Spirits Among Us

The house I grew up in is an old house.  It was built right around 1900, old enough even when I was a kid to warrant stories of inhabiting ghosts. 

Our family used to sit in the living room together on weeknights, watching TV.  We watched game shows and sitcoms, mostly.  Once a week we watched a show about strange things that happen in real life, stories of unexplained events and supernatural things.

I remember being riveted when the show featured ghost stories.  This was the era of movies like Poltergeist and Ghostbusters.  Children had been indoctrinated into the world of ghosts for years through traditional stories and books and cartoons about friendly ghosts, and at every mention of ghosts, I was transfixed.  That a person could still be around after death was a mysterious and easy idea for a kid to ponder.  I’d sit on the couch and feel the tingly sensation of being terrified yet not wanting to miss a misty reenactment of a real person’s ghost encounter.  We’d watch the images of a deceased loved one at the foot of a bed, shrouded in white, reaching a cold, transparent hand out to the person he or she was visiting and I’d shiver, hoping against hope that it wouldn’t happen to me in our creaky old house.  After the show was over, I’d tear through our dark dining room and up the stairs to outrun a languid specter.  Later, I’d lie in bed, eyes squeezed safely shut against the possibility of one of my dead-and-gone ancestors floating around my ceiling and waving hello.

Eventually I was convinced that ghosts lived in our house.  Every run through the dining room and up the stairs was a race against the spirit world, every cool draft through a window an old relative visiting from the afterlife.  Hands and feet stayed safely tucked into blankets and did not hang over the edge of the bed until the morning light banished all phantoms.

My mother enjoyed thinking about otherworldly things.  She read dream interpretation books and told stories of strange things happening in the old house that she grew up in, and shared that she would not be frightened if someone from the past showed up at the foot of her bed.  She would welcome her visitor and try to decipher what it was they wanted to tell her.

I did not share her musings.  I considered that if a specter showed up on my bed I would die of heart failure on the spot, and prayed that God would lock any door from the spirit world that had access to my room.

Luckily, I grew up ghost encounter free, never seeing a spirit within the walls of our old farmhouse, nor did I hear or see objects move around on their own.  Sometimes people would come to visit and maintain that they heard unexplained sounds coming from the walls of our house.  There are no ghosts here; probably just mice, we’d scoff.

Living in a house that my husband and I watched being built, and most definitely not on top of a graveyard, I harbor no beliefs that ghosts reside in our current home.  Strange sounds are the noises a settling house makes; changes in temperature outside makes the walls snap, crackle, and pop.  Having children around guarantees that things will not be in the order I left them.  I see moving shadows and light out of the corner of my eye and know that it is the flicker of the sun off a neighbor’s car window, the breeze stirring up fallen leaves in our yard.

But we also have a dark dining room between our living room and bedrooms, and you better believe that when the house is quiet and it’s time for bed, I’m running up those stairs as fast as I can.

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This post inspired by:


Mama Kat's Writing Workshop

Prompt #5: Write about a time you thought there was a ghost.