Image source: Merlina McGovern
Do you believe in ghosts?
Do I?
I’m sitting here staring at that question. I want to believe in ghosts, but I really don’t think that I do. This year’s Inktober prompts really have me pondering some tough philosophical questions. The prompt today is Wander. My little sketch is of a crew of ghosts wandering around lost in a labyrinth. Or perhaps they’re not that lost, considering that they all seem to have made it to the center of the labyrinth.
But these cute little ghosts, with their flowing white sheets and staring black eyes don’t really match up with what I think about when I think about ghosts. I’ve always been a sucker for a good, creepy ghost story. I love the ones of drivers picking up lonely hitchhikers on empty rural roads, only to find that when they drop them off at an isolated farmhouse, they discover that the pale companion that they can no longer find is the spitting image of the farmer’s dead wife. For a while, I would watch every single episode of “Ghost Hunters” that I could find. The folksy plumbers from Rhode Island brought just enough skepticism to their investigations so that the actual phenomena that they experienced (like a chair moving a half inch, or whispered “who are you?”) and couldn’t explain seemed all the more real in comparison.
As for movies, the gothic horror of Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak beckoned me into its darkened, haunted estate with blood tendrils; I still can’t go to sleep without running and jumping into my bed to avoid any creepy clown hands that might be waiting to grab my ankles a la Poltergeist; heaven forfend if I happen to wake up at 3 am, the favorite times for mayhem in movies like The Conjuring and The Amityville Horror; and my absolute favorite movie in the genre is The Others with Nicole Kidman.
But these are all fictional ghosties. Not the real thing. As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I’m a fairly logical person. I’m not prone to believe in ghosts. There has only been one time in my entire life where I’ve experienced what might be categorized as a ghostly experience. When I was in high school, my family lived in a one-story house in Southern California. This house had a strange enclosed greenhouse type room that you walked into as soon as you entered the front door. It had a concrete floor and was ringed by large-leaved plants growing from soil planted into the ground. To get into the main house, you had to walk through the greenhouse and then open a sliding glass door before you actually entered the formal living room. Anyone leaving the house would need to slide the glass door open, walk through the greenhouse, and then open the main front door.
At the time, my mother worked the night shift at a TV parts factory. Every evening, we’d hear the sliding glass door open and shut first and then the front door open and shut as she would leave for work. In the morning, if we heard the front door open and shut and then the glass door open and shut, we knew that she’d returned.
It was very late one evening, everyone was asleep and my mother had already left for work. Something had woken me up. Still wiping the sleep from my eyes, I opened my bedroom door. At the end of a long, dark hallway, my father had also opened his bedroom door and was staring back at me. We had both been woken up by the same sound: the sound of the front door opening and shutting and the glass door opening (but not shutting). Surely, this meant that my mother must have come home from work early. We walked to the formal living room, and the sliding glass door was wide open, but there were no lights on. My mother had not yet come home.
We walked all around the house, but there was no one else there. My mother always shut the sliding glass door when she left for work, so my father and I really had heard the glass door opening. We thought nothing of it over the years, even though I would sometimes feel cold air blowing on my neck in our hot kitchen sometimes, and one evening our glass shower door shattered into a million pieces on its own.
Were these ghostly experiences? I don’t think so, but many, many years later, during one of our daily talks, my mother mentioned that our neighbor had told her about a man that had died in our house years ago. He used to walk restlessly around that indoor greenhouse when he was alive. The hairs on my neck raised slightly when she told me that story. Why had she never told me that before? We’d told her about that night we’d thought she’d come home. The idea had scared her so much at the time, and she didn’t want to invite bad spirits into the house, so she kept that ghost story to herself the entire time.
After that, I’ve never really experienced anything else even remotely paranormal, even though I desperately wished that the ghost of my sister would visit me after she died. I prayed so hard for her to come and visit me, but she never did. That feeling of ghostly abandonment is what has really sealed the deal for me in terms of my belief in ghosts. I suppose it shouldn’t though, because perhaps she has no unfinished business here in our earthly realm.
How about you? Do you believe in ghosts? Share your ghost stories in the comments below.
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