Y’all know that one of my most favorite shows is Ghost Hunters. I’ve mentioned it before. If you haven’t seen it, you should. It’s on SciFi. Wednesday nights. I watch a lot of these ghost shows and all of them except this one are full of crap. Which doesn’t keep me from watching them. Hell, I’ll pretty much watch anything involving the following subjects: ghosts, zombies, Sasquatch, aliens (and the delusional people the swear they exist), crop circles. The most amusing ghost show is on Travel, I think. It’s bad but hilarious. It’s like slumming. Only on tv.
It’s British and the hostess (afraid of her own shadow – or maybe she’s afraid of her mascara which is so thick I do not know how she isn’t bumping into utility poles all day long) and her medium/psychic dude are ridiculous. She screams at every bump and he channels bull-shit, “I’m picking up the name….Elizabeth or Ellsbeth?” And across the bottom of the screen is a caption that reads, “Research has not turned up anyone by that name ever residing in the house.”
And there’s a new one (Ghost Adventures) in which the dumbass host gets “locked in” to various homes for the night but never analyzes his footage afterwards. WTF? He’s incredibly arrogant and wears asshole clothes (t-shirts two sizes too small with blurred out decals and those jeans with acidy white marks down the front like he’s been drying his hands off continuously on the front of his pants. After dipping them in bleach). I want to punch that guy. Repeatedly.
The GH guys, on the other hand, like to debunk. They never assume a place is haunted. Could be the place is jimmied with hoaxes (it’s happened) or there’s a serious electrical issue in the basement. They have the equipment and it takes a lot for them to agree that a shadow or a disembodied voice is a ghost or at least something they can’t explain any other way. It’s an hour or two of my week (sometimes you get back-to-back shows – SciFi often devotes Wednesday nights to GH.) well spent.
Perhaps you are an unbeliever? I am not. I’ve experienced ghosts in my life. Violet recently asked to hear my ghost stories and so I will tell them. You can take from them what you wish. I am not here to convince you, neccesarily, just to share my experiences.
I could have sworn I wrote about this before but I can’t find the post so, if you’ve heard these before, my apologies.
GHOST NUMBER ONE. This happened when I was very young. Younger than 10. I woke up very early on Easter morning, eager to go downstairs and find out what the Easter Bunny had brought me. He always hid eggs in addition to a basket full of malted milk eggs and chocolate. The Bunny, he was good to me. But my parents told me it was too early. I’d have to wait. So, I sat in my room on the floor – I had hardwood floors, old and in serious need of refinishing, and a small mint green area rug – and played with a toy or something. I lived in my head, much as Red does, so occupying myself was never a problem. But I really wanted that candy.
Pretty soon, I heard something walking on the roof. Now, our house was old with a strange roof that had a high, almost false, pitch in the front that gave the impression of a third floor. But it flattened out in the back. My room was in the back. We had only a crawlspace attic and that had nothing but insulation. No floor.
I heard heavy work boots pacing up and back, up and back on the roof or in the attic. Now, it was a Sunday morning. Easter morning. If there’d been someone on the roof doing god know’s what, I’m sure my parents would have known about it. I had a small balcony off my room that looked out on the backyard. I peeked out and saw nothing. There was no one up there that I could see. The pacing stopped as quickly as it started.
Call it a ghost or a rogue chimney sweep, I don’t know (our fireplaces hadn’t been in use in decades). But I was pretty sure it was the former. Dusty thinks it’s the ghost of one of the workers that built the house in 1906. Could be. She’s smarter about most things than I am.
GHOST NUMBER TWO – It was 1987 or thereabouts. I was living in a studio apartment alone. I’d shared it with a boyfriend I’d broken up with recently and since my name was on the lease, I got to keep the apt. All 500 square feet of it.
The room had a loft bed in it but for whatever reason, I was sleeping on the twin mattress on the floor that I’d turned into a sofa/daybed type thing. I was living the bohemian life, let me tell you. Or the life one lives when 80% of their income is spent on rent.
Anyway, I was on the mattress, reading a book (and full disclosure: I was reading a book of ghost stories). I heard a noise. It wasn’t George, my cat. He was asleep at my side. Cats aren’t supposed to notice ghosts. I think dogs have that ability and I didn’t have a dog to alert me to what happened next.
I looked up at the doorway between the main room and the narrow foyer. There was a distinct and unwavering grey shadowy sillouette of a Civil War era woman. Full skirt, tiny waist, hair up. I was a little freaked out. It didn’t move. It was almost like a projection on a screen. Eventually I told her to go away and it did. Just like that. That particular area of town was mostly farm land during the war but it’s still possible that someone had lived in that spot long, long ago. Or, maybe my overactive imagination put her there. Who knows?
GHOST NUMBER THREE – Before we were married, and slightly afterward, my husband and I lived in an apartment that was the third story of a large stately house on a broad stately famous boulevard in the city. It’s where all the statues of dead Civil War generals reside. We were mere blocks from General Lee and his steed.
Our apartment had most likely originally been the servants quarters or the nursery or both. The front room (our bedroom) overlooked the street. It was ridiculously large for a bedroom but it was at the “back” of the apartment. The hallway, with a back stair case, had been turned into a small galley kitchen with a very generous pantry (former linen closet for a wealthy family with lots of linens). I loved that pantry and miss it to this day. Then, you had the tiny living room and bathroom in the front. You entered the apt up a separate set of stairs from the back yard and found yourself smack bang in the living room. The doorway was narrow but we had very little furniture then so it worked.
Trouble was, when you had to pee in the middle of the night, you had to run through the whole apartment. Trouble with that was, there was an angry presence living in the stairwell. Very angry. Every night, I’d wake up and have to pee but I’d wrestle with it because I didn’t want to have to pass by THE THING in the stairwell. It gave off waves of hatred. Not necessarily directed at me but it was there and it was scary. I never felt it at any other time except the middle of the night. I’d dash from the bedroom into the bathroom and back again absolutely sure that one of those nights, a hand would grab me by the neck and pull me down into the staircase.
My theory (and yes, I think a lot about these things) was that someone had been pushed down those stairs at some point in the history of the house and died. A nanny or a child, I don’t know. I’ve never done any research on the place but that’s the conclusion I came to based on nothing but that ball of anger that lived down there in the stairwell.
Sadly, since we moved from that place, I’ve not lived anywhere else with ghosts. The house I live in now is not very old and has a dull history. Nothing stirs at night except the hamsters on their wheel. Or Red who usually finds her way to my bed at some point in the wee hours. But someday, I’d like to live somewhere old again. A place with a history and a little…presence of some kind.
Life in Scribbletown 