31 Ghosts – Home Repair

Earlier this year we learned that there’s some serious siding damage going on in the south wall of the house. While we’ve pushed out the actual reconstruction until after El Nino, we’re still knee deep in getting our ducks in a row and the process of general contractors, financing, etc., have been all consuming. So, it’s only fitting that this comes over into spooky territory…

Erin fell asleep to the sound of the wind through the big oak tree outside and the chimes on the deck downstairs tinkling – they’d predicted the storm would hit just after midnight and if the wind was any indication, the news meteorologist with the big hair was spot on.

“You covered the patio furniture, right?” she asked. “Matt?”

“Huh?” he rustled next to her under the bedspread. “Erin?”

“Yes – patio furniture. Did you cover it?”

“Oh… yeah. Tied it down, too – winds, you know?” Matt said sleepily. As if on cue, a particularly large gust made the leaves of a branch tappity-tap on the window.

“Thanks honey,” Erin said, kissing his head before nestling into her pillow and letting the incoming storm lull her down to sleep.

Erin woke up suddenly. Something had woken her…

She held her breath and listened, really paying attention to every sound – Matt’s little snory-snores… wind and… rain against the window. Okay, the storm has hit, she thought. Something else… footsteps downstairs. She focused on the slow, measured steps… they seemed to start in the living room… walk past the stairs towards the kitchen…

Erin quietly climbed out of bed, her feet finding her slippers as she stood and pulled on her robe. She crossed the bedroom in ten quick steps. She could hear the door to the kitchen open… then close. Then the footsteps continued into the kitchen.

She quietly moved down the stairs, turned the knob on the door to the kitchen and opened it, turning on the lights. Inside, the door to every cabinet stood wide open. Every drawer pulled out to its full extension. Even the oven and microwave doors stood open.

Erin took in the sight and sighed.

“Seriously, George?”

Her gaze was caught by the bushes moving in the wind and rain outside through the window behind the breakfast table and chairs. Her eyes caught on something on the wall… a trickle of… water?

Now Erin screamed.

“Oh yeah,” Dale, the general contractor said, tracing the dried runnel of water along the wall up to a crack in the drywall with his flashlight. Shining the beam on the seam where the wall met the ceiling, his illumination showed distinct discoloration. “Definitely got some water damage there…”

“Great…” Matt groaned.

Erin’s sigh turned into a yawn. Matt had run downstairs to see what Erin had yelled about. Finding her in the kitchen, he looked at the open cabinets and said, “Oh, it’s just George again?”

“No… look…” Erin pointed at the water.

To his credit, Matt hadn’t screamed.

The storm had blown out by the time the sun had come up, but Erin couldn’t get back to sleep. Matt waited until eight to call Dale, who had just finished their bathroom renovation earlier that year. He was on his way to another job, but agreed to swing by.

Stepping outside onto the leaf-strewn wet deck in the backyard, Dale cast his light over the siding, paying careful attention to the seams of the siding. The beam of his flashlight stopped on an edge of siding about ten feet up. “Yep, that looks like it might be the culprit. Looks like some siding might have come loose and you’ve got some water getting in with that rain and wind.”

“That doesn’t sound good,” Erin said.

Dale shook his head and frowned. “It’s not. We’ll have to open up the siding to see what kind of damage you’ve got going on in there. I’m wrapping up this job on the other side of town. If you want, I could probably get started on this next week – that way we could probably get it wrapped up before the next storm blows in. El Nino and all that…”

“Don’t remind me,” Matt said.

“We’re going to Vegas next week,” Erin reminded Matt.

“Oh, that’s right,” he nodded. “Do you need us to be here to start?”

Dale’s eyes surveyed the exterior wall. “Nah,” he said without looking at them. “I just need the key you loaned me last time. Nothing’s changed – no alarm? You still have that ghost… Jimmy?”

“George,” Erin chuckled. “Yeah, George is still around. That’s how I saw this last night – he was walking around the kitchen.”

Dale let out a breath. “That’d scare the dickens out of me. But I appreciate the heads up.”

Erin unlocked the front door while Matt wrestled their checked bag out of the back of the Uber. Swinging the door open, she felt something was… different. Stepping inside, she could see plastic sheeting on the floor leading into the kitchen. Following the trail of sheeting, she saw the translucent plastic tarps separating the kitchen from the construction – the drywall around the kitchen window had been replaced but not yet finished. Through the window in the fading light of evening she could see the scaffolding.

“Wow,” Matt came up behind her. “Dale’s been busy.”

Erin nodded. She sensed again that something had changed, but chalked it up to the construction. “I bet George is pissed,” she forced a laugh.

“I bet he is.”

Erin woke up suddenly. Nothing had woken her…

She held her breath and listened, really paying attention to every sound – Matt’s little snory-snores… but that was it. The house was silent. She listened longer… nothing. They’d been home for two weeks. Dale had finished up a few days earlier, and even the lingering scent of the paint in the kitchen had faded. But there hadn’t been any footsteps in the night. Cabinets were always closed…

Wait… there was a noise. Erin frowned in the darkness. Not footsteps. No, Erin listened to the sound of a chair scraping along the floor.

“What is that,” Matt whispered.

“Shh,” Erin replied. They both listened as another chair scraped along the floor downstairs. Then something heavier moved slowly along the floor. Erin shivered.

Matt looked at Erin and she nodded. Wordlessly, they climbed out of bed. Erin’s feet finding her slippers as she stood and pulled on her robe. They both crept quietly down the stairs as the sounds of chairs moving in the kitchen continued.

Matt placed his hand on the doorknob to the kitchen and gave Erin a look back before opening the door and flipping on the light switch. The overhead lights illuminated a scene that froze Erin’s breath in her chest – the chairs and table that normally sat against the repaired wall and window were all pushed back against the cabinets and stove, deliberately moved as far from the wall as the room allowed. All chairs except one, that is, which sat alone, its back against the newly finished wall facing them. Erin swallowed hard as she noticed the depression on the cushion of the chair. As they watched, the chair creaked as if under a weight.

“That isn’t George,” Matt said.

And then the lights went out.

31 Ghosts – Returning

“Now I want you to consider whether the following story, which I shall tell you just as I heard it, is not even more terrifying and no less wonderful than the other,” so starts Pliny the Younger’s letter to his friend, Licinius Sura during the early second century CE. Though we’re going back nearly two thousand years already, there are arguably older ghost stories —   Titus Maccius Plautus wrote his comic play, Mostellaria (The Haunted House / The Ghost) in around 200 BCE. The conceit of the play relied on audiences already familiar with ghost stories. Even older, we find the Egyptian Khonsemhab and the Ghost in the Ramesside period (roughly 12th–11th century BCE).

But I want to stick with Pliny the Younger because I think there’s an important          nuance to his story. “There stood at Athens a spacious and roomy house […] In the silence of the night the clank of iron and, […] the rattle of chains were heard, the sound coming first from a distance and afterwards quite close at hand. Then appeared the ghostly form of an old man.” The noises and apparition terrorized the occupants of the house who eventually fled. Some time later, Athenodorus the philosopher arrives in Athens and checks out the scene. Not only does he witness the ghost, but he follows it to a spot in the courtyard where it disappears — the same behavior night after night. Athenodorus has the spot excavated and — wouldn’t you know it? There was a body of a man in chains hastily buried there. They removed the chains, reburied the remains and the haunting ceased. This is more than a ghost story, though — Pliny is relaying it as fact. It’s a story he’s relaying, yes, but this very grounded Roman magistrate, statesman, and writer posits it as true.

If this ancient paranormal investigation sounds familiar, it’s probably because the trope of the ghost leading the living to their unhallowed burial underpins so many ghost stories — fictional stories, yes, but it’s also the basis of true paranormal investigations. Heck, I’ve used the trope here plenty of times. It’s a story we return to time and time again because it’s effective, it rings true.

Remember that Egyptian story about Khonsemhab I mentioned a moment ago? Want to guess what it’s about? Unlike Pliny, there’s no indication it’s true or not, but it moves the needle back quite a ways when it comes to a body denied proper burial. For centuries, it seems, we keep returning to these ghost stories…

Pliny returned to the ghost by writing it down.

Where in Athens this house existed is lost to history. The house itself, the courtyard – these, too, have almost certainly disappeared or been transformed into, who knows, a parking lot? A tourist shop? Pliny and Athenodorus have been dead for nearly two thousand years, but tonight we resurrected this story from the early days of western civilization. The world has changed utterly and completely, but we keep returning to these stories of ghosts. Mostellaria returns, Khonsemhab returns. The tropes return.

For the last nine Octobers I’ve done my best to do exactly that – returning to the old stories, to the cemeteries, to the legends. Returning to personal stories of loved ones reaching across the veil and things somebody swears happened to their cousin’s roommate. Returning to some of the same tropes Pliny wrote down two thousand years ago, using a ghost to comedic effect like Plautus because you know what it’s like to be scared by that which we can’t explain and sometimes it’s gentler to laugh than cry.

And so, again, we return to 31 Ghosts.

I really want to call this year “31 Ghosts X” but having lived through the late 90’s/early aughts when practically every name had to be X-treme or Xcelerate, calling it “31 Ghosts X” sounds like some sort of millennial energy drink – “spooky, but potent!”

Though, I feel like I’ve earned the right to my silly “31 Ghosts X” moniker this year. Ten years of returning every October to summon the spirits for stories that unearth the nature of the living as well as the dead. Looking back at what we have all been through over the last ten years, none of us would claim to be the same person we were when I thought writing a ghost story for every day this month would be a fun idea. I mean, 2020 itself lasted at least thirteen years, right?

But returning isn’t the same as repetition. In our digital world, we return to Pliny very differently than when Licinius Sura opened that proverbial envelope. And I return to the tenth year of 31 Ghosts a very different person than that guy who wanted to see if he could rise to his own challenge.

Welcome back for another round of spooky stories. We’ll inevitably tread on some familiar (if unhallowed) ground, but it’s a new year – I’m a new me, and you’re a new you. Let’s see what these ghosts can tell us this year!

31 Ghosts – The House at the End of Sycamore Street

We did it again! We made it to Halloween, the 31st night of October for the ninth straight year. Thank you all so much for coming along for another year of 31 Ghosts. I hope you’ve enjoyed these stories as much as I’ve enjoyed putting them together for you. Now is the time in this editorial that I promise to write more stories or finally publish the second (and third?) edition of the print version of 31 Ghosts. But, you know what? I’m going to see what happens. As the calendar turns to November, we’ll see what happens. Maybe there’s ghosts that don’t confine themselves to October alone… Thanks again, everyone. Hope your Halloween has been spooky!

We lived on the edge of the suburbs, right up against old farmlands that climbed into the foothills. Our subdivision, like so many in the area, had been farmland not so long ago. So, when we were growing up, the old farmhouse at the end of the street didn’t seem particularly out of place.

Creepy? Very much. While our white, gray, and blue houses were cookie cutter models with still small, spindly trees struggling to grow in our newly planted yards, the Midgley place (though none of us kids had any idea who the Midgleys were – we all just knew that was the name) was dark wood, peeling paint, and rusted shutters. We’d occasionally see a car go onto the property, but we never saw anyone in the house – though Joey swore he see lights upstairs at night.

Suffice it to say, we’d all give the place a wide berth.

At least we would every day of the year except for one.

On Halloween, when we were old enough to go trick or treating by ourselves we’d always work our way down Sycamore Street, criss-crossing back and forth until we made our way to the last two houses.

We stood in front of the Midgley place, right where the sidewalk ended and the dirt road ran up the lane to the dark, imposing house lurking in the darkness.

“You said you were going to do it,” Joey said to me.

“Yeah,” Tamara said. “You’re not going to chicken out now, are you?” She was a year younger than us, but she was mean.

“Alan said he was going to do it, he’s going to do it,” Sam patted my shoulder confidently. Then, more quietly just to me, “You are going to do it, right? You’re not chickening out?”

I stared ahead and nodded. “I’m going to do it,” I said. I took a deep breath and started up the dirt driveway. I swear the night got colder and darker not ten feet after I’d left my friends watching me from the safety of the street.

I could feel their gazes on me, and I kept repeating to myself, “Don’t look back, don’t look back,” because I knew if I did I’d lose my nerve and run back. No, I kept my eyes forward on the dark porch of the farmhouse that kept getting closer as my feet carried me down the driveway.

Finally, I reached the steps. I put my hand on the railing, feeling the pronounced grain of the wood sharp and scratchy under my hand. I took one step onto the first creaking stair, and the second step bowed under my weight but didn’t break. I stepped onto the porch and felt a board crack under my feet, stepping quickly to the side before it gave way. Enveloped by the shadows of the porch, my hands were sweaty as I stepped up to the door.

I took a deep calming breath, raised my fist, and knocked three times on the peeling door. It sounded like three peals of thunder – or at least that’s what it seemed like to me. After the third knock I added, “Trick or Treat,” in a voice I tried to keep steady, but it came out as a question, nonetheless.

The door never moved. No lights winked on. I didn’t discern any movement at all. But I felt a shift in my pillowcase of candy gripped tightly in my hand. I opened the bag and looked in and there was a king size Baby Ruth sitting on top of the other candy. I gasped and stepped quickly but carefully down the porch steps and ran back to my friends at the end of the driveway.

“We heard you knock, Alan,” Sam said. “I knew you would,” he added confidently.

“What happened?” Tamara asked.

“I knocked, and then I felt something in my bag and…” I opened my bag and showed them the massive king size Baby Ruth. They all gasped. I could see them looking from the bag to the house, then back to the bag, weighing whether it was worth it.

In the end they decided it wasn’t.

Over the course of the year, the story had grown through retelling to include phantom lights, somehow a glowing dog chased me… I don’t know who or how it got embellished. I certainly never added to it, but I wasn’t going to complain when, in the retelling I managed to come off as some incredibly brave adventurer. But that next Halloween, they dared me to do it again. And I did. And I got a king sized Butterfinger. And still, no one dared try their luck.

The Midgley place got knocked down before the next Halloween, so I didn’t a chance for another king sized candy bar. They turned the whole property into a county park, complete with planted trees that grew up with me. By the time my parents sold me their house, the trees were respectable and the park seemed overgrown and darker than it should be at night after the park rangers locked the front gate.

So when our own twins were old enough to trick or treat on their own, I might have eavesdropped on them being dared by their friends to go see the phantom lights in the park on Halloween.

But that’s a story for another Halloween…