When I was laying out 31 Ghosts: Volume 2 I noticed a lot of these editorials for the last two years focused on how busy I was and “this is going to be short because I have a long day” or “splitting this into a thousand entries because I’m working another gig this weekend.” I’ve deliberately tried not to do that this year. But by not mentioning it, I noticed I’ve not really said anything ahead of some of these stories and that doesn’t feel right either! So, okay, It’s Saturday night and I’m exhausted because I worked a 9-hour gig at a wedding which followed a 14-hour day Friday and Thursday, and Tuesday. Despite that, I’ve been trying hard to put in good, normal-sized stories. Tonight, though, the week is catching up to me. I feel this ghost right now.

Edit: I wrote the above fully expecting this to be a really short entry. It turned out to be more normal-sized than I expected. And now I’m going to sleep.

“Is he there?” the voice came through the radio.

I turned on the camera and focused it on the old wrought iron bed frame. Despite the lack of mattress and the rusty springs, through the lens of the camera a figure clearly lay on its side on the bed. Looking at the figure, though, it became immediately apparent that the figure wasn’t solid – you could see the far side of the bed through its prone body. 

“Yep,” I said assembling the tripod and fixing the camera looking at the figure, “he’s still here.”

“You sure you want to do this?”

The last time I made my way up to this bedroom in the deteriorating house I noticed a wooden chair mostly intact on its side in the corner. I set it upright and sat slowly, testing my weight to make sure the ancient thing wouldn’t shatter. It held and I let out a sigh of relief, “I am. I’ve got a comfortable chair here. I’ll be good.”

“It’s an hour until morning…”

“I’m three Red Bulls in,” I laughed. “I think I’m good.”

“I’ll check in periodically,” the voice came back.

I smiled, “Thanks, Dan.”

When I say this is a “deteriorating” house, I’m being kind. It’s one of a number of places that dot the hills of West Virginia, abandoned and slowly being reclaimed by nature. Dan and I started exploring the Appalachian hills at night looking for ghosts. Despite some seriously spooky discoveries, we never thought we’d come across something like this.

This location was a rare two-story house that once must have had a commanding view of the valley below. But the road up here washed out decades ago – we had to park on one side of the missing road and pack our equipment the remaining couple miles to the place. When we got here, it was further gone than we expected when we spotted it from in the valley – the face of the house with the amazing overlook still looked impressive, but like a sick patient who tries to put his best face on when he goes out in public even though his illness has consumed his body – that’s this place. Half the roof had fallen in, tearing the staircase down with it.

That’s why Dan is on the radio – he’s safely on the first floor. I’m the idiot who clambered up to the second floor on our first visit. But that first visit was also when I carefully made my way into the master bedroom, my foot plunging through the rotting floor once on the way. But there the figure was, laying on its side.

At first, I thought it was the homeowner still inhabiting house and almost ran out, but then I realized that, no, no one had been in this place for a long time – it was a hell of a thing climbing up to the second floor. Who would do that on a regular basis? No, this resident wasn’t living.

After getting over my initial terror, I started getting curious. It helped that the figure just seemed to be… sleeping. I mean, you expect ghosts to terrorize you – and most do! But this one… I mean, it kind of snored a little sometimes.

I tried to wake it up. I know, not the greatest idea – let sleeping ghosts lie, right? But we found a ghost! I guess we wanted it to… I don’t know… perform. I shouted at it to no avail. I even reached out to shake it awake. It’s a ghost, so you can imagine how well that went.

Dan had the idea at first. “Maybe, I don’t know, the ghost wakes up when morning comes?” he said as we ate in the Waffle House in Charles Town as the sun started to rise after the first visit.

“A ghost waking up? Ghosts come out at night, everyone knows that!”

“Do we? I mean, yeah, we always think of ghosts coming out at night, you know – haunting dark corridors and all that shit. But, we’ve both read about encounters that occur in daytime.”

“Right, but just because there are ghosts during daylight, that doesn’t mean ghosts sleep.”

“Why not?” Dan took a long sip of his Diet Coke.

“Why would ghosts sleep? I mean, that’s the whole thing, right? They’re not resting in peace.”

“Maybe,” he agreed. “But it’s worth trying, isn’t it?”

It was worth trying. We made plans for another visit later in the night so we could stay and see if the ghost woke up.

That’s why sat in the chair watching the translucent figure ostensibly sleeping with an unhealthy amount of energy drink coursing through my body.

It had been getting gradually lighter and the pre-dawn glow illuminated the interior of the house Dan and I had just seen by flashlight to this point. What previously looked creepy now just looked… sad. As the first rays of the morning shone through the broken eastern-facing windows, I stared around at the peeling wallpaper and thought about how people lived here and left for some reason – it’s one thing to ghost hunt in abandoned places, but it’s another to see the tragically sad reality in the literal light of day.

Dan’s voice on the radio pulled me out of my reverie. “Hey, Ali,” the radio crackled to life. “Looks like your ghost is waking up!”

I turned back to the figure and, sure enough, it looked like it was turning over and… stretching? Yawning?

The ghost sat up. I could see now that it was an elderly man, sparse white hair on his head had the look of bedhead. I could make out that he wore a faded and torn blue and white sleep shirt. He looked at me and froze.

Our eyes locked and now I was afraid.

“Why are you in my house?” the ghost demanded, accusingly.

“Umm,” I stammered – what a brave ghost hunter I was! “I, uh, we were exploring abandoned houses and found you sleeping here.”

He scowled and the sight was immediately terrifying… until an enormous yawn interrupted his scowl. Seemingly aware his scare wasn’t so scary after the yawn he said in a more regular voice, “Okay, sure, that makes sense.” Then, more seriously, “But no one likes being watched when they’re sleeping! That’s creepy! And I’m a ghost! Nothing should be creepy to me!”

“So, you know you’re a ghost?” I asked surprised.

“Well, of course I know I’m a ghost – I’m dead, aren’t I? And I’m still here, so…” he gestured to himself, “ghost.”

“Why are you here then?”

He took a deep breath and started, “Sonny, I lived a very successful life.” He looked around the room and scowled, but it looked more sad than scary now. “It doesn’t look like much now, I suppose, but this was a pretty grand place when I was alive.” He smiled at a memory, “June loved this place…”

“Your wife?”

He nodded sadly. “She was, yes.”

“Don’t you want to go to her in… you know…” I gestured wildly, “In the great beyond or whatever? Go into the light?”

“Well, I don’t know she wants to me there. See, I was very successful because I worked all the time. ‘Married to my job,’ she’d say.” He smiled wryly, “She wasn’t wrong. I came home one day and she was gone. Left a note saying she wanted to live and not just wait around for me. She was a wonderful woman – I couldn’t blame her. I told myself I would go find her, but… work.”

“Okay,” I said, “but just because she may not want to see you, isn’t the Other Side like, I don’t know, big? You don’t have to see her right? Why not just go towards the light?”

“You want the truth, sonny?”

“I do!” I said, leaning forward in my chair.

“I’d work late into the night. June would sometimes come downstairs and admonish me to get some sleep. I always said the same thing – ‘I’ll sleep when I’m dead.’” He smiled broadly, “So, here I am!”

When Alan saw the antique full-length mirror on the side of the road he stopped immediately, looked around for its owner, and then put it in the back of his truck.

“I know how much you love this old stuff,” he said tapping the end of the mirror protruding from the bed of his Tacoma.

He was right. Surprising me with old furniture is my love language.

And the mirror was amazing! It stood a full six feet tall, the bronze-colored wooden frame was so ornately carved that I wondered if we should get it appraised first. No, that didn’t feel right. It needed its place.

I helped Alan haul it inside. I knew exactly where it belonged – our bedroom, just to the side of the closet. Not in line with the bed – that’s bad feng shui – but still nearby so I could check out my outfit in the morning. Once in its place, it felt right, calm. I patted the intricate frame and was surprised that it felt warm to the touch – not warm like it just came in from sitting in the sun in the truck bed, but almost hot, like body temperature.

Almost immediately I noticed something so weird I thought it was a flaw in the glass or my mind playing tricks on me. When I looked at myself in the mirror, my reflection would be just a little bit off – not in a fun-house way, distorting my proportions, but like I would move my hands to pull my hair up and my image seemed be just a moment behind my physical movements. It felt like a lag of some kind.

Everyone has encountered lag when dealing with online meetings and such – this was similar, but it was a mirror, not some trick of a network. I stood and walked towards the bathroom and watched my reflection stand and retreat towards the bathroom… I shouldn’t have been able to discern a lag, right?

When I talked to Alan about it he dismissed me as just out of it. We both stood in front of the mirror and gesticulated wildly – there was no lag whatsoever.

“See, Trish? It’s fine,” he said and walked out of the room. I stared at his retreating figure in the mirror and saw my image smirk just a little out of the corner of my eye. I looked directly at my image and the smirk was gone – it was just me looking surprised and a little pale.

I didn’t see my image look any differently again, but the delay was there – sometimes a full second or two behind, sometimes barely any lag at all. But something was wrong with the mirror.

One night when Alan was away on business I was getting ready for bed and my peripheral vision picked up the delay of  my image in the mirror and it started getting to my head. I draped a sheet over the mirror, finished getting ready for bed, and then went to sleep. When I woke in the morning, the mirror sat uncovered, the sheet balled up on the opposite side of the room – the sheet would have had to have passed over the foot of our bed.

I was wary of the mirror after that. I tried not to stare directly at my image and, if I could avoid it, I wouldn’t look at my image at all. I tried to move it, turn it towards the wall, but I couldn’t budge it. I thought about asking Alan to help, but what would I tell him? The mirror has lag? It smirked at me? I just did my best to ignore it.

One Saturday morning, though, I caught my reflection in the mirror as I walked towards the closet. Again, my image seemed just behind my actual movements. But as I was about to turn past the mirror, a motion in the mirror caught my eye. I turned towards it and my image was waving at me. I actually looked at my own hand to make sure it wasn’t moving of its own accord – no, it was just the hand in the mirror that moved. As if to confirm my conclusion, my image smiled and nodded.

I waved back, hesitantly.

My image stared into my eyes, and it reached out its hand towards me. My heart raced and I don’t know why, but I extended my arm towards the mirror. Just as my fingers were about to touch the fingers in the mirror, my image’s smile turned predatory.

A number of taxi drivers in Ishinomaki, Miyagi, Japan reported picking up phantom passengers years after the earthquake and tsunami devastated that community. That was my inspiration for this story that I transplanted here in California and swapped the tsunami for one of our devastating wildfires. The towns mentioned don’t actually exist – I didn’t want to use the names of actual towns that were destroyed by real fires. This burn area is fictional, but in too many ways, far too real. So far this fall we’ve been blessed to not have a season scorched by wildfires. I’ll take the respite, even if – like most Californians these days – I keep a bug-out bag handy.

Surprisingly, the first time I picked up a ghost in my cab I wasn’t afraid at all.

It was the first in what would become a pattern. A person would flag me down and climb in. The first was a middle-aged man. His clothes were mismatched and disheveled – like he threw them on at the last minute. I waited for the door to close before I asked where he wanted to go.

“Elk Meadow,” he said tersely.

“There’s not much left there since the fire,” I said. My own house was destroyed in the fire that decimated the town two years ago. “You sure?”

I looked at him in the rearview mirror. He stared out the window and just said, “Yeah.”

So, I turned the meter on and drove.

My heart beat faster when we reached the first burn scars along the side of the road – my therapist says that’s PTSD. She’s probably right. “Did you lose your house in the…” I looked in the rearview mirror and the backseat was empty.

I pulled over in what was once a driveway but now was just a pullout where someone might rebuild. I turned around and stared where the man had sat just a moment ago. Like I said, I wasn’t afraid. I looked out the window. Low grasses had started coming back, but the dense oak and madrones that lined the highway were gone or burnt skeletally black sticks.

That was my first, but far from my last.

When the wildfire came, I was working down in the valley – driving, of course. I probably would be one of those ghosts myself as the high winds drove the fire like a freight train through our neighborhood. I still have nightmares where I wonder if the ones who never knew it was coming had it better than the ones stuck in their cars in the traffic-jammed, twisty mountain road out of Elk Meadow. I lost neighbors that were caught by the fire both ways. I closed my eyes tightly and turned the meter off.

The woman with the teddy bear broke my heart. Thirty-something. Long nightgown just as the sun was setting, holding the bear by its arm. “Where to?”

She closed the door and slowly turned her gaze towards me. Desperate eyes met mine and I could see the anguish and terror plainly. “I…I…” she stammered, her eyes pleading for something. “I don’t know…” she finally said and even as the words echoed between us I could see her fading into the gathering darkness.

I’ve talked to some of the other drivers, of course. We’re a small outfit out of Tulebrook with drivers from the surrounding communities – most outside the burn area, but in these small mountain towns no one doesn’t know someone directly affected. A couple of the guys didn’t say anything, but the way they didn’t say anything told me they’d had these kind of passengers. Nobody but me, though, seemed to have multiple passengers.

After a nervous looking older man lasted all the way to the street he had lived on before he disappeared from my backseat, I started to take it personally. I pulled into the cul-de-sac lined with blackened brick fireplaces still standing devoid of their homes and I wondered whether this was my penance for escaping – the ghosts find me, my cab.

My therapist would say that’s my survivor’s guilt talking. She’s never had an old man confused when the address we pulled up to no longer had a house on it. She’s never seen this man’s face filled with pure confusion and fear. He caught sight of the lights on inside the RV parked in the driveway and his pained expression turned to something almost resembling a smile. “What’s my son doing here?” I watched him get out of the car without opening the door before fading into the night. No, my therapist wouldn’t know I remembered that that old man had run the little market in town – also burned.

I picked up Jessica and her husband, Bo, just outside of Tulebrook. My first thought was what were they doing taking a cab? My second thought was why weren’t they home with their kids? My next thought caused a lump in my throat because I remembered they lived down the street from me. And I could still see their minivan parked in the driveway where their house used to be, the vehicle more melted than burned.

But when they got in my cab they were, surprisingly, happy.

“Hey, Laura! We were hoping it was you!” Jessica said.

Bo agreed, “Yeah, Jessica thought it was, but I said ‘what are the odds?’”

I smiled sadly at them and said, “pretty good, actually.” I sighed and then asked, “Heading home?”

“We are,” Jessica said. I caught her eye in the mirror and, while she was still smiling there was a flicker of knowing there. She was holding Bo’s hand.

“You’re out late, aren’t you?” Bo asked as we the highway curved into the nearly barren burn area.

“Yeah,” I said, “Just trying to make a little extra money.”

He looked at the meter which was off. “Aww, Laura, you’re not running the meter on this drive? We can’t let you give us a free ride.”

“It’s okay,” I said, willing my voice not to crack. “It’s the least I can do.”

We turned down the street where we all used to live. Most of the debris had been long since removed. Some folks like the Sawyers that lived between Laura and Bo’s and my place were already rebuilding. I pulled into Laura and Bo’s driveway. The minivan had been hauled away months ago. The lot was cleared. “Here we are!” Jessica said. 

“Here we are,” I repeated. I kept the emotion out of my voice but couldn’t stop the tears coming down my cheeks.

Bo started to get out. “Thanks Laura!”

“You bet, Bo,” I squeezed my eyes tight.

Jessica lingered a moment, her gaze meeting my tear-filled eyes in the rear-view mirror. “Are you okay, Laura?”

I gave a chuckle at the irony of the question. “I don’t know, Jess. I don’t know.”

She gave me a wan smile and said, “Just keep living, okay?”

I swallowed the sob that threatened to erupt. I just nodded. As she opened the door I managed to say, “Kiss your kids for me.”

Jessica smiled back and said, “I will. I will.” I watched Bo come around the cab, take his wife’s hand and they started towards the empty foundation, their shapes fading into emptiness as I watched through tears.