Happy October everyone! And with the changing of the leaves and arrival of pumpkin spice everything comes another month of 31 Ghosts – the fifth annual 31 Ghosts, I might add! In the middle of September, 2017 on a whim I thought it might be a fun challenge to celebrate October with a month of ghost stories. It’s been tough but a lot of fun – I mean, clearly it’s had to be fun if I’ve managed to come back year after year, right?

Last year I opened the month writing about how I was out of first-hand ghost stories, but instead talked about the ghosts we’ve all picked up after the better part of a year in a pandemic. I wish I could say that was all behind us but, hey, you know the score – things are starting to look up as we enter fall, but they should – could – be a lot better. As a result, we’ve picked up a lot more ghosts, I’m afraid.

But I don’t want to start on that kind of an existential dread.

No, in just a few days we get to celebrate the first birthday of Ms. Allison Lynnette Bonner Jensky. I’m proud to share my birthday with this puppy, even if she can be a royal pain in the ass sometimes. But she’s adorable. 

I wasn’t ready for a puppy – or a dog for that matter – last year when my old friend, Kirk, messaged me saying one of his dogs gave birth to a litter. He wasn’t trying to convince me to take one, either. He had a service helping him place the tan little hellions. And by the end of November all but Ernie – who he was going to keep anyway – and the little runt of the litter were left. I’ll spare you the machinations I went through to actually decide to bring her home, suffice it to say in early December we brought Alli home.

I’m convinced Winston was still hanging around. There were a number of mannerisms that Alli picked up uncannily quickly. I’m sure Winston was still here telling that crazy little puppy, “Look, little one, this is the way things are done around here…” I haven’t felt him for a while, though. I think he stuck around to make sure she was okay – and I was okay, too – and then he decided all was well. Well, Winnie, she’s a pain in the ass. And an adorable joy. She’s so different from you it’s ridiculous. And, in some ways, she’s exactly what I needed.

I returned to the office at the beginning of August, much to the chagrin of that energetic puppy that harbored a pandemic-inspired case of separation anxiety. The advice boards all recommended a good walk both before you leave for work and after you get home. That’s all well and good, but given I have to be at my desk at 7am, that means that any meaningful walk is going to start at 0-dark thirty. Even in August, as we crisscrossed the streets of downtown Guerneville the sun wasn’t even licking the horizon. Add in the frequent blanket of fog, and walking the gloomy streets could be a little creepy.

Winston liked walks, but he also liked non-walking; he was a very, very chill soul.

Alli cannot be tired out. She is pure puppy energy packed densely into a little package.

In an effort to add steps, we decided to stretch a little beyond the streetlights of downtown onto the two bridges that cross the Russian River. The old green iron truss bridge was built in 1922 and it served dutifully for seventy odd years until Caltrans built an unassuming concrete span next to the old bridge. The new bridge is wider, more stout in earthquakes, and most importantly both sides of the bridge are well above record flood level. The relative frequency of even minor floods rendered the old bridge useless when the waters spilled the banks.

So the old bridge closed to traffic but remains the stately edge of town and provides pedestrians a gorgeous view of Johnson’s Beach. At least it’s a gorgeous view during the day. At 5am, however, it’s nothing but blackness on either side of the bridge. Given how many years that old iron bridge has stood above the River and how many devastating floods it’s presided over you’d think this would be the river crossing mentioned in the title.

It’s not.

No, while it’s old, it’s really well lit with old fashioned streetlights. I won’t lie, it’s frequented at all hours by homeless folks, but most don’t bother anyone. Certainly not a big guy with a little dog in the pre-dawn hours.

We decided we’d come back across that bridge, heading out of town across the car bridge. The first thing you notice as you round the corner from River onto the bridge that becomes highway 116 is the darkness. The streets of downtown are very well lit, as is the old bridge. Despite sidewalks on both sides of the roadway, maybe they just assume cars headlights are enough. That first morning going this route, I didn’t bring a flashlight – I hadn’t needed it on previous mornings. So I paused as Alli and I stared into the dark. But, it’s a straight shot, I thought, and the way back along the old bridge is bright. Alli shuffled impatiently… We started off into the darkness.

Since then we’ve walked that bridge in the after-work walks in the light of day. And I noticed that there are distance marks painted on the bridge railings. The first, barely visible in the weathered concrete about a quarter of the way out says “700.” At that point in the morning darkness and fog, the last light behind has vanished. But, again, it’s a straight bridge – what is there to worry about?

The 500-foot mark is just before mid-span and that’s when the hairs on the back of my neck started to stand up. I slowed and looked around. Upriver to the east I could make out wan starlight playing over the black river. To the west the lights of the old bridge shone looking much farther away than the span really is. Alli and I kept moving.

By the 300-foot mark we were well past the midpoint, but now the otherwise oblivious puppy noticed something was wrong. She started looking over her shoulder looking upriver nervously. She didn’t miss a step, but her she started cheating sideways a little too get a better look back into the darkness. I can feel something behind me, watching us. I know no one followed us onto the bridge. The headlights of the car that drove past us into town a moment ago illuminated the empty sidewalks on both sides all the way back into town. We were most certainly alone. But when we reached the 200-foot mark both Alli and I knew we weren’t the only ones on that bridge.

Ahead, we could make out a streetlight. It’s on the south bank and marks where the footpath from the old bridge rises to meet the sidewalk we were hurrying down. We moved quickly, happily letting the light dispel the darkness and uneasiness behind us.

I didn’t hesitate on the turn down to the old bridge. We gladly marched onto the bright walkway. Still over land, I heard an animal stir in the branches of one of the trees up against the span. Didn’t phase me. Halfway across our movement caused the cold iron of the bridge to creak just a little. No big deal. Looking upriver past the lights I could see the concrete bridge looming and let out a little shiver.

Alli and I have been across the bridges in the darkness a few times after that first time. Even with a powerful flashlight illuminating the sidewalk, that same creepy feeling always steals over me at about the same point. Alli always starts looking over her shoulder at the same place… I don’t know what happened on that bridge to cause that sensation. I know from canoeing under it that even with Johnson’s Beach dams up it’s still a really shallow waterway. If someone had jumped from that bridge…

Here’s what I do know: Alli and I will walk right up to the foot of that bridge almost every morning and we stare into the darkness for a moment before making a hard turn and making quick steps back into town.

Happy October!

Way back on Halloween 2017 a group of the living met some trick or treating ghosts. You don’t have to go back and read it, just know they’ve been hanging out every Halloween since then.

“Is anyone there?” Aiden called down the alley.

“I don’t hear anything,” Jacob said. “Maybe they’re not here this year.”

“They’ll be here. They’re here every year. Hello!” Olivia called.

Silence.

“It’s them!” a voice came from the darkness. “I told you they’d be here this year! They’re here every year!” Stewart stepped into the streetlight in the simple costume of a sheet ghost. He pulled up the sheet revealing his rosy cheeks. “Hey guys! Eddie owes me a dollar – he said you weren’t coming this year.”

“Well, I figured you guys were getting too old for trick or treating,” Eddie came into the light in his old-fashioned red velvet cowboy costume complete with Lone Ranger eye mask.

Aiden, Jacob, and Olivia exchanged looks. “Well,” Olivia said, “It might be our last. We are getting a little older… But we looked forward to the chance to see you guys again…. Where’s Anthony?”

“I’m here,” Anthony said, stepping forward with his mohawk and gold chains. “Good to see you, Olivia! How are you guys doing?”

“We’re good,” Aiden said.

“Hey, don’t leave without us!” Duane yelled as he and a girl ran into the light. Duane had his Dr. Zaius Planet of the Apes plastic mask on and the girl with him had black and red checkered outfit with black and red tights and one red and one blue pigtail.

“Hey Duane!” Jacob said. Who’s Harley Quinn?

Harley Quinn shied back a bit.

“It’s okay, they’re the good living!” Duane said.

“I’m… I’m Ava,” she said sheepishly.

Olivia stepped forward, “Hi Ava, I’m Olivia. This is Jacob and Aiden. You’re new around here?”

Ava nodded. “I died this year. April,” she said. “I’ve always had really bad asthma and then Covid…”

“I’m so sorry,” Olivia said.

“I really wanted to be Harley Quinn this year,” Ava said.

“And so you are!” Olivia smiled. Ava smiled, too.

“What’s your costumes?” Stewart asked. “Olivia, you look like a doctor!”

“I am!” she said holding the ends of her stethoscope.

“Are you a doctor, too, Aiden?” Duane asked.

“Nurse,” he said pointing to his scrubs.

“I don’t the bottle costume, Jacob,” Anthony said.

“I’m a bottle of hand sanitizer!”

Stewart, Eddie, Duane, and Anthony stared confused. Ava, however broke into loud giggles.

“Hand sanitizer! Ha!” The other ghosts looked at her. “It’s a Covid joke,” she explained. “Is it going to be a weird Halloween because of the ‘rona?” she asked.

Olivia nodded, “It’s going to be strange. There’s a bunch of contact-less candy hand-outs, and a lot of parents decided not to let their kids out at all.”

“Understandable,” Ava said.

“You know what this means?” Anthony asked.

“Yeah,” Duane said pulling his Dr. Zaius mask down over his face, “It’s our year!”

“Let’s go!” Eddie drew his cap-gun pistols. “Hee ha!”

—

The kids were about to head up a driveway when they heard “Fire in the hole!” from the end of the driveway. A woman pulled a lever and a catapult hurled a bunch of Snickers and Milky Way all the way down the driveway. “Andy, there’s a bunch of them in this group – fire the backup trebuchet!”

“On it, Anne!” and Andy pulled a lever and an elaborate arm started swinging around and hurled Almond Joys and Reeses.

Stewart held out his sheet to block a bunch of candy. Anthony was glad no one noticed a snickers went right through him. Ava giggled as she scrambled for candy.

—

A few houses down they looked up at a porch and started up the walkway to the porch when a stop sign popped up in front of them. “Huh?” Eddie said before a whirring noise drew their attention to a pulley system rigged between the light post at the end of the walkway and the kitchen window at the porch. An orange and black lit ghost carrying a small basket traveled with a whirr from the kitchen window over the lawn and came to a stop at the light pole.

“Oh! Your costumes are so cute!” The woman in the window called down to them. “I love the hand sanitizer!”

“Thank you, Ma’am!” Jacob said as he and the others split the candy in the basket.

“Thank you!” they all said to the woman. As they started to walk away they heard the whirr of the zip line ghost traveling back up the wire.

—

The front of the Peterson house at the end of the street was completely obscured by an enormous couch with a huge fifteen foot skeleton perched on it and graves scattered across the lawn. One arm of the skeleton was replaced by a big PVC pipe that extended way out over the walkway.

The lights in the skeleton’s eyes lit up and the mouth opened as a voice said, “Step up to the skeleton chute!”

“That’s so cool!” Anthony said, stepping up to the chute that ended in a fake hand. He put his bag up to the end of the chute and a full-size Twix slid down and dropped into his bag. “Awesome!”

“Ooh, me next!” Eddie moved in.

—

They walked up to one house that had no lights on the porch, but red dots crisscrossed the driveway.

“I don’t understand,” Steward said.

“Line up under a dot,” a voice came from up on the roof.

Jacob scrambled his bottle costume onto the driveway and managed to get a red dot into his bag when he became aware of a cacophony of buzzing before two bags of M&Ms dropped into his bag from the sky. “Whoa!” he said.

Ava followed suit as the drone that had just dropped the M&Ms hummed down to the group of four on the roof of the house where one of the operators re-loaded the candy basket as another drone dropped its cache of Laffy Taffy into Ava’s bag. She squealed as the two Taffys fell in and that drone whirred down for reloading.

It took a couple minutes, but all eight kids got their air-dropped treats and walked away laughing and talking about how Aiden’s Hershey’s missed his bag at the last moment and he scrambled to pick it up, and how Eddie’s Nerd boxes bonked off his head.

They hit a few more conventional houses but it wasn’t long before they all retreated to behind the warehouse where Anthony lit the fire and they gathered around and compared their hauls.

“How’d you do, Ava?” Olivia asked.

“Really good!” she said smiling broadly.

“Glad you came! I mean, I’m sorry you’re a ghost, but it’s nice not being the only girl.”

“I’m glad I could come,” she said.

“Were you guys serious when you said this might be your last year?” Anthony asked.

Aiden looked at Jacob and then at Olivia. He shrugged, “Not likely,” he said. “I forgot how much fun it is hanging around with you guys!”

“Good,” Eddie said, then got really serious and said, “We wouldn’t want to have to haunt you and your families.”

Jacob, Aiden, and Olivia froze.

“I’m just messing with you!” Eddie and the rest of the ghosts started laughing uproariously.

“…Should’ve seen the look on your face,” Duane wheeze-laughed.

Jacob, Aiden, and Olivia were slow to join in the laughter.

“It’s funny,” Stewart said, “Because we’re all treats and no tricks!”

This case differed from most I get called in on. 

Think of me more of like an exterminator – not that I’m exterminating ghosts, mind you – it’s just you don’t call an exterminator to take care of termites or fleas or spiders because you’ve seen one bug. No, it’s gotten to a point where your place is so infested with bugs that you need the assistance of a professional. 

Same with a paranormal investigator. The rocking chair moves on its own? So what? You hear footsteps in the empty attic? Eh. You get pushed down the stairs and thrown out of your bed? Now you’re going to call me. 

When the Richardsons called me they’d only had a few instances. Though, to be fair, they were doozies. It happened every year. On the 15^th of August, from 12:01am until 11:59pm their house was a battlezone. Plates get thrown against walls; fridge erupts violently ejecting its contents all over the kitchen; Knives get hurled towards people – and that’s just in the kitchen. No room is spared: Bobby, the little boy, has all his toys strewn everywhere; Molly, the teen girl, gets her clothes thrown out of her closet, her make-up drawn all over the walls. 

But the moment the clock strikes 12am and the calendar changes to the 16^th? Quiet. And it remains quiet for 364 days a year. But August 15^th? Pure hell. 

When they called me as August 15^th approached the case intrigued me. Poltergeist activity tends to be more continuous and usually centers around a person (most commonly a teenage girl – and Molly wisely spent the last August 15^th at her friend’s house). So, it didn’t fit a traditional poltergeist, yet a ghost rarely has the ability to do more than, well, rock a chair or make footsteps in the attic. Actually messing a place up like the Richardson’s experienced? I couldn’t find anything similar. 

I knocked on the door on the 13^th of August. 

David Richardson answered. “Hi, I’m the paranormal investigator, Eleanor Sully,” I introduced myself and held out my hand. 

“Oh, right, of course,” he said shaking my hand. “I’m David. Please come in, meet the rest of the family.”

The house sat at the end of a cul-de-sac in a quiet neighborhood – no gothic castle here. Two stories, though the second was added after the house was built. No dank basement. I’d already gotten some information about the family members, but putting a face to a name is always enlightening. Amanda Richardson looked anxious – who wouldn’t be knowing what was coming in a few days? Bobby was precocious and had one baby tooth hanging on right in the front of his mouth – it was kind of adorable. And Molly rolled her eyes a lot and announced this year, like last, she’d be spending at Tiffany’s. 

I wasn’t introduced to the 12-year old on sitting on the stairs. He saw that I saw him even though I was giving my full attention to my introduction to the Richardsons. Once that was complete though, I made a beeline to the stairs. 

“And what’s your name.” 

“Doesn’t matter,” he said sullenly. 

“It does to me.”

He looked hard at me for a minute as if making up his mind whether it really did (it did). “Eliot.” 

“Hi Eliot,” I said. I could feel the astonished stares from the Richardsons in the next room. “You don’t seem very happy. What’s going on with you?”

“I’m a ghost, duh!” he said. While obvious, it actually was significant that he recognized he was a ghost. 

“I see that. They don’t though, do they? Does that bother you?” 

“Not usually,” he said.

“But…” I prompted. Then it occurred to me: “Let me guess: August 15^th is your birthday, right?”

“And they don’t do a thing! When Bobby turned 8 last year they had a bouncy castle that had a ball pit!” Eliot yelled, pulling himself to standing with the banister. I heard a gasp and realized the Richardsons just saw the banister start to shake on its own. “Molly had a sleepover with all her friends – I didn’t scare any of those girls!”

“No?”

A devious smile appeared on his face, “Okay, I turned the sink on in the bathroom when that redheaded girl was in there. That was pretty funny,” he erupted into giggles.

“On the whole, that’s not too bad,” I said. “But on your birthday? You lose it?”

“I dropped hints all year. They’ve lived here for five years now and nothing.” 

“Well, us living can be a little dense about those things.”

“Yeah, no kidding!” he sneered.

“I’ll make you a deal,” I started. “If we have a party for you on your birthday you won’t make a mess?”

“That’s all I want!”

“Done,” I said. “Any requests?”

“Banana cream pie!” He said at once.

“You can’t eat it, though.” 

“Doesn’t matter!” He countered. “Balloons! Lots of them! Will they sing to me?”

“That can be arranged. Anything else?” 

“Can we watch my favorite movies?”

“I don’t see why not. What are your favorite movies?”

“Star Wars!”

I thought for a moment. “Eliot, what’s the last Star Wars movie you saw?”

“My mom took me to Jedi in the theaters!” he said as his face fell. “That was right before we all died.”

“You know, Eliot, there’s new movies…” 

“No way?!”

“Like a bunch. What do you think of a birthday movie marathon?”

“Oh my God, really?!” 

“As long as you don’t break anything, we’ve got a deal.” 

“Deal,” he said, spitting into his hand and holding it out to shake. I did likewise and tried not to close my hand too much – it’s awkward to close my hand over a ghost’s. “I’m so excited!” he said pogo-ing upstairs one step at a time. I heard the Richardsons startle and realized they’re hearing him on the stairs. 

I turned to them and clasped my hands together. “So,” I started, “We have a party to plan…”

I’ll give this to them, The Richardsons seriously got into this. 12:01 on August 15^th and Amanda had three types of popcorn ready as David hit play on “Solo: A Star Wars Story.” 

“Oh, you’re doing the revised Machete order, I see,” I commented. 

“You know your Star Wars,” he nodded appreciatively. 

“Get comfortable, Eliot! You’re in for a treat today!” I said. He was in his place of honor they’d reserved for him on the couch. 

“It’s my day!” he squealed with pure joy. 

And it went on all day: “Solo” to “Rogue One” to “A New Hope” and “Empire” before David jumped back to “Phantom Menace.” All the while Amanda kept the snacks coming. Star wars pancakes once the sun came up. And Eliot got his banana cream pie and everyone – Molly stayed home – sang him happy birthday.

I left around ten that night. 

“You’re going?” Eliot asked.

“You’re going?” Amanda asked. 

“It’s been a fun day,” I said.

“Right?!” Eliot agreed.

“But I’ve got a wild haunting consult tomorrow. Happy birthday, Eliot!” 

Eliot jumped up and hugged me. I actually felt him hug. 

I squatted down to his level, “You know, Eliot, if you see a bright light you can always cross over. Your mom and dad are probably waiting for you.” 

“It showed up around noon.”

“Oh?” 

“David said ‘Rise of Skywalker’ is as good as ‘Empire!’ It’s on next! I’ll go after that. Think mom will be mad?” 

“No, Eliot, I think she’ll be excited to hear about your last birthday party.” 

He grinned and ran back to the couch as I let myself out.