It’s October again and you know what that means… It’s time for 31 Ghosts! This is the third year I endeavor to bring you a ghost story every day of the month through All Hallows’ Eve. The yellowing leaves are starting to fall, the temperature (at least at night) is growing chilly as the days get shorter and the shadows grow longer.

Earlier this year I moved back into downtown Guerneville. My buddy’s lower unit had taken on four feet of water and his tenant left town almost as quickly as the floodwaters. Before the flood and before that tenant, my friend’s boys lived down here off and on. They talked about at least two ghosts down here — one that haunted towards the back of this lower level near the bathroom and the other… the other had some definite ideas about what to watch on the TV. They said they’d have activity when they started watching scary movies — lights flickering, bumps, cold spots. One of the boys’ friends claimed a ghost kept whispering in his ear that they shouldn’t be watching scary movies so vehemently that he had to seek psychiatric help afterwards. Missed like a month of school. Wasn’t the same afterwards…

I lived down here then for about six weeks between houses. With a huge dog and two cats in one room, it was easy to blame any unexplained noises on the cats or the dog… even if they were in the same room with me. The hallway light flickered on occasion, but that constituted the paranormal experiences I had in my first time here.

Fern and I came to help as soon as we could after the water receded. That first weekend was a mess of hauling out soaking debris and pulling down soggy drywall. Numerous times coming in and out I swear I saw a cat out of my corner of my eye. Nothing definite — I’d tell you it was a black cat, but I don’t know that I caught enough of its slinky figure moving among the tools, mops, and buckets to really be sure. But it wasn’t a single time. Power was shut off, there was still standing water, maybe it was just a trick of light, but I kept seeing that cat.

It brought be back to the middle of February, 2014. We were told my mom wouldn’t last the night, so racing to the airport turned into a forced quiet of unknown in an airplane hurtling through the night. We made it. Long after midnight we got to the hospital bed set up in the family room of my mom’s small home. She was sleeping. My sister Jenny asked if Jack, Jay, or I would stay with mom overnight and I volunteered immediately. Jenny had already made the hospice nurse, Augustina, get some rest and in short order I was alone with my mom. Wracked with an obscenely fast-moving cancer diagnosed less than three weeks earlier she lay unconscious. The only sounds in the room came from the rise and fall of the mechanical oxygen machine. The only light shone a weak orange glow from the bulb about the range in the adjoining kitchen.

“Jenny and Jill said I should sleep. The aid said I should sleep (she just came out and said it again),” I wrote in my journal. “Not now. Now I feel I need to be present. She’s drugged asleep, I know that. But she’d do it for me. I will sleep later. Now breaths are finite and even if it’s just watching her, so be it.

“Oh, and the ghosts,” I wrote. “Sitting here watching her there are shadows flittering at the edge of my peripheral vision. I feel people standing behind me – that uncanny feeling. I can’t discern who it is/ they are, but it’s unmistakable.” There was a cat there that morning. I saw it slip around the coffee table and move around the bed. At least one other person told me later they had seen a cat in the room another time. My mom didn’t have a cat.

I’d mentioned in the first 31 Ghosts entry my dad died on October 1. I remember very vividly as a teenager watching my dad in his last days seem to unwind like a watchspring, making statements that didn’t make any sense in context… or maybe they did. Once, I remember, he startled and demanded, “I need the key!”

“What key, dad?”

“I need the key, goddamnit, I need the key!”

“Dad, there’s no key.”

He was desperate now, “I need the key to open the door! I need the key!”

Maybe he was seeing the final door he wouldn’t get to for another few days.

My mom’s last morning she lay mostly unconscious, incoherent. “Around 3 in the morning Augustina was resting on the couch next to my mom. Suddenly mom woke up with a cry of ‘Nana! Nana, wait!’ She turned to Augustina and said, ‘I have to go now. Tell my family I love them.’ And then she lapsed into the state she was in before.” She died twelve hours later.

I still see them both – mom and dad – in dreams, mostly. A smell of my mom’s favorite hand lotion sometimes. I hear my dad laugh. Ghosts. Shadows…

It’s October again. The living have had the last eleven months, so I’m taking this one for the dead. 31 Ghosts has begun.