A genuine shade of the departed - the suicide soul stealer

This evening I explained my prior experiences to the Tiger-lady and my new colleague at work put his oar in. She was none too impressed with his undoubtedly spurious accounts of so-called "ghosts". He confessed to being both paranoid and under the influence which makes his accounts both implausible and merely delusional. However, when the Tiger-lady asked me earnestly to describe the figure I saw when I was a child she replied, "This, I can believe because I have seen something similar myself when I was only young."

In Guin Lin province in China, near the Lin Hua Doung river about forty years ago this is what happened.

A storm passed over the place and Mrs. Duong was with her two siblings (a niece and and a nephew). She was the oldest and they tried to reach their family home, but the river had flooded. It was midnight and they had to got around to find a place to cross, through the fields away from the small town where they lived. Suddenly she shone the torch and saw something, an apparition, a very well dressed lady, ethereal, in pure white, with no face. When she tried to find the ghostly figure again, she could not. They continued, and there she appeared again, floating along the raging river with her right hand moving in a motion almost as if to catch the white foamy waters. Again and again she kept catching sight of the ghostly lady, but each time Mei tried to focus on her, she disappeared. Alas, they made it home safely.

Later on an elderly lady from the village told them the story of what had happened. The young lady had fallen in love with a local boy whom had broken her heart. She committed suicide in the river. A week later the nephew went to find the ghost and died instantly. "She had taken my nephew's soul" said Mrs. Duong to me, with a sincere intensity in her eyes. Sure enough, after many years had passed and Mei had been living in England, she returned to her family home. Upon her arrival a neighbour said he had seen her nephew. She could not understand this because he had been dead for years. The report was that he was by a glade near the riverside crying with his head in his hands, ethereal as the lady, again with no face and they only recognised him him through his form and gait. The shade had waited for someone to come, claimed his soul, so that she could be released from a state of limbo and eventually pass over to the other side, the afterlife.