I can’t believe it’s already Halloween! And with it, I can’t believe the 2019 run of 31 Ghosts is completed! Thank you, everyone, for coming along for this ride! If you’ve missed stories, I’m going to update the “Stories” tab at the top of the page with this year – things have been a little busy lately. I’m planning on keeping writing – I think I’m going to try my hand at NaNoWriMo this year. Yikes, that starts tomorrow! I hope to have more for y’all to read soon! Until then, not all ghosts are unwanted…

I’ve known our house was haunted since we moved in.

Footsteps in the attic, knocking on the walls, items disappearing and reappearing… we’ve had a little bit of everything. But it never felt menacing. Playful, maybe.

Once, we didn’t close the front door all the way and a gust of wind – legitimately, it was blowing like hell outside – pushed the front door open. Opie, my indoor-only cat saw his opportunity for a jail break and ran for the exit only to stop just inside the house, back arched, hair on end, hissing fiercely at something unseen in the doorway. I came out of the kitchen and saw Opie in the invisible standoff in front of the open door.

“Huh,” I said, and closed the door. “Thanks, Carl.”

Two knocks came from the wall behind me.

We have no idea where we got the name Carl, but it feels right. So, our ghost is Carl.

Recently, Carl has upped his tech game. First lights in rooms we were in would blink off…

“Carl, knock it off.”

… the light comes back on.

He’s taken to helpfully turning lights off when we’re not in a room anymore. Seriously, this ghost should be listed as a feature of this house! Not that we’re ready to move or anything.

Tom, my husband, was out of the country on a business trip. He’d been gone for almost a week. After we talked on the phone, he wished me a good night (I wished him a good morning) and I went to bed. A few hours later I heard footsteps downstairs and wondered what Carl was up to. I rolled over and went tried to go back to sleep, but the footsteps came to the foot of the stairs.

Slowly, step by step I could hear the footfalls on the steps. They reached the landing halfway and continued up slowly and steadily.

Annoyed that Carl was being particularly brazen, I got up, took two strides to the door and opened it.

I’ll never forget what I saw. The moment lasted a second but the details are still fixed clearly in my mind.

At the top of the stairs stood a man.

Not a ghost.

A man.

Dressed head to toe in black. The wood brown and chrome handle of a revolver jutted up from his waistband. A roll of silver duct tape in one black-gloved hand, a heavy black MagLite – turned off – in his other hand.

We both stood frozen for just a second.

Then his eyes hardened in annoyance that I was awake. He tensed to lunge at me.

And then something like an invisible bowling ball slammed into his midsection punching his breath out and knocking him backwards. He dropped the tape and the flashlight as his arms flailed uselessly. He fell back down the stairs and rolled down hard onto the landing, ricocheted off the wall and kept tumbling like a ragdoll down the rest of the stairs. He hit the ground with a thud.

Before I even had time to process what had just occurred, two things happened. First, red and blue flashing lights lit up the front yard. Second, the front door – which I locked, bolted and chained earlier – unlocked with audible clicks and opened.

Two officers came in with guns drawn.

“Are you okay, ma’am?”

“Yeah… yes, I… I am,” I stammered.

They pulled the gun from the unconscious man and started to handcuff him.

More police cars pulled up with sirens blaring.

“It’s good you called, ma’am,” one officer said to me.

“Call?” I said.

My phone rang on the nightstand. “Can I… get that?”

I grabbed it and it was Tom.

“Tom! How did you know to call? Oh my god,” the sound of his voice made everything sink in and I started to cry and hyperventilate.

“Whoa, whoa, Cindy, calm down,” he said. “Know to call? Honey, you called me.”

I sat down hard on the edge of the bed. “Thank you, Carl.”

So, October is almost over. How do I know? IT’S MY BIRTHDAY! Like my birthday itself, I had a hard time with my story today. It’s not that I’m having a tough time getting older, it’s just that with the fires and evacuations and power loss (I HAVE POWER NOW!!!) it just really overshadowed the celebration of another trip around the sun. But as inevitably as my birthday came, so comes today’s story. Who would you choose to meet?

My grandmother was a witch.

I thought that was just something my dad used to say when he was fed up with having to do another chore for her. “That witch can landscape her own yard with her sorcery!” My mom just sighed and reminded him, “And what do you think her daughter is?”

He died when I was a teenager. Later, my mom explained it was true – not that my Nain should or could do her own landscaping, that she was a witch.

“So she can do spells and stuff?” I asked.

“She can…” she replied in an equivocating tone, “To an extent.” And she talked about the Welsh traditions that powered her spells didn’t hold much power in this country. “She’ll talk to you about it herself when she’s ready.”

She almost died without being ready.

Like, literally, she was on her deathbed. Congestive heart failure. She hadn’t spent a night in the hospital her entire life and now it looked like she would be spending her last nights there. At least that’s what the doctors said. Nain had other ideas. All of us were there – Mom, me, my aunt, her three boys – and Nain said “All of ya, step out for a minute. I have to talk to my girl, Carys.” That’s what she called me. Yeah, I know, my name is Alison. Carys is the diminutive of my middle name Ceridwen and it was the only name my Nain ever called me.

“Mom,” my mother started, “We’re all here for you…”

“Did I stutter?!” she said firmly. “Out! All of ya!” her Old World accent still distinct after most of a lifetime in America.

No one said anything but filed out of the room quickly until it was just my Nain and me.

“Carys, come here, dear.” I did. “What’dya know about me being as gwrach?”

“As what, Nain?”

“Gwrach. Witch. Don’t deny you’d heard about it. Yer ma told me she’d told you.”

“Nothing beyond what she told me, Nain. She just said you were a witch and that you’d tell me about it when you’re ready.”

She took in a deep, contemplative breath and broke into a coughing fit that wracked her thin frame. I was about to call for a doctor when she held her hand up in restraint. She stopped coughing, drew another long breath that wracked as she took it in, then she let it out carefully.

“I guess I thought I’d have all the time in the world,” she smiled. “But I don’t. I don’t even have past sunset,” her gaze went to the window.

“Nain, the doctors said you had a few days–“

“Hush, Carys, they don’t know what they speak of. A few hours is all. And that’s fine. It’s been a good long life. I’m ready. Well,” her eyes fell on me, “Almost ready.

“Carys, the tradition of witch is matrilinear – only woman to woman. But it skips a generation, always. So, yer ma was skipped. But you…” her smile turned mischievous as she pointed a bony finger at me. “You’ll inherit the mantle, Carys.”

“What… what does that mean?”

“Oh, I’m ‘fraid to say not much. This land is bereft of memory and the old world doesn’t hold enough sway to really allow you to do much. With one exception.”

“Oh?”

“The right of the Pentuple.”

“The pentup… what?”

“Pentuple, dear. I don’t have a lot of breath left. Pay attention. You’re 21, yes?”

I nodded.

“Every five years of age – 5, 10, 15, 20, 25” she put emphasis on the 25 as the other milestone ages were past. “Every five years of age you are granted the Right of the Pentuple. In the moments before the clock strikes midnight and your birthday begins, think of someone who isn’t living that you want to spend your day with. Anyone dead is fair game. Do you want to spend the day talking philosophy with Aristotle? Better brush up on your Greek, because for the next 24 hours you’ll get to talk with him. Maybe you’d prefer an English speaker like Amelia Earhart – you wrote that report on her in fourth grade, right?”

“How do you remember that?”

She winked at me. “At ten to twelve on the 29^th you focus on dear old Amelia and you can spend your birthday asking her about aviation, her crash, whatever you want – you’ve got her ghost for the day!”

She got serious for a moment and said, “There are some caveats, Carys. This is for you and you alone. Ya can’t have a party of it and bring yer friends around. Just. You. You can’t take them out on the town – ghosts don’t travel well. Get comfortable because those 24 hours are in the same place.”

“I don’t know what to say…” I said honestly.

“Well, you’ve got the better part of four years to think about your first Pentuple. Now give your Nain a kiss and get the lot of ‘em back in here to say goodbye.”

I leaned over and kissed her on the forehead and then went out to let my family know to go back in. My mom didn’t believe me when I told her Nain said she wasn’t going to last past the sunset. But as the shadows in the room grew longer Nain’s strength faded.

“I’m going to take a nap, I think,” she said, and everyone said their goodbyes to let her rest. I couldn’t keep the tears from falling down my cheeks. “There now, girl,” she said. “It’s not forever.”

Mom told her she would be in the waiting room if she needed anything, then she kissed Nain on the forehead before following me out the door. A few minutes after we all left her heart stopped.

Losing Nain was hard. Losing my dad was brutal, but it was a slow decline from cancer – by the end it was something of a relief, as terrible as that sounds. But Nain… she’d been such an important part of my life I didn’t appreciate fully until she was gone.

Even four years later I thought of her daily, which is why on the eve of my 25^th birthday it was she I focused on. I was living on my own in a shitty studio apartment in the flight path of SFO. I’d just broken up with my boyfriend and even if I had finished mourning my Nain, I felt I needed her then. And I had so many questions about this whole witch thing.

I stared at the alarm clock willing it to strike midnight. When the numbers flipped over, I was delighted to hear her Welsh lilt, “I told you it wouldn’t be forever!”

I leapt from my bed and ran into her arms. Real arms! “You’re really here!”

“Well, what’d you expect?”

“Oh, Nain, it’s so good to have you here! We have so much to catch up on!”

“Well, girl, you’ve got twenty-three hours and fifty-eight minutes. Let’s get going!”

And we did. And it was wonderful. We talked about being a witch – she recommended books and places in Wales I needed to go to for research. And we talked about life – mine now and hers then. She showed me the recipes from my childhood that she never wrote down. She even sang me a lullaby she used to when I was a kid. It was a needed catnap. And as midnight approached, I kissed her on the forehead and said goodbye. But it was a happy goodbye because we truly used every minute we had together.

That birthday had a profound impact on my life. Part of it was the ability to let go of my grief, part of it was having the interim time to think about what I wanted to talk to my grandmother about. Part of it, too, was finding out how to become a better witch, a task I took to heart and certainly changed the tenor of my life. I didn’t quit my job and start riding brooms, but I spent my idle time reading books about witchcraft and I traveled to Wales and joined a community I hadn’t known existed.

It also helped me come out. I talked to Nain a little about my sexuality – something I’d always been afraid to even bring up at all when she was alive, and we had a lively conversation that was supportive and encouraging.

As my thirtieth birthday came around, I tried to think about who I wanted to meet. There were a number of important women in the Witch community who I would love to pick their brain. Then there a number of artists who I considered, like Picasso or Van Gogh (obviously), but also Frida Kahlo or Georgia O’Keeffe. I’d recently finished Charlie Chaplin’s autobiography and I thought that would be fascinating.

Ultimately, though, on the eve of my thirtieth birthday I thought of my dad. He died when I was barely in high school and I never got to meet him as an adult. When I heard, “Hey Pumpkin,” it brought me back to that awkward teenager, and we spent the next 24 hours getting to know each other as people. Have you ever came out to your dead dad before? It’s a weird experience, let me tell you!

Unlike after my day with my grandmother was over, it took me a few months to unpack and re-grieve my dad. He was a new person to me now, and I had to both reconcile that with the person I knew as dad as well as let go of this really interesting, complicated, person who screwed things up from time to time and was terrible with money. It didn’t change my life as much as help me re-order it.

And it drew me closer to my mom – if that’s possible – because I got to meet the man she fell in love with and forged a family with. I felt I knew her in ways I never knew, that she could never tell me.

That was before they found her breast cancer. I was 34 and she was having a really tough time with the chemo treatments. As my birthday neared the doctors worried the cancer wasn’t disappearing as they’d hoped and her body was just wrecked.

And so it was on the eve of my birthday I struggled to think of who I wanted to spend the next 24 hours with. I went through the lists I’d made over the years. Eleanor Roosevelt was a strong contender. Malcom X, too, but I’m not sure how he’d feel about a white woman summoning him… Ultimately, though, I just wanted to be with my mom.

And when the clock struck twelve, my mom walked in and said, “Oh my god, I’m dead?”

No, I’m just kidding! That’s so messed up of me! That didn’t happen at all! No, I didn’t kill my mom by thinking of her! Wow, sorry, I had to do that, though! No, my mom is fine. I didn’t make her a ghost by thinking about her. I conjured no one and spent the day with her. We ate cake. We spent quality time together and when the day ended… I still had my mom.

Some ideas get brainstormed with Fern and I, and sometimes she throws out some ideas which I might seem like I dismiss a little too quickly. But they register, and I roll the idea around until I come up with something. This is a case in point – she suggested the impetus for this story a few weeks ago and it’s taken some time to come to fruition, but the story came around and here it is! Here’s putting the “oo” in “Boo”!

I thought we really had a thing going. He was so sweet over the phone, and he sent me the nicest text messages throughout the day – I mean, not, like, so many that it was creepy or clingy? There’s a fine line there, and Eliot (even his name was cute!) stayed clear of it.

We met online, of course – that’s how everyone meets now, right? I responded to his ad and we messaged on the site for a few days before we transitioned to email, then texting. He never pushed it, which I appreciated because I’d had some serious creeps try to ratchet things up too fast. All, “hey, let’s talk on the phone!” or “What do you mean you don’t want to meet immediately after we exchanged our first messages? I’m a nice guy!”

“A nice guy.”

But not Eliot. He never said he was a nice guy because it was like he wanted to prove he was a nice guy, you know? But I wanted to hear his voice, so we started talking over the phone. And he emailed me a picture and he had this dopey grin that just melted my heart and eyes that just, well, let’s say our conversations didn’t stay PG-13 for long.

What?! I’m a grown ass woman! If I want to talk dirty to a guy I met online I’m entitled to that! Don’t judge me. I mean, you didn’t hear Eliot’s sexy voice. He had this accent I couldn’t place. It was foreign, but I couldn’t tell if it was English, or Australian, or Irish… I’m bad with accents, okay? But, my god, it was hawt.

And so, we agreed to meet.

Okay, in fairness, I pushed for the meet. Hard.

“Look, Gina, I’m all for meeting face to face but I know you’ve been hurt before and I don’t want to rush you into anything.”

And I’m like, “No, I’m totally ready for this. We totally have to meet because you’re driving me crazy and I really want to…” Okay, well, you get the point.

So, we agreed to meet. Over the phone we settled on the time and place. Eight PM. The Starbucks on Cleveland. I sent him an email reminder – which he confirmed. The day of our texts were full of things like, “Can’t wait to see you tonight at 8 at Starbucks on Cleveland,” to which he responded, “I can’t wait either.”

So, when I was at the Starbucks on Cleveland at 8pm and he wasn’t, I got really worried. I texted him. No response. I called him – straight to voicemail. I texted and called him every five minutes for the next hour. Nothing.

The MFer ghosted me.

No messages, no email responses, no nothing. Radio f’ing silence.

I gave him the benefit of the doubt for a day or two – maybe his distant grandmother in London or Sydney or, Dublin got sick and he rushed to her cottage where there’s no internet or cell service or… stupid right?

But that evaporated and I got angry. I sent him selfies flipping him off. I left long voicemails that were really just long strings of profanity strung together.

And of course, I poured through his emails and texts looking for the clues that he was gonna ghost me, right? Because there had to be a clue. I didn’t find any, but I did find he referenced his work – InterCorp.

The next day I called and got the receptionist. “Hi, may I speak to Eliot Day?”

“I’m sorry, who?” he responded.

“Eliot Day? I believe he works there.”

“Well…” the guy started, “He did…”

OMG, is this guy going to tell me Eliot was fired and lied about even working there??

“But he died a few years ago. What is this in regards to? I could put you through to his former manager…”

I hung up.

He died? What the hell?

I went to Google and I found a news article I came across when I googled him previously – don’t judge, you know you do the same damn thing to a guy you’re interested in! It was about a car accident that killed an Eliot Day three years ago, but I brushed that off as some other Eliot Day because my Eliot Day was super hawt and most certainly not dead.

Except… apparently… he was.

But…

I mean…

Move on, Gina, right? So, you were ghosted by a ghost. That’s a fun story to tell on reddit, but beyond that everyone’s gonna think you’re nuts, right?

I was in bed the other night and I had just turned off the light and settled in when I heard a voice in the darkness. “Gina? Don’t be scared.”

I shrieked, turned on the light, and grabbed for the baseball bat by my bed. “I don’t know how you got in here you pervert, but I’m gonna bash your nuts in!” I yelled, bat cocked at the empty room.

“Gina,” the voice came again. I recognized the way it said my name.

“Eliot?”

“It’s me, Gina,” and a figure materialized or is it apparated? Or is that some Harry Potter crap? Okay, materialized. I recognized the dopey grin and the eyes…

“What the hell, Eliot?! You couldn’t tell me you were all,” I gestured to him, “Dead?”

“I’m sorry, Gina, I… I didn’t know how to tell you…”

“But, you’re a ghost! How could you email and text and talk…”

“I admit I’ve gotten pretty good at manipulating electronic devices over the years.”

“I’ll say,” I said. “But why’d you agree to meet if you knew you couldn’t?”

“Because… I didn’t want to let you down.”

“Well, you did.”

“Well, I did.”

“Big time.”

“Yes, big time.”

We stood there staring at each other. Finally, I said, “So… now what?”

“We could keep talking. I really like you, Gina…”

“But you’re dead. You’re a ghost. What kind of relationship can I have with a ghost?”

“I thought we really connected.”

“We did. But, I mean, what if I want, you know, more than just talking,” I realized that sounded bad and quickly added, “I mean, hanging out or something.”

“I don’t have to be this visible ghost,” he disappeared and his voice came velvety behind my right ear. “I can just be near you.” Part of me wanted to call him a perv ghost, but if I’m honest, I got chills – and not the scary kind. The weak-in-the-knees kind.

“Is…” I stammered, “Is that… all you can do?”

The voice came into my other ear now, just as velvety, just as softly, “Why don’t you put down that bat and I’ll show you.”

I put the bat down. I got into bed. I’m not telling you anymore. Okay, okay, we’re still, uh, seeing each other or whatever. It’s fun. It’s no pressure. It’s fantastic. Yeah, sure, it’s a little weird, but it’s also hella hawt.

Don’t judge me!