Ghosts

Ever since I was a little girl, I wanted to haunt the living after I die. Spooky movies confirmed that ghosts hold power over all. I coveted that kingly status, that invincibility.

When John and I married, I told him about my childhood wish and asked him if we might haunt together. “For good, though, not evil,” I said. “I just want to play with people. Maybe scare some sense into those who need it.”

“I’ll probably go first,” he said.

“Then let me know you’re there.”

“How?” he said.

“The lights. Mess with the lights. I’ll know it’s you.”

As a child, I wanted my maternal grandfather’s ghost to visit me. I never got to meet my grandfather. He died shortly before I was born. My mother talked fondly of her father, telling me he thought little girls were precious above all. How I’d wished for a grownup who would find me precious. My mother told my five siblings and me that after our grandpa died, he’d visited our grandma in their old home in Illinois, then he came to my mother in Missouri. She said it was a noise that half-woke her, and a feeling of being kissed on her cheek.

Growing up, ours was a troubled household. My father, a rage-a-holic factory worker, supported six children and a wife. He resented the burden of children. I had a passive, religious mother who put my father on a dais. We children knew we weren’t wanted and spent our days scurrying away from my father’s heavy hand and insults. When my father wasn’t around, we bullied each other. I was the third youngest; I didn’t stand a chance.

My first experience with a ghost happened when I was about six. My family lived in a 1902 house. My siblings and I sensed the spirits in our upstairs bedrooms in the two lightless closets built into the roof’s east downslope.

One morning, I awoke to a figure hovering over me. It had no legs. Its arms ended at the elbows. The figure’s head held some of my mother’s features: her brown hair, cheekbones, and chin. But the face didn’t sit right, like a mask not fully pulled down on one side. The thing also wore one of my brother’s shirts, the ugly yellow one with brown circular designs that he’d outgrown and discarded. It struck me odd that the figure wanted to look like people I was familiar with, like it didn’t want to scare me. But it did. Its mouth formed a grimace, and it had an unblinking, dead gaze.

I closed my eyes tight and hid under the covers. When I peeked out, it had moved closer. I closed my eyes again, frightened almost to tears. I kept my eyes shut a long time. When I opened them again, it was gone. It never reappeared.

When I was twelve, I went looking for it in those lightless closets. I felt ready to confront the thing, to know what it wanted. I went into the thick of the closets, the coldest, darkest parts, my heart pounding. But, nothing. I decided, since it tried to look like family and hadn’t hurt me, it had only wanted me to know it was around. Like it had come out of concern. When I felt alone, it wanted me to know I wasn’t.

I didn’t see another ghost until I was married and in my forties. John and I were at a produce convention in San Diego. We stayed at a small hotel in “Old Town.” I found the place charming and quaint, until night time.

John had fallen asleep, but I heard noises on the ceiling. Not walking noises, since we were on the top floor, but a random tapping and rapping. I felt wisps of cold air. When I finally fell asleep, the ghost visited me. He hovered, legless, next to the bed. I was quite aware I was in a San Diego hotel room bed, in my body and not dreaming. He wore a green fatigue shirt. At least I felt it was a “he” due to its manly build. It didn’t have an attached head. Its head was in its arms. A man’s face. Long, fine brown hair in a ponytail. He plunked his head onto his neck and laughed. I thought, Are you real? Am I seeing you in my room right now? He nodded, grinning. I fully woke up and he was gone.

I told John about my experience. He believed me, though he had heard and seen nothing.

When John and I checked out, I noticed a brochure about the hotel at the front desk and took one as a souvenir. When I opened it later, I read a section that mentioned guests often saw ghosts: a legless woman that roamed the halls in a red ball gown, a mischievous male that liked to turn on water faucets and make beds shake, and another spirit that liked to dance on the ceiling on the top floor, in the room where we’d been.

When John and I stayed at an old hotel in Yosemite, a ghost woke the two of us. Another tapper. Ceiling, walls, armoire. Sometimes once. Sometimes in threes. John and I looked at each other. Yes, he heard it and knew what it was. He smiled and fell asleep snuggled against me. I was more wary. Why did the ghosts always find me? I told myself the spirit simply wanted to be acknowledged. Mission accomplished.

A few years later, we bought a ranch-style house in Northern California built in the 1960’s. When we first viewed the house, I sensed good vibes. An old upright piano. A New Yorker magazine on the coffee table. Eclectic furnishings, like funky, thrift store finds. A creative person lived here. “Why is the she selling?” I asked the real estate agent. I’d noticed the New Yorker’s label listed Josephine with the house’s address.

The realtor hesitated. “Actually, her brother is selling the house. She died here.” He quickly added, “Of natural causes. Nothing bad.”

He looked relieved when we told him that didn’t bother us.

Our first night in the new house, I was awakened from an exhausted sleep in the wee hours by heavy footsteps coming from our hallway, as though someone had descended stairs. I told myself I was dreaming—there was no upstairs, and fell back asleep. In the morning, I suddenly remembered the dream and told John about the noise. He shrugged. “Just a dream.”

When we went down the hall, he looked up, then at me.

“The attic,” he said. “We have an attic.” He found the special hook in the closet that pulled the attic door down. Attached to the door was a heavy wooden ladder. Stairs. We glanced at each other.

“Guess we have a ghost,” I said. I climbed up the stairs and peeked around. No flying objects, maniacal noises, or icy breezes. “She seems friendly.”

Later that day, the neighbors to the north of us, a young couple, came over with a plate of cookies to welcome us to the area. We learned that the last owner of our house, Josephine, had fallen on the attic stairs and died from a blood clot. “It traveled from her leg to her heart,” the husband said.

“And….” the wife added, moving in closer as though about to tell a secret, “Josephine was really a man.”

I shrugged, indicating my support for whatever Josephine wanted. I’d once dated a closet transvestite, a man I found confused and in denial about his identity. I ended up giving him one of my dresses and wishing him well.

Her husband frowned. “Not that it made any difference to us if she was Josephine or Joe. She was just a nice lady who went nuts on the piano when she had a few too many.”

“She always wore a burka,” the wife said. “I never saw her hair.”

“But I saw her through the fence slat when she was out mowing the back yard,” the husband said. “She wasn’t wearing her usual hat or dress, and she was definitely a he, hairy chest and all.”

“Her brother told me, when he was getting the house on the market, that Josephine had a very hard life,” the wife said. “That’s why she moved to our little town.”

“She must have had a difficult go of it,” I said. It was 2003, when transgender or transvestite was only beginning to be recognized. Poor Josephine.

Her brother left most of the furnishings with the house. We found a garage full of abstract, sloppy paintings and odd, mismatched fabric coverlets, as though Josephine had assembled them when high on something. I felt I understood her frustration, her need to find an outlet while fighting acceptance, maybe even of herself.

For our first year in the house, I’d feel her quiet presence, usually in the hallway or to the entrance of our bedroom. At dusk, I sometimes saw a misty image of a little boy in gray clothing. The image would be gone a second later.

When we did some remodeling to the house, taking out the popcorn ceiling in the living room and adding a cheerful skylight, the visits stopped.

When John died seventeen years later from complications of Lewy Body Dementia, I had to replace floors, repaint walls, and refinish furniture. Lewy Body Dementia is unkind to its victims, and John had destroyed property with violence and incontinence.

I was afraid my home alterations might stop him from ever visiting me from the cosmos.

About two years after he died, when I was coming out of the numbness and the worst of the grief, light activity started. I’d leave the bathroom, turning off the light, only to have it snap back on. Another day, I entered the office, and the lights above me flickered. I changed bulbs, just to make sure I wasn’t reading anything into it. They did it again. A week later, as I went into the dining room, the hanging light blinked. I spent a lot of time in the living room on the couch, missing my husband. The TV started turning itself on. It could only be John.

I wondered if he’d had a chance to meet Josephine, face-to-face. Or my grandfather.

When I had a romantic fling three years after John’s death, the living room lights went off like fireworks as the man, half-dressed, kissed me. Looking up, he said, “I bet that’s your husband.” For weeks, whenever the man showed up for a little evening delight, the living room lights flashed like a scolding.

John has now been gone six years. Since that time, I’ve moved across the country into a new state and home. I bought my new house from my brother David, who purchased it seven years prior for my brother Richard and my aging mother. Mom had reached a point in her 90’s when she needed caregiving. Mom died in the house. Richard then moved into his own apartment in a different town. About the time I retired, David was selling the house. I liked knowing its history, so I bought it.

I’ve never felt my mother’s presence here. A small bit of her ashes sit in a container next to John’s in the living room. My mother adored John. She’d appreciate his proximity.

Since the move, only once has the television turned on by itself, together with the DVD player, a feat that requires multiple remotes.

Only once have the TV room’s lights flashed. Only once have the bedroom lights blinked. One night, I did feel a sudden heaviness on the bed, as though someone sat down, followed by a lighter jump. Our old cat Keoni liked to ride John’s shoulders. Keoni’s ashes share John’s urn. They were visiting.

John has recently taken on new technology. Every few months, he sends me messages through the phone. These come in funny additions to my grocery list, which I keep in Notes on my IPhone. My first such message was an extra line at the bottom: “Yogurt, yogurt, yum, yum, let’s go get some,” followed by a soft serve ice cream cone picture.

This message held great significance.

When John was alive and well, we’d sneak away afternoons to head down to Mendocino for frozen yogurt. We’d take the long way home along the ocean, licking our cones and holding hands. We glanced out the window, admiring the way the sun’s rays sent sparkles along the waves. These were priceless outings.

I take these signs as a small hello, John letting me know he is still around, watching me, protecting me, and waiting for me.