When Alex and I moved into the house on Charleston, down by the railroad tracks, we knew the entire neighborhood was sus. I mean, we could afford it – enough said. The two-story house with peeling turquoise paint was a hundred years old if it was a day and stood defiantly as the last house before the weed-choked lot that separated the residential from the industrial warehouses that butt up against the railroad proper. Long ago it had been converted into two units – upstairs and downstairs. We had the downstairs unit.

After I’d told her I found us a place we could afford that was larger than a shoebox I tempered her expectations by saying the magic words – “Keep an open mind…” She rightfully raised an eyebrow in suspicion.

“Oh, this place is haunted as hell,” Alex said when we moved in.

“Keep an open mind…” I admonished as I carried a chair across the threshold.

“Ruby,” she said accusingly.

“Seriously…” I protested, a little crestfallen at her implied criticism.

She chuckled as I set the chair down. “Ruby, I didn’t mean I wasn’t stoked that you got the place.” She wrapped her arms around me as she looked around. “I just don’t think we’re going to be the only ones here…”

We both jumped at a loud knock on the door.

“Hey neighbors!” The tall thin man with the tanned skin and wide smile called from the doorway. Seeing our reaction he frowned, “Oh, sorry! Didn’t mean to scare you!” He stepped forward, hand outstretched, broad smile back in place. “I’m Elan,” he said as Alex took his hand. “My wife, Shadi, and I live upstairs.”

I shook his hand with a friendlier smile than Alex. “Oh, good to meet you, Shadi. I’m Ruby, this is Alex. We… well,” I gestured to the one box and single chair in the room, “we’re moving in, as you can see.”

“I saw you and I thought I’d say hi,” he said. “I’ll leave you to it. If you need any help or anything, feel free to stop in!” And he left as quickly as he arrived.

Alex and I exchanged a look. I shrugged and we wordlessly headed back to the truck for more stuff.

It didn’t take long for Alex’s first impression to be proved true. With both of us working from home, finding a place that was large enough for both of us to have our own workspace where we wouldn’t kill each other was paramount – hence my celebration at finding this lower floor unit we could afford.

I heard footsteps run across the floor upstairs first and I told myself I was making it up. Then I heard it again. And another set of footsteps. And then the muted laughter of a little girl made my blood run cold.

Alex appeared in the doorway, her face pale. “What in the hell was that?” she asked.

“Shit,” I said. “That means I didn’t hallucinate it.”

“Elan and Shadi?” Alex asked hopefully.

I shook my head. “I saw them leave for the University this morning. Besides… that sounded like children.”

Alex nodded solemnly and looked up at the ceiling. As if on cue, the footsteps rain across again, followed by the second set, followed by the peal of children’s laughter. She took in a deep breath then looked at me. “We can afford this place?”

“Yes.”

She shrugged and said, “We’ve got headphones…” and started back for the spare room she used as an office. Before disappearing down the hallway, she turned. “Whoever said ‘the sound of a child’s laughter is the music of the home’ never heard it come from an empty apartment.”

Fortunately, the footsteps were about the worst of it – and only from upstairs. Whatever ghosts lived in the house didn’t come into our flat – for which I gave thanks to the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Alex, ever the curious one, spent her free time at the library looking for references to our little haunted house. She discovered one of the first residents of the house had two little girls who died in the house in the 1930’s. She found microfiche of the town paper describing the death of the two little girls from carbon monoxide poisoning “…from a blocked fireplace flue,” she read. Both of us turned to look at the bricked-up fireplace in the family room where we sat. Neither of us spoke for a long moment.

I started, “But, the girls,” as we’d started calling them, “are always upstairs…”

“Yeah…” Alex agreed.

“Even though they…died,” the word came out choked, “down here.”

“Hey, don’t invite trouble,” she smiled wanly.

***

A few days later we went upstairs to have dinner with our neighbors. We agreed not to say anything about the ghost girls. “Maybe they don’t know about the girls,” I offered as we climbed the rickety outdoor staircase to the second floor.

“So, like it’s some sort of spectral subletting while they go to work and leave them be when they’re home?”

“I don’t know…” I admitted as I knocked on the door.

“Don’t know what, dear?” Shadi asked as she opened the door. With a build nearly as wiry as her husband and skin just as dark.

I stammered, but Alex covered perfectly. “Much about the area. We don’t know much about the area. We just moved to the area a few months ago.”

“Oh,” she smiled. “This part of town isn’t much to look at, but it’s safe and quiet – well, except for when the train comes through.”

“We noticed,” I chuckled remembering the way Alex and I stared at each other as the walls shook the first night when the endless train stacked with shipping containers roared through.

“You should try it on the second floor,” Elan said as he joined us. He reached over to a bookshelf covered with nicknacks. He plucked a small carved owl figure which took more force than the little carving should. “Museum putty,” he smiled, showing the beige smudge on the base. “Shadi figured that out shortly after we moved in, what? Ten years ago?”

“Twelve, dear,” she smiled. “And we use it in the museum, so it seemed natural.”

“Makes sense,” I said to fill the momentary silence.

“Tł’ohchin biiyaazh is ready!” Elan exclaimed as if he just remembered why he came into the room.

Alex and I exchanged confused looks.

Shadi rolled her eyes. “Navajo tacos, dears. Elan just likes to make it sound fancy.”

When we finished our frybread tacos sitting contentedly around their round kitchen table, Elan started, “We were wondering if you ladies could do us a favor. Shadi and I are going to visit her mom in Salt Lake and hoped you could water our plants while we were out.”

“It’s just for a few days,” Shadi added.

“Sure,” Alex said. “I mean, I’m guessing you don’t have a massive grow lab up here, right?” she laughed.

“Well,” Elan said seriously, “there are a couple of those… but only a couple…”

Shadi stood, “Everything is on the patio through our bedroom.” She headed for hallway.

We rose and followed her as she opened the closed bedroom door. “It’s this way…” she said, but Alex and I stood staring at a bookshelf just inside the room. The bookshelf was the inexpensive kind we have several of that we bought at Walmart – about six feet high, five or six shelves. But this unit was packed with small porcelain figurines of people and animals. Some looked positively antique – one crude coyote figure looked carved from red clay. Others looked more contemporary, but all had eyes that seemed just a little… off. Almost like they were looking at us.

“You found our family,” Elan came up behind us. His voice sounded almost resigned.

“You’re family?” Alex asked.

“Spirit dolls, dears,” Shadi said, coming back into the room from the patio.

I spotted the figures of two little girls front and center on a shelf at eye level, their eyes on me, their painted faces seemingly grinning at me. “I… don’t understand…” I stammered.

Elan let out a deep sigh. “When we come across a spirit wandering this plain, Shadi and I are able to contain its lonely spirit in a figure that we place here.”

Alex raised an eyebrow. “That’s better?”

“Oh yes, dear,” Shadi added. “A spirit left alone on this plain will eventually just fade away. Here they have us and each other for company.”

“It’s a safe place,” Elan said.

“Those…” I stammered, “Those girls?” I pointed at the two on the shelf.

Elan nodded seriously.

“They were here when we moved in,” Shadi said.

“We’ve heard them,” Alex nodded.

“Heard them?” Elan looked quizzically from Alex to Shadi.

“Yeah, running around up here when you guys have gone to work,” I said.

Elan shook his head, “That doesn’t make sense. When they’re in the spirit dolls they aren’t able to come out…”

Alex shrugged. “It sounds like two little girls are up here during the day.” Then she asked practically, “They’re all, uh, stuck there with what did you call it? Museum paste?”

“Museum putty,” Shadi said, pulling a cow figurine off a shelf, showing us the beige blob before returning it to the shelf.

An awkward silence fell on the room.

“Well,” Shadi said, startling us all. “Let me show you the plants.”

***

A few nights later I stared at the figurines while Alex watered the plants out on the porch. I reached out for the same cow figurine and found the museum putty indeed fixed it in place pretty good. I picked at a snake figurine to check it, too – I don’t know why I was more comfortable touching the animal dolls but not the people. No, I know why – I mean, right?

“Creepy as hell…” Alex said, coming back into the room with the watering can and locking the balcony door behind her.

“Yeah,” I said distractedly. My eyes traveled over each shelf. The girls weren’t front and center. In fact… I couldn’t find them at all. “Alex, I don’t see the little girls.”

“What?” She came up behind me and looked at the shelf, searching for the little girl figurines. “There,” she pointed to a tall shelf. “There’s one of them.”

“How…” I started but was interrupted by the sound of a distant rhythmic and repetitive bell-like clanging outside.

Alex and I looked at each other and said “Train!” at the same time.

The shaking came on gradually. Sure enough, though, the intensity of the shaking was magnified by being higher off the ground. But the shaking and accompanying roar grew past what I thought was natural.

“What’s happening, Alex?” I pleaded. Then I followed her eyes up to the top of the bookshelf. The second little girl figurine stood on top of the bookcase and seemed to wedge itself between the bookcase and the wall, the shaking of the house causing her to wedge into the crack. The bookcase began to lean precariously forward, its movement exacerbated by the unnatural shaking.

I stood fixed, in shock by what I was seeing, but Alex was already at the doorway and grabbed the collar of my shirt. “Ruby!” she called as she pulled me out of my reverie.

We slammed the front door and had our feet threshold of the stairs when we heard the bookshelf topple over in a crash of broken glass.

Broken figurines.

Broken spirit dolls.

Alex and I looked at each other.

“Run,” she said. And we did.

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to visit the Meinberg headquarters in Bad Pyrmont, Germany. Despite what “Bad” might connote in English, in German it indicates the place is officially recognized as a spa town (“bad” meaning “bath”). The headquarters was absolutely fascinating, and the sleepy little German town was gorgeous. I did get out early in the morning to get steps in – that’s true, that really happened. And the memorial was there, too. Beyond that… let’s just say the early morning really sparked my imagination. I can’t wait to go back and explore more.

I don’t generally go running in the middle of the night. But the 4:30am taxi I scheduled to take me from Bad Pyrmont to the train station and then a full schedule of trains and planes meant that if I had any hope of getting my 10,000 steps in I was going to have to start early.

That’s how I ended up on the cobblestone streets of Bad Pyrmont, Germany at 2:45 on a Wednesday morning. While a slight chill pervaded the late summer air, by the time I reached the road marked Brunnenstraße I felt plenty warmed up and the streetlights gently lit my way. I’m not a good runner, nor a graceful one, so as my feet quietly slapped the deserted pavement of the town still asleep, I admit I enjoyed the anonymity. Just me and the stone buildings, many probably predating the first Europeans in America. While I adjusted my pace to keep my breathing steady, I enjoyed my personal tour, glancing up at curtained windows and down narrow side streets. Passing one of these side streets, I heard the crying of a newborn and wondered how the parents were doing with their new lack of sleep.

Ahead, I spotted a glow near the base of one of the beech trees along the sidewalk. As I approached, I saw the glow came from several votive candles flickering in the early morning breeze, casting wan light on framed pictures of a young man and handwritten notes – clearly a fresh memorial. Unfortunately, I don’t yet speak a lick of German, so I kept moving, though the solemn memorial might have let the breeze chill me more than it had a few dozen meters back.

By the time Brunnenstraße crossed Oesdorfer, I turned back along the way I came – I was just looking for steps and a short workout, not trying to run any kind of distance. As I approached the memorial this time, I could see a tall man in a dark coat standing regarding the candles. Given I’d just been through here a few minutes ago and I hadn’t seen anyone or even any cars on the street, it struck me as odd. Still, we all grieve in our own ways, so I didn’t slow as I drew closer.

“Was machst du um diese späte Nachtzeit draußen?” he asked, his voice clear but not loud.

I stumbled to a halt and turned back to face the man. “I’m… sorry… I don’t speak German,” I said between panting breaths, now equally embarrassed that I hadn’t even learned to say that in German as I was panting and sweating in front of this man.

A smile creased his neatly shaven face. “Ah, an American. I asked, ‘what are you doing out at night?’”

“Oh,” I said sheepishly grateful for his English. “I’m just going for a run. Have to catch an early train.”

He took in my words and nodded. I thought his eyes looked familiar. Maybe I met him the day before at the factory…? “You shouldn’t be out now.”

“Oh? Sorry, is there some kind of curfew?”

“No…” he said slowly, and then looked at his watch. “It’s almost Geisterstunde.”

“Geister…” my mouth tripped over the syllables.

“Geisterstunde,” he repeated, then added, “It means… the witching hour.”

I recognized the face as I felt an icy chill cut through my soul.

It was his picture at our feet, at the base of the beech tree. It was his memorial. I staggered backwards, away from the man who didn’t move. His smile faltered a little and he looked sad. “Get inside,” he called after me. “It isn’t safe.”

I turned and sprinted away. I glanced over my shoulder and saw the memorial deserted again, the man gone. Somehow that made me run faster. I ran past the side street with the crying baby, but now the crying was gone, instead I heard the laughing of unseen children bubbling from the darkness of the bushes just as the a distant church bell tolled once… twice… three times.

And the deserted street in front of me filled with people.

Dozens of men, women, and children in outfits from varying time periods walked along the narrow street. I dodged a group of men in World War I era German uniforms who looked askance at me as I ran. There was a woman in a nineteenth-century gown walking next to a young girl in servants clothes pushing a pram, the woman fanning herself dismissively as I hurried past. I heard breaking glass nearby and looked over to see several men smashing a store window, the imminently recognizable symbol on their coats unmistakably told me their time period. One of the men saw me as I rushed past and called after me, pointing. The other men broke into a run after me.

Remember when I said I wasn’t a good or graceful runner? When you’ve got Nazi ghosts chasing you, it has a way of turning you into Usain Bolt. I ran faster, cutting down the broad, tree lined Hauptallee. This boulevard, too, was filled with people from seemingly every era for the better part of the last millennia. But these people paid me no mind, instead focusing on the luminescent stream that ran through the boulevard – the healing waters of the Hylliger spring. I slowed watching the ghosts gathering the waters when I heard the strident call of my pursuers and I sprinted towards my hotel.

I threw open the door to the lobby and bolted inside. The older woman at the front desk looked up startled, her face blanching. “Du solltest nicht draußen sein,” she said.

“What?” I panted, doubled over. I stared through the glass door, but outside the gently lit street was empty.

“You shouldn’t be out!” she repeated in English.

“Yeah,” I said, “I’ve figured that out.”

Before October 1 lands, I like to go back and read my previous October 1 posts, because they’re a bit different than most of the 31 Ghosts entries. For one, they’re non-fiction. The first couple years documented real-life encounters I’ve had. More recently, I’ve used the October 1 post as sort of an Opening Ceremony – what have I been up to? What’s in store for the month?

The last few years I’ve detailed the ways that my year has been crazy and how October looked to be even crazier. I’ve looked at my calendar of the year so far, and I look at just my travel schedule for this month alone and I genuinely shake my head at those previous years and thinking I was “busy.” I’m not going to get in to it this year, but suffice it to say, the complete life change that started into motion last year finished its chaotic cycle this year – I’ve moved, gotten married, have a new, exciting job now, and have run more this year than all previous years combined. It’s been wild, and there’s still a lot left before we change the calendar.

But we did just change the calendar to October, and that means we have now officially entered the eighth year of 31 Ghosts!

Thinking about this post I started to look back at the last year and whether I’ve had any paranormal experiences worth sharing. Truth is, I haven’t. I remember having an experience relatively recently where I knew there was a presence in a specific room, but I’m embarrassed to say I can’t remember the circumstances – must have been really terrifying, right?

But it got me thinking about my relationship to the paranormal and ghosts in general. There’s a popular paranormal podcast where the host argues that despite hosting the show and presenting numerous paranormal guests and their spooky situations, he himself isn’t sure about his beliefs on the subject of otherworldly-ness.

I’m not nearly that ambivalent, but the more I read and the more I encounter (or don’t encounter), the more complicated my feelings on the paranormal become. And that got me thinking about Harry Houdini.

Yes, Harry Houdini the escape artist and magician from the early twentieth century. Towards the end of his life, he set about debunking Spiritualists performing seances. He argued that his sleight of hand experiences made him uniquely qualified to expose the tricks many in the burgeoning séance industry used to con people into believing their loved ones were being contacted. By the 1920s the Spiritualist movement was extremely popular in the US. Founded in the nineteenth century with the fundamental principal that through mediumship we can cross the veil and contact those who have died, many well-known people participated in various aspects of Spiritualism. Abraham Lincoln’s wife, Mary Todd, hosted a séance in the White House to contact their son, Willie, who had recently died of typhoid fever.

The creator of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, was a vocal proponent of Spiritualism and came to a very public disagreement with Houdini after Doyle’s wife, Jean, performed a séance with Houdini where she claimed to contact Houdini’s late mother. She hadn’t, and Houdini exposed the fraud, calling Arthur Conan Doyle, “one of the greatest dupes” during a Congressional testimony on fraudulent seances – they were big enough to warrant Congressional hearings. Only a few months after the hearings concluded, Houdini died of a ruptured appendix at only 52.

What fascinates me about Houdini was that despite spending the last 35-odd years of his life systematically debunking séance practices, he still believed there was something to the afterlife, to the point where he and his wife, Bess, had an agreement that should he die before her, he would do everything he could to contact her from the other side. They had an agreed upon code his spirit could present to prove it was truly him.  Following his death, every Halloween Bess gathered with friends and tried to make contact with her husband’s ghost. Unsurprisingly, he never showed. After Harry failed to appear on Halloween, 1936, Bess declared, “Houdini did not come through. … I do not believe that Houdini can come back to me, or to anyone.”

I’m not out to debunk anyone, and certainly not debunk ghosts or the paranormal. I’ve read too much to not believe there is something on the other side of that ephemeral veil. At the same time, I’ve become increasingly more cynical about many of the popular ghost stories that are repeated. Perhaps the best example of this is the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose. I love the Winchester Mystery House and its mysterious back story and bizarre architecture and story about Sarah Winchester’s perpetual building to keep the spirits of the people killed by the rifle that bore her late husband’s name at bay.

I love the Winchester Mystery House knowing that it’s all a sham. Sarah Winchester wasn’t a histrionic woman terrified of ghosts. She was an enterprising woman of her time who did most of her own architectural work, expanding what began as a modest farmhouse to accommodate her extended family. She didn’t even live at the house for the last seventeen years of her life, choosing instead to spend most of her time at another house of hers in Atherton. The blue room in the center of the house where she ostensibly held seances in every night? That was the gardener’s room. Most of the dead ends that are presented as ways to befuddle malicious spirits are almost all the result of repairs from the 1906 earthquake that severely damaged the place.

So how did we get to The Winchester Mystery House?

After Sarah died, the sprawling place failed to find a buyer. Instead, an entrepreneur, John H. Brown, leased the land. He had run an amusement park near Lake Erie and one of its most popular attractions was billed as a “House of Mystery” – see where this is going? If his legend-building of the place wasn’t enough, the author, Shirley Jackson, grew up in San Jose and based the house in “The Haunting of Hill House” on The Winchester place. A few years later, Walt Disney drew on the gothic façade as the basis for the Haunted Mansion. And, like that, the legend built on itself.

But let me say again, I love the Winchester Mystery House. It’s a fantastic place, and I highly encourage you to visit – especially one of the nighttime flashlight tours. It’s truly spooky as hell – and I know it’s all a carefully crafted story that doesn’t have a lot of basis in actual fact.

In that regard, it shares a lot in common with many, many other popular ghosts.

And yet…

And yet, I love to read these “true” ghost stories and visit the places. These stories, I believe, tell us far more about ourselves and the milieu that created them than any actual historical basis. I think that’s why Houdini and Bess established a code to provide proof of the afterlife despite Houdini knowing how many fakeries he’d personally seen. And it’s why I always look for that unexplained bump in the night, or unexplainable light winking on or off… Is there something there? Ghostly wheat in the chaff? And I can’t discount the personal experiences I’ve had that really don’t have any other explanation – I will forever remember the cats triangulating what I still maintain was my dad’s ghost that I wrote about in that very first October 1, 2017 entry…

That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? For another month of reading about ghosts that tell us – sometimes literally – about the subjects they haunt as much as who they are and were. Because as much as we don’t want to encounter the paranormal… we kind of do. At least from the safety of a ghost story.

Welcome to the first day of the eighth annual 31 Ghosts. Stick around, let’s see what these ghosts tell us about ourselves.