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

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

Day 9: The Living House

As promised, here with are, in full Halloween paraphernalia, (well, I've got chocolate) starting our Nine Days to Halloween True Story Blog Series.

Unlike my Mojito sisters who all have a hard time coming up with more than one true ghost stories, I've got a pumpkin's head full of them right here.

That's because I lived in a very, very creepy house, in a very, very creepy neighborhood.  This is coming from a chick who is living right now in the #1 haunted city of all the United States, Savannah, GA.

No, this house I'm talking about wasn't in Savannah: I think it would have been too creepy for all these good meaning pirates, black cats, and fair maidens dwelling in these lovely Victorian homes.  This house was the thug of haunted places: think Amityville.  Think The Omen.  The kind of house that plays with your head, making you think at first you're a little tired, maybe, that maybe you really did leave the back door open four times in the span of one hour, and no it didn't really shut in your face when you went to lock it again for the fifth: surely it was the wind!  It was the kind of house that wants to terrify you slowly with sudden drops in temperatures, and a strange kind of energy that makes you feel like you're being watched and not in a good way; a house with creaky ceilings, missing items, and electricity gone haywire, voices of weeping women floating in as if from a radio hidden somewhere, playing at very low volume.  The kind of house that wants to kill you like a frog in a boiling pot.

When we first moved into this house I was a tween.  My family had just spent a year living in a condo in bustling uptown New York, but my father was seduced by the idea of realizing the American dream: a house in a quiet neighborhood with plenty of room for the kids to grow and play and sprawl, with so much land in the backyard and even a basketball hoop in the front.

We should have been tipped off to the weirdness by the address: 39-1/2.  We laughed about it.  Ha ha, these crazy Americans.  It became less funny when we realized that the guy who owned the original lot, the guy who now lived in #39 was a widower, a married widower, married, that is, for the seventh time.  Wife #7 was dying of cancer, by the way.

On the other side of the fence, in house #40, our neighbor was a very nice family: three kids, a man and his wife.  Except his wife died only after a few months after we moved in.  She drowned in her own swimming pool.  Not funny: the father, owner of #40, married again not six months later, and his brand new wife was, you guessed it, very, very pregnant.   A year later, however: so sorry.  Father also dies.  Drowned.

As for our house: all we knew about the previous owner was that he was an "Arab" (real estate lady's words).  His son, it came out once, long after my dad had signed the mortgage, had tried to axe "the Arab" to death.  We could, in fact, still trace the axe mark in the room across the hall from mine, a room we called the yellow room because when we first bought the house, every room was painted a bright pastel color.  Whether there had been any casualties, we could only guess.

What we didn't have to guess was that something was wrong with the neighborhood altogether.  Not only were our friends to the left and to the right of us contaminated with serial death.  We were, like our Amityville friends across the bay, built on Indian burial ground.  I hated walking home from school after dark: it was like I could feel the darkness watching me and hating me.

The worst part was "the howl": it happened exactly at 4:30.  It sounded something between a tortured dog and an agonized human, more like a dog than a human. The howl was so chilling, so painful or angry or...something that it literally chilled the bones to hear it.  It went on for about 30 seconds, long enough for any one unlucky enough to hear it to make us drop our jaw and try to understand :WHAT THE HELL IS THAT, HUH? WHAT IS IT? WHAT THE HELL IS IT?  Then it was gone. And it always sounded like it was coming from everywhere. From the north, from the south, no, no, from there, from there back in the woods! Who knew.

When we asked our neighbors they said they hadn't heard it. Then they heard it and they said it was the woman who was sick of cancer who lived in the house in front of us, from where, I was sure, the howl had not issued.  And why was it always coming at 4:30?

I told my friend at school about it and she thought the story interesting enough to nod. Then one afternoon she came home with me and we played hoops, and I was beating her ass, but she got the basketball and 4:30 ticked in and the howl came.  My friend dropped the ball and began to shake.

"I told you!" I said to her. By  now I was used to it.

"I have to go home now," she said. And she never came to my house again.

As for the house: at night I heard the unmistakable sounds of someone in high heels walking the length of the bedroom a floor above mine.  She'd go to the end of the room, stop, and then walk the length back.  Only problem: there was no floor above mine, only a lot of insulating material, not the kind of place anyone could walk on, let alone in high heels.

The house also had fun playing with electricity: the garage door opened and closed at will.  The lights would turn on and off in different bedrooms, sporadically.  The drier was in the habit of starting a cycle all of its own will.

My father, a skeptic to the end, called an electrician to inspect the house.  "Nothing wrong," said the electrician.  We complained about the garage door opening and closing at all hours of the night.  "It's another garage door opener that's somehow got its signal mixed up," said the pragmatic man.

"But what about the alarm?" my dad inquired.

The alarm had gone off throughout the whole house a few night before the electrician came, setting the whole house a-ringing, tearing us out of bed in the wee hours of the night.  It shut itself off after we had all scurried out of our rooms and met with wide, glassy eyes in the hallway, looking to one another for the next thing to do.

"What alarm?" said the electrician like we were trying to trick him.

"The alarm" my dad pointed impatiently to the windows, where he imagined it would have been installed.

"Sir," said the electrician backing away from my dad, "I've checked your entire system, outside and inside. There is no alarm set up in this house."

Once, after school, as usual we called my mother to pick us up.  She said, "I'm on my way," and hung up. An hour later, she still wasn't there. We decided we could start walking towards home, like we often did, and meet her on the way.  But we went all the way home and Mom hadn't left the house. When we got inside, we found her stomping around, crying, holding her hair and cursing under her breath.

"My car keys," she cried, as soon as we stepped in.  "Did you do a joke on me?" I dropped them right there, right there!" she pointed at her bed.  We (my brother, my sister and myself) all searched the bed, we retraced the steps to the kitchen as we tried to calm her down, to the bathroom, back to the bedroom.  Not trusting my own eyes, I began to feel the whole length of the bed from left to right, then again from right to left. I removed all the pillows and searched again.  No keys.

I went to look for my sister, who was in her bedroom, looking at a creepy doll she kept on the pillows of her bed and, not seeing me there, she asked the doll in all earnestness: "Was it you? Did you eat the keys?"

I left my sister's bedroom and turned back to my mother's bedroom, and there, like a bad joke, the keys of the car sat on the bed, just as my mother said.  I pointed, I said "There!"  My mother looked, her breath failing her.  "I swear," she muttered, "I swear I looked."

She looked that same way another time, too, also in the middle of the night, on a night when my dad was traveling.  She woke us up with a terrified scream that went on and on and on and on.

We ran to her bedroom and found her in bed, all the lights in her room on.

"What happened?"

She was holding her head, looking agape at all the different lamps, her bed lamps, her three way light standing lamp across the room.

"The lights turned on all at once!" she finally gasped.  "All at once. All of them."

They were each on different switches and different systems.

You will hear a lot about this house, especially on Halloween, when I tell you the motherload of all the Ghost Stories of 39-1/2.  But for now, this will do.

Tag, you're it, Tina Whittle.

Laura Valeri is the author of Safe in Your Head (Stephen F. Austin University Press) and The Kind of Things Saints Do (U of Iowa Press) both award winners.  Visit Laura Valeri's 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