsettling experience happened three months before she ever saw the figure. She was mopping near the locker rooms when she heard a woman singing. Not loudly. Not clearly. Just a soft humming from inside the pool area. At first, Maribel assumed one of the swim instructors had forgotten something and returned after hours. She opened the pool door and called out. The humming stopped. The water was completely still. For several weeks, Maribel heard the same humming whenever she cleaned the locker room corridor after closing. It was always female. Always distant. Always coming from somewhere near the water. She told herself it was pipes. Old vents. A phone left playing music in someone’s locker. Then she began noticing the smell. Not chlorine. Not mildew. Lavender. “It made no sense,” she told me. “The whole building smells like bleach and old towels. But right near the deep end, sometimes it smelled like lavender soap. Like someone had just showered.” The first visual sighting happened on October 7 at 10:42 p.m. Maribel had entered the pool room to collect trash from the spectator benches. She says the water was motionless when she came in. Halfway across the room, she heard the humming again, closer this time. Then the surface of the deep end broke in a perfect circle, as though someone beneath the pool had exhaled. She stepped closer. That was when she saw the figure below the water: a pale woman with dark hair spreading around her shoulders, standing upright on the pool floor. Maribel remembers one detail more clearly than anything else. “She had her hand lifted,” she said. “Like she was touching the underside of the water.” Maribel ran. The night manager searched the room less than two minutes later and found nothing. The exterior doors were locked. The pool cover was still rolled against the wall. No towels were missing. No wet trail led anywhere. But later that night, the security system logged motion near the deep end. One still image was saved. The activity did not stop after Maribel reported the sighting. It became more direct. On October 11, she found a wet handprint on the inside of the women’s locker room mirror. The print was small and narrow, as if made by a woman’s hand. Below it, written in a dripping line of moisture, was a shape Maribel first thought was a letter. An L. Or maybe a 7. By the time she brought another employee to see it, the mirror had dried. On October 14, the pool camera captured a sequence of stills from the deep end. In the first frame, taken at 10:44:05 p.m., the water appears undisturbed except for faint ripples. In the second, at 10:44:10 p.m., a pale shape can be seen beneath the surface. In the third, at 10:44:15 p.m., the shape is clearer — unmistakably human in outline, like a woman standing under the water and looking upward. The fourth frame, timestamped 10:44:20 p.m., is not an image of the pool at all. Instead, it appears as a corrupted still: black static, digital noise, and horizontal glitch bands tearing across the frame. The timestamp itself is broken, as though the camera failed at the exact moment it should have captured whatever came next. Maribel finds that missing image harder to accept than the others. “That last frame is the part I think about,” she told me. “Not because I saw it — because I didn’t. Something happened there, and whatever it was, the camera didn’t keep it.” By the end of the month, Maribel began dreaming of a woman in a white swim cap standing at the bottom of the pool. In the dream, the woman never moved her mouth, but Maribel still understood one sentence: You heard me. Gillian Crowe: You told me the figure did not feel like a normal apparition. What did you mean by that? Maribel Santos: “Because she wasn’t in the room. She was in the pool. Like the pool was her room.” Gillian Crowe: Did she seem aware of you? Maribel: “Yes. Completely. That was the worst part. She wasn’t just there. She knew I was there.” Gillian Crowe: Did you feel threatened? Maribel: “At first, yes. I mean, what else do you feel when you see a dead woman underwater? But then… I don’t know. It changed.” Gillian Crowe: Changed how? Maribel: “It started to feel like she was trying to show me something. Like she had been waiting for someone to look long enough.” Gillian Crowe: Why do you think she targeted you? Maribel: “Maybe because I was always the last woman in the building. Maybe because I heard her. Maybe because I didn’t laugh it off the first time.” Gillian Crowe: You said something earlier that stayed with me. You said the presence felt feminine, but not fragile. Maribel: “Yes. That’s right. She felt sad. But she did not feel weak.” The material Maribel provided is limited but consistent. The strongest items are: one exterior night photograph of the community center pool entrance one still image from the pool security camera on October 7 a three-frame sequence from October 14 showing movement beneath the deep end a phone photo of the locker room mirror taken after the alleged wet handprint had already begun to fade Maribel’s interview, recorded in the center office after closing None of these pieces proves a haunting. Together, they create a pattern. Water movement after hours. Female humming. Lavender scent. A repeated figure below the surface. Missing camera frames. Dreams that began only after the sightings. That is the strange thing about cases like this. They rarely arrive as proof. They arrive as accumulation. One odd thing becomes three. Three becomes seven. Then the witness is no longer asking whether something happened. She is asking why it chose her. There are several possible explanations for Maribel’s experience. Indoor pools are strange acoustic environments. Sound can travel in misleading ways through vents, pipes, pump systems, and tiled corridors. What she heard as humming may have been mechanical vibration or distant music distorted by echo. The figure beneath the water is harder to assess. A low-light security camera filming reflective water can produce unusual shapes from glare, surface movement, lens distortion, and compression artifacts. A pale reflection from the wall or ceiling could appear to be below the surface when it was not. The lavender scent may have come from cleaning products, soap residue, or a forgotten gym bag. The missing still could be nothing more than a camera fault. Maribel knows all of that. She also knows what she saw. “I’m not asking anyone to believe me,” she said. “I’m just telling you I don’t go near the deep end anymore. And when I hear humming, I leave.” Two weeks after our interview, Maribel sent me one final message. It contained no greeting and no explanation. Just a photograph. The image showed the deep end of the Briar Glen pool in daylight, taken from the spectator benches. The water was bright, clean, and calm. At first glance, there was nothing unusual in it. Then I noticed the tiled floor beneath the surface. Someone had arranged several black lane-marker tiles into a crooked shape near the bottom of the pool. A letter. Not L. Not 7. A G. Maribel’s message underneath read: “She knows your name now.” Case Status Unresolved I cannot prove what happened here. The evidence can be questioned. The witness can be doubted. The darkness can make liars of cameras and memory alike. But something changed the woman at the center of this case. For now, it remains unresolved. — Gillian Crowe