Yes, it's Halloween--what better time for a ghost story?
My sisters and I grew up in a house inhabited by a ghost. Understand, I'm not all that thrilled to have to admit to this: I like to think I'm a rationalist, and no good skeptic would cop to a belief in ghosts.
But alas for skeptical me, I have no choice in the matter: I did experience ghostly behavior, and there's nothing I can do about it.
Upstairs in our home we had a huge walk-in closet. At the back of the closet was a door to the attic. We did not like to go into the closet, and we most certainly didn't go into the attic. For it was understood that the ghost lived there.
Most of the time, if we opened the closet door, the attic door would be open--even though it had been firmly latched shut the last time we'd been in the closet. My mom would say dismissively, "Oh, a draft must have opened the door." Of course we didn't buy this; how would a draft open the latch on the door? Years later, my mom confessed that she, too, hated to go into the attic and felt the creepiness in the closet and attic. But at the time she was bent on pooh-poohing the whole ghost thing, probably so we wouldn't be frightened.
Anyone walking into the closet would have that sensation of hair standing on end, and she would be inundated with a feeling of dread. You'd feel uneasy--more than uneasy--and you'd want to get out of there as fast as possible. It was a horrid feeling, and no matter how you told yourself it was senseless and there was no basis for it, you just couldn't help the urge to flee. We didn't want to hang our skirts and shirts and dresses in the closet, for we didn't want to have to go in there at all.
One evening my sister Linn and I were sitting at the dining room table--that's where we usually did homework--and above us we heard footsteps, heavy, measured footsteps: clomp ... clomp ... clomp. I looked at Linn and said, "Did you hear that?" Wide-eyed, she nodded yes, and we heard the footsteps again. Everyone in the family was downstairs at the time.
My mom told us it was squirrels. Squirrels!!
After my dad's death, Mom sold the house, and some years later came an occasion when, as I was just getting out of the tub, Jim came in to tell me I had a phone call: "It's Shelley K____ , and she wants to know about the ghost in your mom's house." Wow! Independent corroboration!
According to Shelley, who had bought the house, it was widely known that our house was haunted. This was news to me, but she said that people she worked with who lived in the area all knew about the ghost. Someone in her family had seen the ghost--I never had--and it was a male, dressed 1800's style. I told my sister Jana about it, without describing the ghost, and she told me she'd seen the ghost once. The way she described it matched Shelley's description. Shelley had hired a psychic to investigate, and the psychic said the ghost was not malicious, but he was angry and bitter. She said he'd been a blacksmith in life. This made sense, as we knew that way back in the 1800's, the earliest version of our house, a log cabin, had been inhabited by a blacksmith (this was even before Michigan became a state).
The ghost was much more active during Shelley's inhabiting of the house. He took objects and hid them, and did other mischievous things. Jana had experienced some poltergeist-style activity when she was the only daughter living there with my folks, but what Shelley described went way beyond that: plates stolen out of the cupboard to be found later on the shelf of a second-story closet and that sort of thing.
So as much as I don't want to, I do think there are phenomena we call ghosts, and I've experienced such phenomena. I wish science would stop denying the existence of such phenomena and would spend some time figuring out how they can exist and what they are.
The ghost never did anything harmful, but I was afraid nonetheless. I guess it's the unknown: you fear what you don't know. How can you "know" a ghost? It's something uncanny, something folklore tells you is about the dead not being able to rest, and most of us fear death.
For over twenty years Jim and the kids and I lived in a house over 150 years old, and I never, ever had that sense of something creepy and uncanny. In one room there was a stain on the wallpaper that vaguely resembled a human face, and we jokingly called it "Captain George" after the Great Lakes shipping captain who had built the house. But never did we feel an actual presence as we sisters did in the house we grew up in.
So if there's a room in your house that gives you goosebumps, it's probably not just your imagination at work. It's probably that field of energy, or whatever it is, that we designate as "ghost." It's probably harmless.
Probably.
