In 1981 my parents lost the house they had owned and we moved into a new house in a new (to me) town. It wasn’t too far – I didn’t change schools or anything like that (well, immediately anyway). But when you’re young and you’ve only known one house your whole life, even moving one town over seems like a major upheaval. And while I was too young to understand concepts like mortgage defaults or foreclosure, the sense around every aspect of the move felt like defeat. So, you can imagine my surprise – and delight – when the house we moved into was a hulking mission-style 1920’s place on top of a hill with a view of the Santa Clara valley; it hardly seemed like a downgrade!
As an adult I look back on the time in that place – let’s call it the Oakridge house – with an adult perspective recognizing things like how we had to convert the formal (enormous) dining room into a make-shift apartment so we could take a boarder and make rent, or how when my dad was a kid he and his family stayed in a place not far away in Los Altos Hills and that, in some ways, renting this majestic, decaying place was a way of keeping his pride intact even after he felt he’d utterly let his family down. Those are Adult Details. But seven-year-old Jordy saw an incredible adventure palace! And if I try I can suspend my Adultness and see the place through his eyes. More often I see our time there with the mystery and adventure braided in with adult hindsight; one doesn’t diminish the other, but rather each perspective highlights and contrasts different aspects.
My sister Jill and I had to share a room, but I didn’t care. We got along great and we had our own balcony! And there was so much to explore! You want to defy danger? We had that in spades – we’d sneak down the steep hill to make forts in the bushes bordering the country club golf course. Or the annual rattlesnake infestation that came with the heat of summer. One of our neighbors was an elderly woman and her husband – Peggy and Paul, if I recall correctly. I remember they seemed ancient, but I realize now she must have been in her late sixties early seventies (funny how that doesn’t seem so ancient anymore). Jill and I would visit her with my mom for long talks – Peggy gave Jill and I rolls of lifesavers. One summer she told us she had been tending the fruit trees in a clearing on the property when an eight foot rattlesnake slithered by. Part of me remembers she killed it herself with a hoe, but part of me remembers that she didn’t – live and let live. I’m sure my family will correct me, but for now I’m okay remembering both outcomes. Every evening her husband Paul would take a walk along the road that bordered the golf course. I drove those roads not long ago when I was back that way, and that was a not insignificant walk, let me tell you! And then one night he didn’t make it home on time. He was found, but I remember hearing the word “Alzheimer’s” for the first time. I know Paul was around for some time, but in the way that childhood time speeds up in the mind’s eye I see him fading into a ghost himself before disappearing entirely.
I learned to ride a bicycle on the wide circular driveway there. Just when I felt like I had a hang of it I’d lose my balance and crash into the same damn Cyprus tree (that winter, a particularly windy storm toppled that tree. I like to take some of the credit). We raised a small garden in a bed adjacent to the house – I ate my first home-grown tomatoes at the Oakridge house. I remember we had chickens for a short while – that was less a deliberate act and more a begrudging accepting of the chicks that hatched under the incubator at Jill’s kindergarten class.
The house was also haunted.
Let me pause for a moment and get a little meta. First, welcome! It’s October 1, and that means it’s the first day of 31 Ghosts 2018!! Looking back on the stories last year, particularly the true ones, I noticed stories about the Oakridge house were absent. There’s a reason that nicely illustrates one of the difficulties inherent in this theme: for the most part, ghost stories can be, well, boring. Okay, not exactly boring, but unless you’re living on the corner of Hell and Damnation, real paranormal activity has its own pace and it rarely makes for a compelling tale. From a writer’s perspective, stringing the rare, spooky beads onto a narrative thread in a way that’s engaging can be quite the challenge. Taken another way, we go to horror movies and read scary stories because we inherently know life isn’t that spooky. And that’s good. Reality is scary enough as it is (the way real life facts and episodes are spun into grotesque horror stories intended to keep us afraid is whole different story in itself).
But let’s go back to the Oakridge house when I was small and the cracked whitewashed stucco walls towered above me to the master bedroom turret. The house even had a basement – a feature all but unheard of in California! The washer and dryer were down there in that perpetually dim space. I didn’t go down there much — a fact that surprises me because I should have loved it! Maybe it spooked me more than I care to remember, but I only have vague memories of the chill dampness. There was a stairway down from the outside, but we mostly used the narrow steep stairway that led down there from inside the house. With at least three of us kids and my dad, my mom hefted some serious laundry baskets down those rickety stairs. Years later she admitted that on numerous occasions lugging baskets down there she would lose her balance and feel herself start to pitch forward only to physically feel something take hold of her and steady her until she got her balance under control. Maybe it was the repeated benevolence of the act that kept her from talking about the events until years later. More likely, she took it as it was, felt grateful for the assist and kept going – there was always laundry to do, kids to feed, etc, etc. No time to worry about ghosts…
On a number of occasions, we heard unexplained footsteps. I remember waking one night to a sound downstairs. The wan glow of the AM radio alarm clock let me know it was the middle of the night, and with Jill and my door open I could her my dad snoring down the hallway and up the short stairs to their turret bedroom. But there was that sound: one of our kitchen chairs pulled out from the table to accommodate someone taking a seat. I waited in the darkness, breathing shallowly, quietly, lest I miss a sound. I listened hard. Nothing but my own heart and my dad’s snores. Then the sound again! The chair moved! And then footsteps started slow and deliberate on the creaky wood floor of the kitchen. Step by step, and I hoped for a moment it was Dave who lived in the apartment downstairs and he’d just go into his room and it’d be quiet again… but these were boots. Dave didn’t wear boots. And the slow footfalls moved from the kitchen into the tiled entry way and didn’t stop at the door to Dave’s room. No, I heard the first booted foot start up the stairs. I was breathing fast, trying to control my fear now. The footsteps climbed the curving stairway, step by step by step. I could hear my heart beating in my ears as the boots came up onto the landing. My bed was in direct line of sight of the top of the stairs. Whoever – or whatever – was at the top of the stairs could no doubt see my outline under my beadspread, pulled tight now over my head. I didn’t dare peak. I heard the steps come closer to my open doorway and then pause. I heard a doorknob turn and quietly I heard the door to my brother Jay’s room open…pause… and then gently close. But it wasn’t Jay. No, the steps moved the few feet to our open doorway before they paused again. Whatever it was, it was in the freaking doorway and it was staring at my bed and Jill’s bed. I didn’t move. I lay as still as I have ever done in my life before and after. I held my breath. And then the steps moved down the hallway… only to take the few steps up to the landing leading to my mom and dad’s room. There, too, I heard the door open… pause… and then close again. The steps came back down the stairs. I started breathing again, shallow, fast, and quiet, oh god, so quiet, as the footsteps started down the curving staircase. I listened to every receding footfall grateful with each stair that I might live to see the next morning. When the steps reached the bottom of the stairs, the heavy boots again crossed the tiled foyer. And then… they faded out. I waited. I listened. I listened more. Nothing. When I was certain there wasn’t another step, when I knew it had been long enough, I bolted from my bed down the hallway, up the short stairs to my parent’s room and leapt into bed with them. I don’t remember what I said or what they said, but I do remember laying there between them, safe, and drifting off to sleep.
For the record, Jill? I’m sorry I left you in the bedroom that night after that, though I’m pretty sure the ghost was done for that night.
There were other occasions where I heard – and Jill and I together heard – the footsteps. They always terrified us. I remember one time eventually screwing up the courage to peek my head out from under the covers when the steps reached the landing, when whatever it was would be in plain sight of me – and it would see me. And I remember seeing… nothing. Seeing nothing, I leapt out of bead and into the empty hallway. Nothing. I took a few tentative steps down the stairs to look the length of the curved stairway down to the foyer. Nothing. Don’t get me wrong, that didn’t make it any less terrifying, but it sparked a lifelong curiosity about what it was exactly that went bump in those long nights in the Oakridge house.
