Ghosts? In mah house!?!

I can honestly say that I was never a Christian. I wasn't raised with religion. It was never discussed in my house. My father's parents didn't become religious until much later in life and my mom's family is Catholic for the most part. My mom considers herself Catholic, but it was never something that was forced on us as children or adults for that matter. My dad doesn't care about religion one bit and you'd be hard pressed to get the man to go into a church. The only time I've seen him do so was at my older sister's wedding. There are things that I did believe though. When I was a kid, I was certain that my house was haunted. Ghosts and ghouls creeped in the basement. In the kitchen, behind the antique crockery that was on the counters, a little monster hid until my parents turned off their lights and would come out and stare down the hall at me. I would stare back from the end of my bed, convinced that if I looked away, it would most definitely get off the counter and come back to my room. Unspeakable Lovecraftian horrors lurked under the bed and in the closets. The only effective counter measure for these terrors was to never let a body part dangle off the bed and make certain the closets were closed tightly. I can attribute this to several things, first and foremost probably my lifelong love of horror and dark fantasy stories. Secondly, at least two of my siblings swear to this day that the house was haunted. Third, I have a very vivid imagination and my elder siblings didn't help when they encouraged the fact that there were monsters under the bed, in the closets and ghosts would get you and do horrifying things to you. And secretly I loved it.

I am also a lifelong insomniac. At times the sleep deprivation would get so bad that I would see things at night. I would have long and coherent conversations with people, usually my mother, that I believed were standing next to my bed, conversing back with me, only to be gone in a blink of an eye. This might have frightened a lot of people, but I saw it as normal and didn't realize until years later it was due to my lack of sleep. And I have congenital cataracts. I was born with cataracts and didn't learn this until several years ago during an eye exam. I don't always see things clearly in very low light. That's where the monster in the kitchen came from. I thought I saw the monster, when in reality it was the sugar canister.

As an adult and a skeptical one at that, I can look back at these things and laugh. The thing is, my siblings aren't so skeptical about it though. They swear the house was haunted. They swear they saw things that can't be explained in that house. The house itself was pretty unremarkable. 3 bedroom, 1 bath, kitchen, living room, full basement. A small little house. We were the first people to live in the house. It was brand new when my parents moved into it in 1972 after my older sister was born and my dad got out of the Army. My Grandpa M- was one of the carpenters that built the house. There was never any horrible tragedy in the house. The land it was built on was a flower garden for the house to the right of it. It was nothing more than a cheery little yellow house with a black roof and shutters.

So what horrors did the house contain? I remember my older sister telling me over and over, and probably still would if I asked, about the lady in white. The lady in white wore a long white dress, like a wedding dress and would come out of the closet and stand at the end of our beds. She would stand at the end of my bed and move her lips as if she were talking. She would move to the end of my sister B's bed and point at her while she moved her lips. The all powerful and protective ghost repelling sheet or blanket would come into play then, covering her head as she hid from the ghost. The rule was, according to B, if you lowered the sheet, the ghost could 'get' you. Personally, I didn't believe that. I figured if you couldn't keep an eye on it, it had a better chance of getting you. In the years we shared a room, I never saw the lady in white. When B got older, she quit talking about the lady in white. She never mentioned it again until many years later when we were both at home for the holidays visiting. It was about 2 or 3 in the morning and an old horror movie was playing on the TV. The lady in white and the black thing.

Now the black thing was different. The black thing happened twice and she was sick both times. When B was in high school, she moved to a room in the basement, as did I. It was a school day both times she saw the black thing. My mom was a stay at home mom until all of us children were grown and pretty much out on our own. Basically she started working when she got into her 50's. B and my mother were the only people in the house. My mom was upstairs doing housework and B was in bed asleep. She woke up for some reason or another because she said she 'got a funny feeling'. She looked at her door. Instead of seeing her beloved door sized Motley Crue poster, she saw the black thing. It looked like the grim reaper she said. Nothing but a big black cloak. She never saw a face or hands, just a big black shape around 7 feet tall. As ridiculous as it sounded to me at the time, I didn't laugh when I got home from school and she told me about it. She was honestly petrified and afraid to tell my mother, who would have laughed at her.

The second time she saw the black thing she was at home sick again. She heard her door open and someone walk over to her bed and sit down beside her on the bed. She thought it was my mother checking on her. She looked and saw the black thing. So, the protective blanket came into play again, at 16 years old. I was puzzled by this because it seemed a little far fetched to me. Not because I didn't think there weren't ghosts in the house. I was 12 and knew that my sister was prone to some dramatics. She was a full fledged teenager. She was supposed to be.

And B isn't the only one to say that they saw things in the basement. I think I saw things in the basement. My little brother P, who is two years younger than me was flat out terrified of sleeping in the basement. I took the room he didn't even last one night in he was so terrified. He decided that he was going to move into the basement because he didn't want to share a room with S our youngest brother. He lasted 3 hours. My mother moved his things back to his old room while he was at school the next day and he slept on the couch. He never elaborated on what he believed was down there, but I think he might have gotten some premature gray hairs that night.

I did laugh at him. And he laughed at me and told me I was crazy when I said I was going to move into the basement. So I did. Nothing happened the first two weeks I was down there except my paranoid older sister waking me up with Motley Crue, Skid Row or freaking Guns n' Roses at all hours and her unplugging everything in my room daily. She was afraid if you left something plugged in, the whole house would immediately burn to the ground. The exception was her alarm clock. I still don't understand the logic behind that.

The first night something happened, I had just taken a shower and was getting ready for bed. The 10 o'clock news was just getting over and suddenly, out of nowhere, I heard what sounded like the typical generic demon voice from any number of horror movies. I was at my parents bedroom door upstairs probably second before the sonic boom of my flight from the basement. I'm certain I was as white as a sheet. I told them what happened and they laughed. They told me to sleep on the couch if I was so afraid. This made me angry. I was supposed to be reassured by my parents, not mocked for my irrational fear. I told them no, I was going to bed. So down I went to my room. Mission Impossible had started and no one was going to keep me from watching those old reruns. I looked around my room and said. "This is my room. You aren't going to scare me like P or B, so just fuck off." I was so bad ass, talking to an empty room after hearing what now was undoubtedly a tape screwing up the audio at the local TV station. I was so angry though. I put the headphone in the TV and shut off the light and got in bed. Nothing happened the rest of the night and I fell asleep watching Mission Impossible reruns.

My brother couldn't believe it. He freaked out. I told him no one was gonna make me give up my sweet room. Of course, my dad never did finish my room. It was a large open space next to the room he had made for my older brother J, that B had moved into when J didn't live at home anymore. There was one other incident, a few years later and I chalk that up to the combination of typical sounds a house makes, sleep deprivation and my poor eyesight. I do wear glasses now, I got my first pair my freshman year in high school. Without my glasses, I cannot see a foot in front of me clearly because of the cataracts. My vision wasn't that bad then, but it is now. I still could not see further than 5 feet away without everything becoming blurry. I woke up, hearing something, probably the furnace or water heater, or my dad raiding the fridge upstairs. I woke up. It doesn't take much. I'm a light sleeper. I sat up and looked around. Basements are dark. Basements are even darker at night. My brother and I had our bikes stored down there in my 'room'. I saw something over by the bikes. I thought maybe my brother had forgotten something and had come down to get it. Why this didn't strike me as odd at 2 or 3 or 4 in the morning, I don't know. I put on my glasses and saw, what appeared to be a person clawing at their face in pain. What? You say. It's the middle of the night, I got woken up by something and I think I'm seeing a man clawing his face in my bedroom. I took off my glasses, said "That's nice", and went back to sleep. Yeah, it wasn't any big deal that I thought I saw a man ripping the flesh from his face. I just rolled over and went back to sleep.

By that time, I had pretty much lost any fantasy illusions of ghosts and sky fairies and anything else that I couldn't prove to be true. It takes a lot to frighten me nowadays. It took quite a bit to honestly frighten me then. Ghosts and monsters scared me when I was very young but real things scared me more than anything. I was absolutely petrified of nuclear war. I would stay up at night after hearing something on the news about Russia and the US and nuclear weapons. Ah, the good old Cold War. You gotta love it. I realized by the time I was in high school that the things that you can imagine in your head can be pretty scary, but things in the real world are even more so. Today it's not so much the nuclear warheads and going to war with Russia that people would flap their gums about on the news when I was growing up, the new fear mongers beat the drum of terrorism and Muslims wanting the Western world dead, Socialists taking over the country, and gay marriage and abortion destroying the nation.

I sometimes wish I was that innocent again, believing in the ghosts and monsters in the basement and under the beds. It would make things easier. It honestly would. There was one final nail in the coffin of ghosts for me. It was the death of my older brother. That is also around the time that I openly said I was an atheist. My reasoning was if there was this great and wonderful god that my neighbors spoke of and some friends talked about, then why would he let my brother, who I loved and still love very much, suffer so badly in silence that he put a shotgun in his mouth and killed himself at 22 years old. I was a very angry 15 year old. Part of me still is. Part of me still wants to ask "How dare you. How dare you con people into believing such horrible lies about how wonderful this alleged sky fairy is. Comfort? It's not comfort, it's bullshit. Complete and utter bullshit."

That doesn't explain that final nail though. That final nail is the fact that my older brother told me, on more than one occasion, that any time I needed him and wanted to talk, he would always be there for me. That's the nail. After we had moved out of that house, out of that town, in the small town where my dad is retired and has his little spot in the country, the discussion of spirits came up. And Ouija boards. So then, on a Friday night, several of my friends wanted to use the Ouija board. They did. I sat there, probably with much eye rolling on my part and a few of the others, I said I would know if it worked or not. I was pretty sure the people using the damn thing were making it say whatever they wanted. I know, I had used one before and the joke was that we were talking to Burl Ives and he kept trying to sing us songs from old Rankin-Bass Christmas specials. None of us were serious that night. But that Friday night, one of the girls were dead serious about it. She was convinced that she was being haunted and targeted by satanists. Yes, she went there. And yes, the town is very, very small. I was in a graduating class of less than 60 at that school. I took the board with one of my friends and alone I sat there, away from the very overwrought girl (Who later got several of us a trip to the police station because she said we were satanists. Oh yeah, satanic panic still lives. That's a story for another day however.) I can say with 100% certainty, no matter how badly I wanted to have my brother talk back to me through that Parker Brothers piece of cardboard and plastic, he never did. She shut up that night and the matter was dropped. She decided her drama wasn't worth probably getting her teeth knocked out for talking shit about my brother.

That was the final nail though for me. Silly, probably, but that's what it took to finally wash my hands of bogeymen and spooks. I still love horror. I still love ghost stories. Nothing will change that.