Near every night for the entirety of summer, an Auburn woman named Jen has been visited by a ghost.

The ghost comes gliding down the sleepy sidewalk in the wee hours, a slender waif in a white evening gown that flows out behind her.

Sometimes the ghost stops to stare up at Jen’s house, her eyes glowing silver in the glare of security lights.

Other nights, the apparition skips up Jen’s driveway, moving briefly away from the eye of the security camera that has captured her spooky image for so many months.

It is unsettling for Jen, this swift moving phantasm that seems fixated on Jen’s cozy home in the blackest hours of night.

“It’s like something right out of a horror movie,” Jen said.

But then one dark night not long ago, this revenant in white made the leap from curious apparition to something substantially more sinister.

On that night in early September, the ghost came inside.

“She broke into my home at 2 o’clock in the morning while me and my daughter were sleeping,” says Jen.

Jen awoke on the couch, that frightening morning, to find the woman standing over her and just … staring.

It’s the kind of scene we’ve all watched unfold dozens of times in a variety of horror movies, and lets make no bones about it: It could have ended worse.

“I convinced her to go into another room,” Jen said, “so I was able to get into my daughter’s room and tell her to call 911 and hide.”

And when all this happened, Jen didn’t call for a merry band of ghost busters or a exorcist with a fist full of rosary beads. She called police and hoped that the machinery of the legal system would take over.

Because as you’ve no doubt deduced by now, the figure in white wasn’t a ghost from the realm of spirits, but a wandering young woman, estimated to be in her late 30s, with significant mental health problems.

And as a result of that revelation, our ghost story turns from spooky and unnerving to just plain sad.

Yet still unnerving.

As it happens, the woman in the evening gown, much like a ghost in the old Gothic novels, is a troubled lass who wanders in search of her beloved who departed long ago.

“She believes that her husband is not dead,” Jen explained. “And that myself and the Auburn Police Department have helped fake his death.”

Jen has been unsettled by her strange, roaming neighbor for many months. She is annoyed and frustrated and ready to beat her head against the wall.

But it’s not exclusively the nocturnal activities of the lady in white that vex her. Mostly, Jen saves her anger and hostility for a system she feels has failed them all.

Because whenever Jen or one of her neighbors calls to report the strange woman wandering in their driveways or their backyards, it’s the same old story.

“She gets taken to St. Mary’s,” Jens said. “She’s released in two days and then she can do absolutely whatever she wants until she gets to this point again.”

Stealing into Jen’s home in such a troubling fashion earlier this month merely got the woman charged with criminal trespass. She was taken to St. Mary’s Regional Medical Center for psychiatric observation once again and then released a week or so later.

For Jen, who has mustered plenty of sympathy for the woman in the past, waking up to find the lass standing over her in the dark of night was a bridge too far.

“I definitely have some sympathy for her,” Jen said, “but she violated my home and took away the feeling of comfort for me and my daughter.”

In the past, the woman in white has made remarks to the effect that anyone she discovered to be hiding her dead husband would pay, Jen said.

“So I feel like extremely lucky,” Jen said, “that she did not come in my home and kill me in my sleep.”

So now when she lays her head down at night, Jen finds that sleep is hard to come by. She keeps a wary eye on her security cameras. She checks and then re-checks all the doors and windows to make sure they are locked down tight.

She does this night after night because no matter how many times the police intervene, the woman next door is free to wander.

“I’m the one who has to run in circles to make sure we’re not harmed,” Jen said. “And that’s not OK.”

Prior to the night that Jen awoke to find the woman standing over her, she called police five times to report suspicious behavior. Erratic behavior, is how Jen described it. And escalating by the day.

She warned everybody that something bad was going to happen if this troubled soul was left free and untreated.

“I tried to be the nice neighbor and say she needed help,” Jen said. “They said she was not bad enough to be put into protective custody even though she had jumped off of the Longley Bridge a week before.”

Jen doesn’t blame police for all of this. They have responded and responded promptly to her warnings. But as we’ve seen before, the system that is meant to help the mentally troubled — and by extension, to protect the rest of us — is badly flawed.

We saw it in October 2023 when a madman went on two deadly shooting sprees in Lewiston. That man had been troubled for a long time, as it turns out, and yet on Oct. 25 of that year, he was free to open fire in Lewiston, killing 18 and wounding many others.

We saw it on Thanksgiving Day in 2022 when a 34-year-old named Justin Butterfield butchered his brother in Poland in the mad belief that he was battling evil. For four years, Butterfield’s friends and family had been begging mental health workers to treat the man and to keep him away from the public.

Nobody is suggesting that Jen’s troubled neighbor is on her way to doing anything as heinous as all that.

But let’s face it. A troubled woman who has escalated to the point of entering another person’s home in the middle of the night is a potential danger to herself and to others. There have been plenty of warnings that something is woefully wrong with the wandering woman and yet the mental health system just keeps sending her home.

“It’s definitely the system that is failing,” Jen said.

Again, she might have added.

The system is failing again.

In the end, Jen is doing what all of those poor saps in so many horror movies should have done at the first substantial sign of ghostly trouble.

Jen is packing her bags and moving.