Who you gonna call?

I’m thoroughly convinced ghosts exist, and that I have seen them; different occasions in different locations, sometimes recurring. One such recurring location was in the house where I grew up. It was built near an old Native American burial ground. My friend, Andrew, used to find an arrowhead in the horse pasture behind our house every time he came over.

Our home was a small rectangular basement house. The rooms on the back side of the house didn’t have windows, as they were completely underground. This was great for sleeping; with the lights off and the door shut, they were completely pitch-black. My parent’s room was on the front of the house, and had one large double window. There was a hallway with two doors on each side. The first door on the front side of the house was the bathroom, and the second was my parent’s room. The first door on the back side of the house was my room, and the second was my stepsister’s room.

From time to time when I looked down the hallway, I would see something moving from my stepsister’s room to my parent’s, or vice versa. You might think it was just the dark hallway and my imagination playing tricks on me. I know that’s what I chalked it up to for the first dozen-or-so times I saw it. But I started to notice that I could usually only see them when there was enough light coming through my parent’s window to illuminate the hallway. I saw them more and more, sometimes from closer positions too. I won’t lie; they scared the ever-loving-shit out of me. For the most part, they were colorless, like a shade of grey. But not grey. I don’t recall them being translucent. They were usually out of focus, blurry. They were kind of short in stature, and when they were clear enough to make out, they looked as though they were a person walking somewhat hunched over. Sometimes they were clear enough to make out; it seemed their clarity grew exponentially the closer I was, but they were never close enough to make out intricate details. Mostly it was just one wispy image sneaking into either room, but sometimes it was two, and on rarer occasion there might be three. They never turned to look at me, or even seemed to be aware of my presence. I was sure-as-hell aware of theirs though, and sometimes I would break into stride and run through the hallway to my room, where I would shut the door and dive across the room into my bed. I saw them less often once I moved into my stepsister’s larger room at the end of the hall, but I still saw them. They continued to appear, ever sporadically, until my last day living in that house.

On a few occasions, I did awaken in the middle of the night to find someone in my room. I had poor vision and wore coke-bottle glasses every day past the third grade, so everything in my room, without my glasses, was blurry. Once I awoke to find my mother standing beside my bed, leaning over me, watching me sleep. The next morning, my mother was no longer wearing a white nightgown, and I asked her why she changed. She said she didn’t own a white nightgown. I asked her why she was standing in my room the night before, and she swore she had never set foot in my room that night. I was petrified. My mother wasn’t one to lie about things like that to scare me. I started sleeping with my bedspread pulled over my face, and to this day I still sleep that way if the temperature permits.

When I was in my early teens I spent every other weekend at my stepmother’s house. I had a stepsister there that was only two months younger than me, so we got along pretty well. It was in a really small town, one of those one-stoplighters, and there wasn’t really anything to do. So we rode out bikes around town a lot. There was an old broken down house on the opposite side of our block. And elderly couple had died there, first the husband, followed about a year later by the widow. We used to see someone staring out of the window to one of the rooms upstairs. I saw her, my stepsister saw her, and if we happened to have a friend with us, they would sometimes see her as well. We we’re all pretty convinced that it was just something sitting in the room, something on the wall, or the glass, or some drapes. So one day we all got the bright idea to go check it out for ourselves; a little innocent breaking and entering. When we found an unlocked window on the side of the house, I was boosted inside and went to open the front door and let the others inside. We all got pretty nervous because the entire house had been cleaned out. We found the room, and the window, and both were empty; nothing to reflect the light, nothing to show through the window. We all got pretty freaked out and bolted out the front door, never to look back. We never rode out bikes around that corner again; all certain the old widow would be pissed that we had been in her house.

There were some other occasions, but the details all seem to escape me right now. I never believe something until I see it, and sometimes I don’t believe it even if I do see it. Yet I still believe what I saw, and I’ve always believed in ghosts. I don’t know what else they could have been, so until I’m proven otherwise, ghosts are real.