Every family has stories. What we live through together. What we live through apart. Stories within stories within stories. Layers of events – and the retelling of those – which gives each family its unique stamp.
Tom’s family tells hunting and fishing stories. Repeated again and again. They sit around the table at deer season, year after year after year after year, telling and retelling the same stories. The main storyteller talks; the others chime in now and then to insert an important point…a perspective that might be lost if not repeated. It holds them together, their stories and especially the telling. Even more important with so many of the main characters gone now…
Tom and I had been married several years before I realized that his family doesn’t have any ghost stories. No stories about scary things that can’t be explained. Amazing. I grew up in a big, sprawling extended family full of stories where the best ones almost always include a ghost or two. Maybe it’s an Ozarks thing, but pretty much all our houses were haunted. Sometimes the monsters walked in skin. Sometimes they were spirits. Sometimes something else.
When I was a young girl…oh, 13 or so…I slept in a bedroom that was on the opposite end of the house from my parents and sisters. It was one short hall away. I know that now, but back then it felt like I slept at the other end of the world. I liked the solitude mostly. Back then I was a cranky, adolescent who took herself way too seriously. One of those teenagers who stayed in her room a lot, doing homework, reading, listening Herman’s Hermits on the radio. I preferred it there in my room by myself. I wanted my privacy. Me. My. Mine.
Until the lights went out.
It waited until I shut off my light for sleep.
I would read back then. Book after book after book. Sometimes for hours before turning off the light for sleep. Almost as soon as the lights were off, I would hear it. Someone in the living room, kicking back in the recliner. A double thumping sound. No mistaking it.
I’d wait…hoping to hear more. The television coming on or the refrigerator door opening. But there would be nothing. No familiar human sounds to accompany the unexplained movement of dark furniture in an empty room.
I’d hold my breath and pray for protection. Then wait again. In the dark. Forever. Heart racing. Shallow breaths. Straining, straining to hear something that would signal that someone…some person…had gotten up and was doing normal, middle-of-the-night insomnia things.
More than once I wished I could be one of those people who got scared and just pulled the covers up over her head and finally fell asleep. My favorite cousin, Sandy, was like that. When we’d scare each other telling ghost stories, her greatest defense was to pull the covers up over her head and disappear. But not me. I had to see what was coming after me.
Plus I can’t breathe under there.
Finally, when waiting was too painful, too terrifying, I’d run the hundred miles across my dark room, sure something was under the bed just waiting for my feet to hit the ground so it could grab my ankle and pull me under. I’d flip on the light, then tippy toe down the long hall, and peek around the corner to see if there was a light on in the living room.
No. Only dark, quiet house.
Turn on the kitchen light. Then the dining room. Moving from room to room, flipping on lights. I’d tippy toe all the way into the living room, hoping to find someone playing a joke. But there’d be no one. Just the recliner…always upright. Always quiet. Always still. Waiting for my shaky examination of the shadows of things that move and hide and go bump in the night.
Except for that one time, when I walked in to find the rocker moving back and forth, like someone had just stood up.
Another time, when I was a little older…14 or 15, I think…I’d been lying in my bed reading. It was way past my bedtime, late, probably midnight. I had just turned off light and closed my eyes. Immediately, I felt someone or some thing hovering above me. I opened my eyes and standing right next to my bed, leaning over me, was a young woman, her red hair put up in enormous rollers, wearing a pink granny gown. She was glowing, illuminated. Smiling. A halo of pink light surrounding her.
I started to sit up in bed. As I did, she started to move away from me. Float is a better word. No glide. She started to glide away from me.
“Hey!” I said.
She just kept gliding slowly across the room.
I sat up a little farther. Pointed my finger at her, “HEY!”
She just kept smiling and gliding. As she passed by my mirror, I remember thinking…I want to remember this…that I’m seeing this…this…whatever it is…that it is reflected in every detail in my mirror, all the way down to her pink light.
By the time she reached my closet (in the far corner of my room) and disappeared, I was sitting all the way up, arm out, reaching for her:
“HEY!!!”
As soon as she was gone, I hopped out of bed and ran to turn on the overhead light. Everybody knows that if you can get to the light switch before ghosts and/or monsters grab you, they disappear…since it is common knowledge that Light scares the crap out of ghosts and monsters and sends them scurrying back to where they came from.
As I walked past my mirror on the way back to the bed (I slept w/the light on that night. I slept with the light on a LOT of nights.) I saw it again in the mirror.
Red hair. Huge rollers. Pink granny gown. Only the pink aura was missing.
It was me.
I have no explanation for it. None. Why would I see myself standing over me and then float away and disappear? I never saw it again, and that was a good thing.
I was 19. Living in York, Nebraska with my cousin and her husband. I had gone there between college semesters to work for the summer. I was holding down 3 part-time waitress jobs. Each job had a different uniform.
One afternoon I was getting ready for my Pizza Hut job. At that time the uniforms were dresses (boy, THAT takes you back). Navy blue rayon A-line with white collar and big pockets. Nametag and red Pizza Hut logo. That particular day, I had laid out my slip with my uniform. Then, suddenly I couldn’t find it anywhere. Nothing so unusual now…but I was younger.
I looked in all the obvious places…drawers and hamper. Then the less obvious…under the bed, behind the dresser. I finally completely tore down the covers and top sheet on my bed (which surprisingly enough I had actually made earlier), thinking that I might have accidentally made my slip up into the bed. Which made no sense, since I’d had my slip after my bed was made, but I was getting desperate. I literally tore my tiny basement bedroom apart.
Finally, I thought maybe I’d lost my mind and put it back in the washer or dryer, so I went to the laundry room.
Nope.
I walked back into my room and there was my slip, folded neatly…no…perfectly…laying right on top of all the tousled covers on my bed. I was alone in the basement and even though it was afternoon…and there was light…it totally freaked me out.
A week or so later, I was in bed. It was late…maybe 3 a.m. or so. I worked late hours at 2 of my jobs, so it wasn’t unusual for me to be awake at 3. I was watching the silver of the moonlight, streaming down through my little basement window, and thinking about how amazing it was that it was literally illuminating my room. As I lay watching, a dark fog or mist, started to seep through the window and down the wall. At first, I thought it was a natural phenomena…somehow fog outside was finding its way inside. But then it started to get thicker. Then thicker. And even thicker. Finally, it was pouring down…dark, thick mist…swirling and pooling on the floor next to my bed. Then, as I watched, it started to rise back up, to swirl and become denser. To take shape. The shape of a man. No features. Just tall, very tall and very dark and very close to my bed…and me.
I knew I had to get to the light switch, but the only way to do that was to go through him. I threw back the covers and jumped out of bed. I must have closed my eyes, because I don’t remember actually running through him…but when I turned on the light and looked back to see what was there, he was gone.
One last story…
I was still in York when this happened.
I’m in the basement sleeping. Deep, hard sleep. It’s the middle of the night. Right next to my ear, an inhuman voice, something…a cross between a growl and snarl, like nothing I’ve ever heard before or since (well, maybe in The Exorcist) says,
“Che-e-e-e-r-r-r-r-r-ie…”
Before my eyes are even open, I’m screaming like a skinny blond in a horror movie. I’m screaming before I even know I’m screaming. I don’t fly out of the bed this time. This time I do NOT want to go through or past whatever has made that noise. Which is a real problem, because I want out of that bedroom like I’ve never, ever wanted anything in my life. Something…something horrible and unimaginable…is in this blacker-than-black room with me.
My cousin, Stephen, a couple years older than I, is also sleeping downstairs in another part of the basement. I start screaming his name. “Steeeee-phen!”
Then…I can’t wait for rescue, I’ll have to chance it…and I’m up and moving toward the door when I realize that…I’m not dressed. And when I say not dressed, I mean NOT dressed. No pj’s on me. No top. Just underpants.
What can I say, it was summer in the 70’s…
Stephen, who is also scared shitless…being wakened from a dead sleep by my bloodcurdling scream…he’s pretty sure I’m being murdered in my bed…is running in the door while I’m yelling, “No! No! Don’t come in! Don’t turn on the light!!” meanwhile I’m whirling and grabbing at and yanking off blankets and sheets and pillows and anything else I can get my hands on so I can get myself covered up and away from the demon.
I manage to get myself wrapped up, more or less (at least all the important parts are covered) and stumble/run/fall out the door. By this time, the whole house is awake, which suits me just fine, since there is no way I want to be up by myself.
There are more stories to tell, of course. But the sun is up and it’s time to warm up my coffee and move into this day.
Happy Halloween.
