MLS True Ghost Stories: Remembering The Dead on All Hallows Eve

I was going to tell you all about the time when my family was sitting at the kitchen table at lunchtime, and we heard someone fall down the staircase, hit the wall, and land in the vestibule right by the front door.  We searched the house inside and out, didn't find a person nor a tree limb nor anything else that could have made the whole house shake as it did.  But that's all the story there's to tell and though it was frightening to me at the time, in retrospect, it's just another spook story.

Instead I have been compelled to tell you about a different kind of ghost story.  It's about the ghosts that lurk quietly, not to scare us, but, perhaps to watch us and help us not to get into any more trouble than we already get into all by our lonesomes.

For instance, when in the late 90's my sister called me from Italy to tell me that my grandmother had passed away, I already knew.  That night I had been sleeping soundly, when something in my dream shifted abruptly.  I felt my grandmother entering my dream with such vividness that the emotion I felt in seeing her sucked me awake. I asked my sister what time my grandmother had passed away, but even before she confirmed my suspicions, I already knew.

She visited a couple of times since then, too.  I cannot mistake the smell of my dear grandmother, that mix between cigarette smoke and chef's soap.  When she's around, I say hello to her in my head.  I imagine she's always surprised that I know she's come.

I've also had some other lucky visitations. The most vivid of them was when I was 8 or 9 years old and I'd gotten lost on a mountaintop during a snow storm during ski camp.  The lifts had closed down but my brother and I had got stuck on the top of the mountain, and there was no way to get to safety but on skis. An instructor had tried to help us out, but my brother was so small that the wind kept sucking him up, so the instructor tucked him between his legs and propped him on top of his own skies.  That was enough of a balancing act that he didn't look back to see if I was following, and he didn't notice that, though I was bigger than my brother, the wind was slowing me down.  Pretty soon my brother and the man disappeared into the mist and snow, out of my sight, and shortly after that, their voices were too faint to hear. There was nothing but ravines around me and trees ahead of me. I didn't know the way.

I was talking to myself, saying something like, "God, I'm going to die," mewling and thinking of all the stuff I'd seen on the news of people getting lost on mountains and freezing to death, when I heard a calm, friendly voice behind me, a man who asked me if I needed help.  I was a little embarrassed to have been caught talking to myself and I barely nodded. He told me to take off my goggles and slipped them in the pocket of his ski jacket, but I never actually saw this man above the waist. I never looked up to see his face.  He led me down the mountain and shielded me from the strong gusts of wind, and when we got down to the shelter he helped me take off my skies, then asked me if I wanted some hot chocolate. Still without looking at him I nodded yes.  He led me inside the chateau and stepped into the crowd.

The moment he did, I heard my father's voice behind me: "Where have you been?"

I told my father everything.

"Where are your googles?" my father wanted to know.

I pointed to the crowd where I thought I might recognize the man who had gone to buy me a cup of hot chocolate, who still had my ski googles in his pocket, but I realized I didn't know him.  He could have been anyone. We waited and waited, but the man never came back.

Was he a ghost? A dream? An angel?

Does it matter?

One time as I was driving on a highway towards work, I got sandwiched between a slow truck before me and a car speeding fast into the highway from a ramp to my right. With no time to step on the breaks I had to cut off a woman in a corvette on my left lane.  I then slipped back into the right lane to give the corvette room to pass me, but the corvette had also slipped back to the right lane, and seeing me maneuver like that, the woman driving the corvette leaned heavily on the horn.  She passed me to my left, but not content, she slowed down so that we traveled at the same speed.  She leaned on the horn again, staring at me and cursing me out.  I flipped her the bird.  I saw her gape at me.  I saw the look that came over her face with her unsavory decision.  I saw her spin the steering wheel, her lips between her teeth, obviously intent on slamming her corvette into my station wagon.  I saw the hood of her car nearing towards mine.

This is the part I still don't understand.  Her car didn't hit me.  Her car swerved as if pushed away by an invisible forced and did a 360 on the highway. I barely swished by and saw the corvette spinning in the rearview. Luckily she did not crash, nor did anyone behind her on that busy highway.  Something similar happened a few years later when I was stopped at a light and an out-of-control car screeched and careered towards me only to swerve on a split second, again as if by pushed away by some invisible force.

And this ghost visitation seems to be a family matter. When my sister was a baby, my mother woke up from her crying. Slow to respond she was surprised that before she got to the baby's room, the baby had stopped crying already. She peeked softly into the baby's room, careful not to make noise. A woman in a WWII nursing uniform was bent over the cradle -- or so it seemed in the shadows. My mother asked, "Who is that?" but there was already only just darkness.   Another time, during a particularly trying night, my mother saw and heard her father call her name: he was dead then already twenty years.  He was an illusion of light, a whisper of the wind, but he had enough substance to say her name, to ask what is the matter, in a loving enough voice that my mother jolted out of her sadness and into wonderment.

Yesterday, I was working on an email in response to something my sister had sent me that had made me angry. Needless to say, what I was writing wasn't kind. When I hit the send button, however, my gmail said "There is a problem with the server. Please try again later."  The thought hit me that it might have been a sign not to engage in an argument with my sister, but I hit send again.  And again a few moments later.  Still, the email wouldn't go through.

To appease my guilt, I began to edit the email down. For every paragraph that I edited or cut, I hit send, and still the same error message came back. I checked my internet connection. It was working. I checked FB. It was working.  I tried to send my message again and still the same server error popped up.  This went on for a while. I went on FB and asked if anyone else was having problems with gmail. Nobody else seemed to be having problems.

Finally, my better wisdom prevailed and I deleted the email to my sister.  Within a few seconds, I was able to send and receive email again.

Was it a ghost or an angel or just coincidence?

I don't know, but I did remembered then that Halloween is, after all, not just about ghosts and monsters. It's also about remembering those who passed away, and about honoring the "hallowed" saints who look over us from that world beyond.

So it occurs to me that the dead want to be remembered, not just as spooks and apparitions, but also for their best hopes for us.

It reminds me of one of my favorite poems by Susan Mitchell, The Dead, from which I will quote only a few lines out of respect for copyright:

Some dead find their way to our houses.
They go up to the attics.
They read the letters they sent us, insatiable
for signs of their love.

So on this All Hallows' Eve I'd like to express my gratitude for those who watch over us, and also offer a little prayer for our ancestors:  that they may thrive in peace, love and joy, wherever they may be.

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Laura Valeri is the author of Safe in Your Head, which has ghost stories in it, and the author of The Kind of Things Saints Do.

Day 3: Popcorn Ghost by Rebecca Johns

This story comes from my in-laws, at least four of whom were witnesses to the events I'm about to recount. 

My husband's grandmother during her life was very fond of popcorn. She'd make a pan of it every night and eat it watching old movies on TV. My mother-in-law says that the house constantly smelled of popcorn.

One night many years after she died, my in-laws went to visit my husband's grandfather at his house in Northwest Indiana. He was a bit of a shut-in then, with strange habits. They weren't at all sure he'd even open the door. But when he let them in that night, they smelled a very strong scent of popcorn. My mother-in-law asked her father, "Have you been eating popcorn?" and he said, "Popcorn? Are you nuts?" because he didn't have any teeth. But there it was: the distinctive smell of popcorn. And my father-in-law smelled it just as strongly.

They might not have thought too much of it, though, except that a few months later they took the kids (my brother-in-law Matt and sister-in-law Erin) to visit their grandfather. As they were pulling up to the house, the front door opened, and Erin, who was maybe ten at the time, said, "Who's that lady next to Popo?" and Matt (12) said, "Yeah, who IS that?"

When they got to the front door they asked their grandfather if there was a lady in the house with him, a friend or a nurse. No, he said. He was alone.

But Matt and Erin swear to this day they saw her standing next to him.

Tag You're It: Joel

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Rebecca Johns is the author of The Countess: A Novel of Elizabeth Bathory, and of the novel Icebergs

Day 4: Emma in the Ouija by Laura Valeri

This time I’m going to tell a Ouija story I haven’t yet told.  It’s from the time i was in college at NYU and rather than studying for tests, my friends and I much preferred gathering in one of the cramped dormitory rooms, drink rum and coke out of plastic cups and play Tears For Fears on a boom box.   Somehow one night the conversation got onto Ouija.

My friend Vinny, the only one of us who wasn’t dorm-bound, was intrigued by the stories some of us had told of playing with Ouija board and things getting increasingly weird, so he went to a toy store or two, only to be let down that nobody carried such an outdated thing anymore. It was the dawn of the age of video-games.  Tower Records was still on Houston.

Then one morning he stepped out of his home, walked for half a block and literally stepped on a Ouija board that someone was hawking on that Brooklyn sidewalk.  Those sort of things, I’m told, happen a lot with Ouija.

Vinny arrived one late evening at our dormitory and slipped it out from under his windbreaker with a winsome smile and a chirping, “Surprise!.”  Before long we all had our fingers on the planchette, trying to make it move.  With collective will, it’s not hard to make something happen. Soon we were asking stupid questions at a piece of hard cardboard and getting mostly misspelled, terse answers.  Still, no one wanted to leave the door room, not even for more rum, afraid we would miss something funny from our four favorite Ouija ghosts:

Emma, an 18th century woman who died of some kind of fever

Mo, the guttermouth who died in Vietnam

Mary, a mostly shy ghost who seemed to like speaking only to Clemencia, my roommate

And Andy, who died in a motorcycle accident and whenever we asked him where he was standing, would say, “On your tit.”

(It wasn’t until months later, when I woke up one morning to stare at my only-half read Jane Austen masterpiece that I realized that all the initials spelled Emma).

Before long, a room that was intended to be a tight abode for two smallish college girls became a speakeasy with smoke tufts blowing from under the door, music playing late in the night, and voices ringing with questions like, “Which one of us will be the first to marry? No, no, wait, I have a question but I don’t want to ask it out loud. Can you read my mind?”

The dormitory door was always open and boys and girls were streaming in between classes to get their turn at touching the planchette and asking after a grandfather, aunt, or lost cousin.  One girl became convinced she was talking to her long gone grandmother, in Greek.

Soon the room began to smell of feet, bad breath, and unwashed laundry.  Our little gatherings didn't sound so fun anymore when we were accusing one another of hogging too much time or for not being a “good enough conduit.” We were all so caught up in this addictive intercourse with the other world that we didn’t even care when Vinny began to shout that he’d had enough, that we stank as badly as that room, and that we all needed to cool it and get some fresh air or he was going to take his Ouija and go home.

We all unanimously agreed that Vinny was an uptight asshole.  As for his taking his Ouija back, “Over my dead body,” said Clemencia in a deadpan, and then slept with it under her pillow for a night or two.

One day, a skeptic friend who had been observing us for days asked the Ouija for proof.  He didn't want to put his finger on the planchette: too easy it would be, he claimed, to get caught up in the illusion. Instead he asked the four of us who were sitting in session to ask Emma the ghost what his middle name was.  The planchette unwaveringly spelled it out.  I was in the room, and I saw my friend’s mouth hang open.  He muttered “That is correct. I’ve never told anyone.”  

Finally, Tracy, a girl who was a self-proclaimed Born-Again Christian, talked me into stealing the Ouija and sneaking it  when Clemencia was sleeping.  Clemencia, she pointed out, was a church girl with nothing but Christ in her mouth.  Yet that afternoon, when we told her she was becoming obsessed with Emma, Clemencia had looked at me and said, “Fuck you. Both of you. Get out of my room.”  

Tracy dragged me down to the dorm’s basement, with a Bible in her coat pocket and the Ouija under her arm. Once we’d set up the board over the ping pong table, Tracy began to invoke Emma, the ghost who had most consistently haunted our Ouija board.  At first the planchette moved hesitantly under my index finger.  Then it began to pick up confidence.

“Are you there, Emma?”

Yes.

“Your name isn’t really Emma, is it?”

No.

“You’re Satan, aren’t you?”

Goodbye

“Do you know God, Emma?”

Q    U    A

“Do you fear God, Emma?

Q   U   A   C   K

“Quack?” I didn’t speak English all that well yet, and it seemed odd to me that Emma was impersonating a duck.

“Yes, you're a quack, the quacks of all quacks,” Tracy intoned.  She read a passage from Revelation, fire and brimstone and lakes of sulfur spilling out of her mouth in dramatic Evangelical overtones.

I don’t know whether Emma was a duck or a dead person, whether she meant that Tracy was a quack or that God didn’t exist.  But I do know, sure as I know I’m typing this right now, that the planchette was spinning too fast for my finger to keep up.  I lifted up my finger and after a second or two, Tracy did also.  The planchette kept spinning all by itself.

It spun for about four or five more seconds, so fast that it looked to my naked eyes like it had lifted half a finger’s height off of the Ouija board.  Then it shot very fast and hard like a hockey puck at Tracy’s face.  Tracy ducked. The planchette landed somewhere in the darkness of the dormitory’s basement.  We heard its thuck thuck thuck and then it was quiet.

Tracy congratulated herself on a job well done of exorcising the demon in the Ouija.  As for myself, I don’t know what it was that spoke in Greek and could move a planchette without a physical body.  But one thing is for sure: I never played Ouija again.

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Laura Valeri is the author of two award-winning short story collections, Safe in Your Head (SFA Press)  and The Kind of Things Saints Do (U of Iowa Press).  You can follow her blog at www.lauravaleri.com

True Ghost Stories: The MLS Halloween Blog Tag

You've heard of the twelve days of Christmas, the song with the pear trees, the calendar with the chocolate treats, and blah, blah, blah.

Well, it's almost Halloween, and we at the Mojito Literary Society believe that fine traditions start with wise women...us!

We believe that as a citizen of the world, you have a right to be frightened to death, and so, we say, in the spirit of Halloween, the MLS is read to provide to you an opportunity to make you so chilled that you'll want to reach for the nearest mojito, with cranberries and caramel apples at that! (Any recipes, mojito sisters?)

The Mojito Literary Society hereby presents:

THE NINE DAYS TO HALLOWEEN TRUE GHOST STORY BLOG TAG,

wherein

each of us mojito sisters will tell you a story about ghosts and weird phenomena, guaranteed true, 100%, either because one of us was there and experienced it or because it came from the lips of someone we personally know and trust not to bullshit us and try to impress us.

So expect this:

1 True Ghost Story
4 all of 9 days
each story followed by a "TAG YOU'RE IT" to another Mojito Sister

In other words,

WE'RE FIXIN' TO SCARE ALLS Y'ALLS

(That one came from the Savannah Chapter Mojito Sister)

because we at the MLS want to wish

ALL YOUR HALLOWEEN NIGHTMARES COME TRUE

So grab a blanket, a broom, salt, a crucifix, and get ready to read some true stories about those rent-skipping inhabitants of yours' all's abodes: DA GHOSts of Halloween.

Starting tomorrow, October 22, 2013