“Kids see ghosts”
I feel like I never told you the story of the ghost, that I once knew, and talked to. His answers came in actions, he never spoke a word. Or maybe I laid down the phone before he could be heard?
Just kidding, I don’t believe in ghosts. I don’t really believe in anything supernatural, for that matter. It’s kind of sad, honestly, to not be able to believe in that stuff, especially as a horror author. On one side, I pride myself in what I consider a factual, reality-oriented worldview that precludes the existence of phenomena that can’t be measured or observed repeatedly. But on the other hand, I feel that it might be easier to write about things that scare me if I was, well, actually scared of anything. It might make the world a bit easier to function in, too, with those beliefs in the supernatural. And certainly more interesting; even though I don’t believe in it, there’s a reason I like to lose myself in worlds of fantasy, science fiction, and horror. But there are a few very specific, non-supernatural things that scare me, climate change being one of them, active shooter incidents another, then dementia/memory loss coming in third, and that’s about it. Although those are all topics that can make for some incredibly compelling pieces, both in and out of horror, they aren’t exactly “scary” in and of themselves. Well, no, active shooters are pretty damn terrifying in their own right, but the other two, less so. Climate change is so slow and almost cerebral in its workings that it isn’t particularly frightening on a day-to-day basis. It’s only the big picture that turns scary, and my fear of a slow decline into listless mental impotence is very similar. And while perhaps my fears say a lot about the kind of things I prioritize, they aren’t the typical things that go bump in the night. I just don’t believe in the run-of-the-mill spirits, although I would be more than happy to be proven wrong on that front. Seriously, I’d love it if magic/ghosts/spirits existed, or if I had an encounter. I don’t like being this bone-headed about it.
That being said, my family seems to have a weirdly high number of strange, unexplainable stories that get passed around every now and then that always, always pique my interest. There’s the one about my aunt and her whole-ass haunted house, or my parents and that weird, incredibly accurate psychic, or my friend’s house and the creepy, bootlegger basement that was once owned by Al Capone (not joking), or the spooky happenings that my mom keeps seeming to run into anytime someone close to her dies, or all sorts of other things like that. Nothing like “I was possessed by a demon” or “I got throw across the room by a ghost,” but still these stories from people that I trust keep cropping up, and I love them. I’ll probably go into them in more detail later, maybe with a dedicated October of the future with just stories from my friends and family, but not today. The point I’m trying to make is that sometimes weird shit does happen in my general familial vicinity, and I don’t know what to make of it. I don’t just shoot it down, is what I’m saying. I relish in the details. But, interestingly enough, the one solid time something happened to me is actually a memory that I’d forgotten about until recently. Let me tell you a story of my ghosts.
The Year of 2014
There are a handful of things I am haunted by, several of which appear in the year of 2014, and the photos and journals I have from those days. For example, I am haunted by the hiatus of Gravity Falls that took place during that time, and a strange, unrequited love that I developed around that era. I had a lot of those back in the day. Something about my family’s trip to Yosemite National Park coincided with both the show’s hiatus (or return from it), and the development of that love, thus the above picture. I wish I had more pictures from that trip, but these were the days before I became truly photo-obsessed, so my images from that time are rather sparse. But let me take a moment to throw this photo, and others, at you in quick succession to set the scene and tell you a little bit about me in 2014 before I get to the ghosts. I am haunted by faces, the faces not just of my friends and family but of the memes and meme-like images that came out of it. I don’t know what it is, but probably 20% of the photos I have from that year are just dumb faces from memes, or particularly humorous faces that I managed to capture in image format. I’ll spare my friends the embarrassment of posting those images here, but I’ll share a few more acceptable selections (though really I’m just picking my favorite ones). Here’s a nice meme one:
And of course this classic (pictured below) of a family member that I dredged up. It’s been so long, the compression is so bad, but I adore this photo. Oh, how could I ever have forgotten about it? How the world has changed since the wedding this was taken at. I don’t know if I took it in 2014, but I had this face as the background of my phone for far longer than I should have.
And I am, of course, haunted by own childish face. I was, what, 15 this year? And I turned 16 in October of 2014, a birthday I still consider one of the best. It doesn’t feel that long ago, does it? Not to me, anyway. Here’s what I looked like at 15-ish. Or at least a screengrab I have dated from that time.
But I’m also haunted by other things. I’m haunted by the death of my beloved parrot, Cleo. She didn’t die in 2014, but going through these images and finding a good picture of both me and her, in her good health, was a bittersweet surprise. She’s the only pet I really got close to, and her death was sudden, swift, and surprisingly unnerving to me. It’s something I think about from time to time, and any photos of her are always tinged with a bit of guilt and that wonder of “was it something we did that killed her?” I’ll never know for sure, but I do miss her.
While Cleo is a major haunting of mine, that year I was apparently also minorly haunted by the House on the Rock, visiting me like a ghost of Christmas present. Except, you know, probably the muppet version because it’s the fucking House on the Rock. That shit’s wack.
I went to the House on the Rock on a Boy Scout trip, actually, so that was a lot of fun, and I got to hang out with my friends. Those trips were always a good time. I don’t really mention it enough, but I had a great time in Boy Scouts. I really, really am glad that I stuck with it for so long, and that I made so many wonderful experiences in it. It’s a shame that I’m only now realizing how much of a garbage fire so much of it was (and is). So I guess you could say I’m haunted by that, too. I loved being in Boy Scouts, and I wouldn’t change it for the world, but it seems I was rather lucky in that regard. Is there a specter of the organization’s misdeeds casting a pall over my memories of those parts of my life? Perhaps. That’s something I’ll come to terms with some other time, maybe. For now, here’s a photo of when I bought the wood for my Eagle Scout project in the winter of 2014. I’m still proud I’m an Eagle Scout, whatever that means. But it haunts me, too.
I don’t really remember what the context of this photo is, if there was anything in particular that was exciting about this particular trip, or if it was just one trip out of many. It’s of the bridge at Matthiessen State Park, the park that plays second fiddle to the more well-known Starved Rock State Park, but if you ask me, Matthiessen’s the prettier park by far. Though they both show up in my memories many, many times, as I’ve been to them throughout my life, in many different forms and contexts. They are, after all, two of the only pretty places worth going to in Central Illinois, so it’s natural that we’d hike there a lot. The rest is all corn. My journal says that these photos are from a field trip I went on to go there with my earth science class in high school, something I am now just remembered is a thing that happened. One girl fell in the water. I didn’t write that in my journal but I remember it happening. I also remember having a crush on my lab partner and like two other people in that class, even though they were a year or two older than me. What a weird class that was. In terms of material covered, I was very much, uh, batting in a league below for that one, if you catch my drift. But it was fun.
Oh, yeah, and here’s some pumpkins. I carved the one on the left because, again, I was really into weird-ass faces. And also Zelda. I’ve always kind of been into Zelda. It’s supposed to be a Re-Dead. It’s more abstract than I would have preferred, but I think it turned out alright.
Ok, one last thing before I get into the meat of the hauntings, though. Here’s another good meme just to add one more layer of context to this story. How many of you remember this one? If you still know the song by heart, like, subscribe, and cry in a corner after realizing how much time has passed.
But now to the real deal. Back in high school, especially in Freshman and Sophomore year (so, around 2014 and 2015 for me, when I was 15 or 16), I held a lot of parties at my parent’s house. These were good, wholesome times, too. I didn’t hold parties to drink beer or sneak a pack of cigarettes from my neighbor or something like that. We didn’t get high or cause property damage. These were things like Halloween costume parties, or bonfires with a table of snacks and drinks that my mom had helped me pick out. These parties had ambient music in the entryway of my house with mid-2000’s playlists and whatever the hell my mom thought we’d like to hear at the time. We kind of went all-out on this stuff, sometimes with a party every weekend for months straight. One of my close friends referred to me as the Great Gatsby, presumably because of the high quantity and quality of the parties that I threw (well, that I and my mom threw; thanks, Mom), and not because of the masquerade on top of the all-consuming hole of sorrow and remorse that truly defined Gatsby. Wonder which one ended up more true.
I invited everyone I even remotely considered a friend to these parties, and you know what? They were great. These parties rocked, and I’m so glad I hosted so many of them. I had, at any given time, a list of twenty or thirty fellow high-schoolers, both my age and slightly above or below, that I could invite and regularly count on actually showing up. Looking back, it’s weird, because nowadays I can’t even imagine throwing a party and getting that many people to actually show up, unless I had the easy means of inviting an entire club of college people (which, in university, I did). Hell, now I don’t think I have twenty or thirty people I regularly interact with, let alone invite to a party at my house. But that doesn’t mean I have less friends now, of course. Perhaps less by number alone, but I’d wager I have fewer, higher quality friends now than the many, lesser quality back then. Of course, even back then, some were great friends, and I’m still close to them to this day. Most, however, were some mix of decent acquaintances, people I wanted to get to know better, people I felt compelled to invite out of either pity or social niceties, people I had crushes on, or people who came along with people I had invited. But then there’s the one that haunts me.
I had a handful of friends, eight or nine of these people that I knew in high school, who, for a time, I considered my best friends. My closest circle. Almost my clique, if you will. The people who knew me the best, who showed up to all my parties, who texted me in and out of school, and who, in turn, invited me to their own social gatherings or welcomed me into their homes. I’ll go into the whole thing in more detail at some point, because it deserves more than just a few paragraphs, but I’ll try to make the long story short. By the end of high school, I only considered three or so of them my friends, and of the dozen or so others beyond that close friend group, the other ones I used to invite, I could barely stand to be around them out of embarrassment, self-disgust, regret, and a handful of other miasmatic feelings. I didn’t hold many parties the second half of Junior year or Senior year, and the ones I did were small. That’s natural, sure, you weed out the people that don’t click with you as you get older, you whittle it down until you’ve got a core group. But this shifting of allegiances, for me, happened quickly and, so it felt at the time, dramatically. My graduation party, in retrospect, feels like a social obligation, not a celebration, compared to where I was at the time. It was like night and day, flipping of switches, and the parties soured soon after. Things did not get better until well into college.
Maybe I felt differently at the time, perhaps my memory is fouled and I did hold parties and invite many people my junior and senior year and I felt great about it, but looking back now, those parties feel like stopgaps. Or bandaids over an ailing wound. Or weak attempts at rebuilding my own social standing, with this person or that. So it is very, very strange, to go back into these photos to find a very specific picture I took one day in 2014, at a small gathering at my house (according to my journal, anyway). It is a strange feeling to go back into those memories and rummage around, bumping into people I thought I had moved on from. Bumping into, actually, the one specific person it was hardest to move on from. He was there. This was long before things fell apart, this was when things were still bright and the future was shining. It’s a weird mix of nostalgia, despair, and a matter-of-factness to dig into those memories. I know what would come to pass after that day, how things would turn out in the long run. I know that maybe it was for the best, or at the very least out of my control, the way things happened. But it doesn’t make it easier. This is what haunts me, just as I am haunted by the face in the window we saw that day. I thought I lost it, but like a whistling revenant, it still comes slithering back.
Do you see it? There’s not much to see there, in that gloomy, darkened picture of the front of the home that I grew up in. That’s the window to the computer room, where my mom worked in, in those days, where Cleo slept. But there’s a face in it, stuck into the mesh screen that covered the open space in the wall. We don’t know who it is, or how it got there, or what trick of the lights came together to pull it off. But we did all see it, that day. I wasn’t even the one to notice it. Here’s a close-up, contrast-up of it. It’s literally a photo of the photo on someone else’s phone. That’s why there are fingers at the top.
My house was apparently built in the 1920’s or 30’s, one of the older houses in the town and definitely the first in the neighborhood. It was originally just a one-room shack, a home for the railroad operator who helped to manage the town’s station on the way to Chicago. It’s been added on to several times over the years, with the original rooms now only being a bathroom, laundry room, and crawlspace under the stairs in the middle of the house. Whatever was originally part of the house has been covered over so many times that even the dirt under the floorboards has been covered up with new dirt, it seems. If there’s a ghost in my house, it might as well be all the ghosts of the houses that came before mine, something we’ve been trying to build on top of for years. But sometimes, in the renovations, something gets unearthed. I tried to layer over it, with other experiences and new friends and the warpings of time, but the memories still groan under the stairs and seep out through the windows from time to time.
The only reason I’m thinking about this now is because just over the weekend I was spending time with some of my friends from my hometown, the ones I went to high school and stayed in touch with. The ones that actually had my back, and liked me for me. Or, at least the ones that were in town. There were two that couldn’t make it, but they were missed sorely. We had a little friendsgiving, the few of us, and we got on the topic of ghost stories, and I mentioned my old house and the lights flickering and stuff that my mom describes happening in there. But it wasn’t even me that brought up the face; that was my other friend, who, according to my journal, wasn’t even there that day. Perhaps he was there and I neglected to write him down (though that seems rather rude of me; sorry, Kyle), or perhaps something about that image left a mark on his own psyche. Was it the sense that this happy, friendly place was haunted? Was it just the eerie nature of the screaming visage in the window? Was it that we talked about it for months afterward as a cheap novelty topic? It could be any or all of the above. But his comment opened something up for me, something that I had forgotten, or maybe willfully buried away in the wake of the things that came later. But I remembered something else about that day, something that did give me considerable pause then and still gives me pause now.
That wasn’t the only face in the window that evening. I did not note this in my journal (or perhaps my memory betrays me, and these are two separate occasions), but later that night, as my friends were standing by the fire, preparing to leave, I saw another face. Not in the computer room window to my house, but across the yard, in the back window of my garage. Behind everyone else, who was facing the fire, I swore, just for a moment, that someone walked by the deep black window of the garage, stopped, and stared out at us. At me. And then I blinked, and they were gone. I squinted and looked and shook myself, trying to ignore it. I didn’t say anything to my friends. I checked the garage later, after they’d left. The door was shut and there was no one there. I never saw it again.
There is no proper ending to this story. It is the same ending that any story about my life should have, until the day I die. “And on it goes,” or “and yet it moves,” or something vaguely meaningful like that. I don’t think we saw anything real that day, house window or garage window or any other window in between, but who am I to say? There were other things playing tricks on us then, things that wouldn’t come to fruition until years later. Things I only think I begin to understand now. And I will surely say the same of myself seven, fifteen, twenty-five years down the road from today. But these are the things that haunt me, or at least some of them. I could find some in any memory I did up, but this is one that, in part, has especially followed me. And I don’t think I’ll be able to shake it for a long time.
And still, onward I go.
That was the proper end, originally, but wait, before you go, I have one more story, this one taking place in the present day. I wrote this ending paragraph before I wrote the whole piece above, originally as an explanation for why it’s so short (so much for that), so even though it’s a total mood-shift, I wanted to share it anyway. As much as I may bluster about a “factual, reality-oriented worldview,” I’m still one of the most gullible people I know. I posted one of those rare Mew Oreos on Ebay because I actually found one and thought, well, why the hell not try to make some money out of it? This was back in September, see, and just this weekend I got what looked like a legitimate offer from someone willing to buy this dumb cookie for $3,000. They seemed legit enough, with a reasonable email and a New Hampshire address, so I went along with it for a while. Thankfully, I’m not gullible enough to be entirely scammed. To make a long story short, I spend the better half of this evening, some three hours or so, digging into PayPal’s tracking code verification functions, automated email etiquette, and general security and fraud advice to figure out whether or not this guy was legit and catch ’em redhanded. Well, I did the research, but you already know the answer; of course it wasn’t legit. My brief dreams of being $3,000 richer came and went as quickly as the Oreos themselves. Alas, these dreams be as fleeting as ghosts.
I know it was my idea, but I kinda love the photobomb posts! I want more of them! 😉