This afternoon I was in the living room and looked up to see our cat Chet coming around the corner to sniff at our new cat’s scratching pad.
Odd thing is, Chet died last year.
Category: ghosts
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alarm
Last night at 3AM the alarm clock on my wife’s nightstand went off, without any cause or reason.
My wife never uses the clock for anything other than to tell time. It’s been sitting there for years. No one had been in our room, no one had any reason to fiddle with it or set an alarm… but it went off in the middle of the night.
All by itself.
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hereditary
Sitting at the dinner table, my daughter suddenly turns and looks over her shoulder.
“What’s wrong?”
She turns back around. “That was weird,” she says. “I heard someone say ‘Yeah’ behind me.”
We go on with our dinner and I make a mental note to talk with my wife.
We’re starting to see more activity around the house. There’s a little bell in my head ringing, signaling that our daughter might become the focus for it.
I also can’t help wondering if, somehow, this is inevitable for her. If this thing I’ve carried for so long might turn out to be hereditary.
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my phone buzzes
Message from my wife this morning…
Just another day at The Last House.
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rush
As I’m setting up the ironing board, something rushes towards me from the living room… low and broad and dark, like a wall of shadow.
I do not flinch.
It breaks around me like a wave around a rock, dissipates into streamers of fading black and gray… and then is gone.
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a voice on the wind
Coming home late tonight, long after midnight…
As I was walking up the driveway, a few stray flurries of snow in the air around me…
I stopped.
A voice, far off . . . one word, harsh and cold and drawn out breathless like the frigid night air.
My name.
Not my real name. The name I grew up with, what I was born with. The name no one calls me anymore.
I wait, listening.
Nothing.
Fair enough, I think to myself as I head inside. You can get back to me when you’re ready.
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daylight come and me wanna go home
Sitting alone in the couch tonight, I slowly realize that I can hear someone singing.
Somewhere in the house, a man is singing.
It has a muted quality, as though it is coming from very far away.
I stand for a moment and listen.
I recognize it. The clear voice, the calypso intonation is unmistakeable.
Someone is listening to Harry Belafonte, somewhere.
But, of course, no one in the house is listening to Harry Belafonte, not tonight.
And yet, there it is.
After a few minutes, the music fades.
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morse
We awake to a burst of static from the baby monitor. This is not uncommon. It seems like almost anything can set it off, if we don’t put the damn thing in just the right spot.
I reach over and shift the monitor on the nightstand, hoping to move it out of whatever signal is causing the disruption. The noise subsides and I lay back.
The room is dark. I run through the usual late-night fears and paranoia in my head: Home invasion, ghosts, something worse than either of those…
It occurs to me that the static had structure, a vaguely familiar rhythm.
Not musical. Not a heartbeat. I can’t quite place it.
I’m just about asleep when it screeches again.
That rhythm. I recognize it now.
Three short bursts. Three long bursts. Three short bursts.
I grab the monitor and head downstairs. I won’t be sleeping anymore tonight.
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music again
In my office tonight, getting ready to sit down and write… I stop.
Music. Unmistakeable.
Somewhere, someone is playing music.
The house is asleep. I’m the only one awake.
Yet there it is. Unmistakeable.
I go out and stand on the front porch, just in case it’s a neighbor.
Nothing.
Back inside, the house is quiet.
I stand in my office, head cocked… waiting.
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forearms
Napping this afternoon on the couch, I dream…
…we’re sitting at the dining room table, my wife and I.
I hear someone call “Tom” from the back hallway. I turn to see something there, down at the bottom of the steps — small and pale, almost like a child.
“Don’t look!” my wife says just as it rushes up towards me…
…awaken with a gasp, lying on the couch with my arms across on my chest.
I cannot open my eyes. I cannot breathe. I cannot move.
Something is holding it’s hands on my forearms, pressing me down.
My breath hisses out between my bared teeth. Little gasps push out of me. I can hear myself whimpering as I struggle to rise, to open my eyes, to speak the name of my God.
Panic. I can feel my body shaking with the effort to move, those hands holding me down . . . something over me, drawing the breath out of me in long, hissing strands.
Finally I manage one word: “Ssssssssasssssstop.”
Immediately, the pressure on my arms lightens and I sit up and open my eyes.
Alone in the room.
Even now, writing this, my shoulders and forearms ache as though I’d been carrying a great weight.
And I can still hear that hissing whimper in my ears. It sounds a little bit like laughter.
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switch
Sitting in my office this afternoon, working.
A few moments ago I heard the distinctive sound of the light switch in the back hallway snapping on.
A few moments later I heard it snap off.
My wife and youngest daughter are napping upstairs.
Before I heard the light switch, it was quiet and peaceful. No telltale sounds of someone coming up or down the back stairs.
For all intents and purposes, I’m the only one down here.
But, I suppose, I might not be alone.
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bathtime again
Downstairs, I run a bath for my daughter. I kneel down to check the water.
When I rise, the old woman is standing in the doorway. She is hunched over, watching me.
“Fuck.”
And then she’s gone.
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light
In the house behind ours, the light in the high attic window keeps turning on and then off again every few minutes.
Disconcerting.
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in the bathtub
“What’s a haunted house?”My daughter is four years old and, a few days before Halloween, she’s decided to start asking questions.
I wring out the washcloth, buying time. We don’t talk about these kinds of things around her. She has a couple of picture books, but…
“What honey?”
“What’s a haunted house?”
“Well . . . that’s a house where ghosts live.”
For a minute I think I might have dodged the real question.
Nope…
“And what’s a ghost?”
“Well…”
That’s not so easy to answer.
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a fall
When I get home after work, my youngest daughter meets me at the door. I’m late and phoned ahead to say they should start dinner without me.
A plate of half-eaten food waits at my wife’s place at the same able. But she is nowhere to be seen.
“Mama went upstairs,” our daughter tells me.
After a few minutes, my wife comes downstairs. She takes me aside.
“Just before you came home, there was this huge crash from upstairs. But it wasn’t like the knocking from before. It was like someone just dumped an armful of books onto the floor right overhead. And it was fucking loud. ”
She is rattled, just a bit. I wait for her to go on.
“I went up and Vincent” — that’s one of our cats — “Was sitting on our bed, frozen. His eyes were fucking huge.”
She couldn’t find anything out of place in our room, nothing to explain the noise.
I go up to check and, yeah, there’s nothing.
Later, she notices that a framed photo on a high shelf behind our bed is laying flat on its face.
It’s a photo of the two of us.
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hard knocks
My daughter an I are in my office when my wife calls from the TV room. I hear her but it doesn’t register until she calls again, a rising note of alarm in her voice.
“What’s wrong?”
She is pale, intense. I can’t tell if she’s angry or something else.
“I just heard…”
She stops, starts again.
“Someone just knocked on the ceiling in the family room.”
She looks at me, eyes wide. “It was like this: Bang bang bang… Bang bang… Bang bang bang. It was someone knocking on the floor of our room. Fucking loud.”
I head upstairs. One of the cats is sitting on our bed. He starts when I come into the room, but he doesn’t move.
There’s a little alcove off of our bedroom, directly above the TV room on the ground floor. My wife has an antique desk and vanity in the alcove. There are photos and mementos on the window sill. A large green crystal hangs from the archway leading into the alcove.
Even still, I have never liked that part of the room. It unsettles me, open like that. When I come to bed each night, I have to resist giving any of my imagination to the mental image of who or what might be standing there waiting in the dark.
While the cat watches, I look around. There’s nothing on the floor, nothing fell.
Nothing to explain the insistent, deliberate knocking my wife heard.
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shimmer
“There was something in the back hallway,” my wife tells me over dinner. “I saw it right before we were leaving.”“What did you see?”
She thinks for a moment. “It was a blur in the air, almost shimmering. Just a movement…”
Gooseflesh on my arms, the back of my neck. “That’s interesting you say that.”
“Why?”
“Tell me what else you saw. What color was it?”
“A gray-blue, a movement like…” She mimes someone passing a hand over their head. “Like someone was throwing a hood over themselves.”
I nod, even though it’s not quite a match with what I saw the previous night.
I tell her that when I was down in the basement, just as I was closing the door, something walked towards me… A shimmer in the air, like a heat mirage.
Mine was brighter, nearly transparent, almost gold.
It was there, then it was gone.
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passing by
In the upstairs bathroom, I stand and wait for my youngest daughter to finish.My back is to the door. Given my history, that’s uncommon.
As I help her down off the toilet, I catch a glimpse of someone passing behind me — walking through the hallway just beyond the door. I assume it’s my teenage daughter coming out of her room to head downstairs.
But the hair was too dark, too long. And she did not stop to say goodnight to her sister.
And there was something cold in her manner.
While my wife puts our toddler to bed, I go downstairs. My middle daughter is there on the couch.
“Have you been down here this whole time?” I ask, already knowing the answer.
“Yeah, why?”
I shrug. “Just wondering” I reply . . . though I am not really wondering.
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morning visitation
…and as I open the door leading from my office to the front of the house, I see a pale shape, not much more than the impression of a white dress moving through the light coming in the windows.
It flows from right to left.
I stop. I blink.
It is gone.
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stench again
That smell again. A warm, yellow smell of rotting fish.
My youngest daughter and I are in the back hallway when it drifts past. It almost seems to stop and turn back, encircling us for a moment.
I look down and see that my daughter has wrinkled her nose.
After a moment, the stench dissipates.
I can find nothing that might’ve been the source. -
a sad girl
…lying in bed this morning, I woke to the sound of the bedroom door opening.
I hear my wife slowly close the door behind her. I hear her footsteps on the floorboards, approaching my side of the bed.
I cannot move, cannot open my eyes.
I feel a fingertip on my arm, just inside the hinge of my elbow.
The footsteps move away. I struggle to rise, to grasp the her arm but my hand feels strange, tingling in the air where I reach for her, a moment’s resistance . . . then the woman pulls away and walks into a little alcove on the other side of the room.
The woman is gone. It was not my wife. It was someone else, someone younger — her hair was longer, darker — and she had long scratches or cuts down her arms. And she was sad.
I cannot confidently say whether or not this was a dream.
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bath time
“Will you check the tub in a minute?”
My wife comes into the room, a little cross. We are getting our daughter ready for bed.
“What’s wrong?”
“There was almost no water in the tub and it was cold.”
“Really?”
She repeats this again. Unspoken is the rebuke — or, perhaps, the fear — that something odd has happened.
It was full, I know. And warm. I checked it myself just a few minutes earlier.
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ghost weather
Early summer afternoon. Overcast skies.
Waiting for storms.
The house is gray. Quiet.
Pale light from outside, dim within. The air still, dead.
Every room feels empty and full at the same time. An unseen crowd gathers.
Something around every corner.
Watchful. Waiting.
Patient.
