Columnist Susan Snyder: She can’t give up the ghost

Tuesday, Oct. 31, 2000 | 9:17 a.m.

Susan Snyder's column appears Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach her at snyder@lasvegassun.com or 259-4082.

Gloria Blair believes in ghosts.

Or rather, one ghost. That's the one she's seen. The one her husband accidentally photographed. The one who talks to her through a close friend. The one, she says, that is her father.

"I've heard ghost stories and stuff. I was a skeptic. I thought, 'Yeah, riiight,' " the 51-year-old Las Vegas woman said.

All that changed in 1997, when an apparition Blair swears was her long-dead father appeared in the living room of her Oregon home.

Blair and her husband had just moved to Oakridge, Ore., that summer. She said she went into the grocery store shortly after moving in and hit it off with a woman named Maria, who worked at the butcher counter.

She invited Maria over to talk the next afternoon, hoping she'd found a new friend. The pair sat facing each other at the kitchen table. Blair's back was to the living room.

"As we were talking, Maria was making strange faces, and her eyes were getting larger," Blair recalled. "I turned to see what she was looking at. I saw only a side view of a person. He just appeared there."

Blair didn't see his face, but Maria told her that she had. Blair shrugged it off. But Maria called her the next morning saying the man had appeared to her a second time in a dream. Blair showed her new friend a photograph with three men in it. Maria pointed to one of them and said it was the man she saw.

"I said, 'That is my father. He's been dead for 12 years,' " Blair recalled.

Talk about the willies.

Blair says her father has appeared many times since then, but he only speaks to Maria. Blair says it's because he thinks it would be too traumatic for her. The messages still come, even though Maria lives in Washington state now, and Blair has moved back to Las Vegas.

Blair doesn't tell many about her experiences. But for those who doubt her, she has a photograph that she believes shows the ghost in all his glory. Her husband shot it in 1998 in the back yard of the winter house they used to have in Hawaii.

Blair says her husband shot some photos of a small concrete pagoda and the landscaping to show Blair's grown children in Las Vegas. He took the pictures three days after Blair said she sat in the yard and asked her father for some kind of sign that he was still in her life. She hadn't heard from him in months.

"When we got the pictures back, there it was," she said.

"It" is an oblong splotch of bright light. There is no face, but there is a head-shaped blob at the top if you look at it with an open mind.

OK, so I thought the same stuff you're probably thinking right now. So I showed the picture to a photographer. He says it could have been water on the lens. Or maybe lint or a smudge.

"Or it could be a ghost," he added.

He was kidding. But Blair isn't. She says her father has talked about life on the other side. Beings are without race, age or animosity. They get to see others whose lives they shared in this world, and people live more than one of those, she says.

"It's fascinating," Blair says. "We're all a part of everything together, whether we like it or not."

And that's enough to scare anybody, even if the ghost story doesn't.