ghosts

Spooky Shit


Ghost

Ghost (Photo credit: Pétur Gauti)

I have written about how Rob and I are haunted.

In the past I’ve attributed much of the goings on to the house itself. Speculated that it’s perhaps a conduit. But I think more and more that it’s just Rob and I. We attract a lot of – largely unwelcome – contact from “the other side”.

Well-meaning though it is, I myself am weary of the advanced spiritual warning system the departed whom I am closely, and not all that closely, connected to feel I need.

Twice in the last week, I’ve received shout outs.  Literally and by name. From the “beyond”.

Both times it was morning and I was abed. The first occurred after the neighbor woke me – again – when he started up his piece of shit diesel truck so it could idle the necessary 15 minutes before he left for work. Fifteen minutes. From 6:15 AM to 6:30 AM.  I wouldn’t need an alarm if I felt at all inclined to get up 45 minutes earlier than I absolutely have to on a weekday morning.

That morning, as I lay there wishing that the neighbor was working nights this week instead of days, I heard my name.  Rob was curled like a hedgehog to my right and clearly not moved by the sputtering outside, but the voice was on the other side of the bedroom door and not Dee’s though at first I thought it was her and that she was already up and downstairs.

I listened.  Nothing but engine in dire need of a tune-up could be heard.

The second time was just last Thursday.  I woke at 5 AM for reasons best explained by the fact that I am almost 49 and the plumbing is in various stages of being decommissioned.  I am zen about the early awakenings accompanied by sleep loss. It’s temporary – though “temporary” is relative – and I just endure, but on mornings when I begin my day two hours into sleep debt, I generally go back to bed once I have the child on the bus and Rob bundled off to work.

As I snuggled in, I heard a man call out my name in an urgent tone.  Like “hey, pay attention!”.  Which I did but nothing followed.  At first I thought Rob had returned because it sounded like him but then I realized it was my father’s voice.

Thanks, Dad.

The first incident I wrote off to randomness. After all, I’d experienced odd rattling of the blinds in the office a few times over the preceding weeks that amounted to nothing as well.  Sometimes the dear departed are just rattling about aimlessly.  Voices, however, are never without motive.  Ever.  If they bother to put something to vocals, something is up.

I endeavoured to remain calm.  I didn’t mention it to Rob.  He’d had a terrible week that began with semi-competent dentistry and a summons from his cardiologist for his yearly stress test.

“Do you want me to come along?” I asked.

“You can if you want,” he said.

In the back of both of our minds is the example of his sister, LW, whose husband dropped dead during his stress test.

But the second calling spooked me.  Dee was heading off to Girl Guides camp for the weekend and Rob was still recouping from 5 hours of dental surgery/torture/malpractice, and then there are elderly family, my sister’s husband heading out into the wilds of Iowa with a crossbow for the start of hunting season and the fact that the United States seems to be on the verge of imploding.

What the fuck, Dad? You couldn’t clue me as to what to focus on?

But now it is Sunday night.  Dee arrived home from camp with tales of blind people, their dogs and how haunted houses should have “medium” scary settings for children her age, and Rob hasn’t injured himself at all as he reno’d about this weekend.

As far as I know, no one in the family died, and the Frankenstorm might generate enough “love thy neighbor” vibe to curb the American tendency to get a bit “dramatic” in whatever aftermath the election gods – in their perverse way of deciding things – blesses the country with this time.

Voices from … elsewhere … nearly always reveal their intentions within a relatively short frame of time, so I sit with one shoe on the floor and the other waiting to drop from another dimension as though this were a Poltergeist sequel.

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What Would Freud Say? Or Was it Jung?


Hamlet, I, 5 - Hamlet and the ghost.

Image via Wikipedia

Can’t remember whose theory on dreams and the subconscious gave the most weight to the symbolic nature of the people, objects and situations that make up the scenery of our nightly home movies.

I blame Pat Robertson and the Progressive Left in any case for last night’s visitation regardless.

Normally, my dreams are populated only with people I know and the setting is most often a variation of the town where I attended university or a school building I once worked in. I don’t know why and I haven’t bothered to research what it means or doesn’t.

Dead people seldom have starring roles in my dreams. If the departed do appear, they have cameos at best. But last night, Will showed up, which shouldn’t come as a surprise thanks to the Robertson faux uproar, but I have to be honest – I was surprised because he has only deigned to grace my dreams a handful of times in the past five plus years and never as more than a walk on. Ever.

I was back in school. It was – god help me – the 80’s with  clothing and the hair styles so jarring that I actually commented on it to another character completely out of context to the situation.

I found myself back on Currier E2 in my old corner room (minus the high-strung room-mate) and Will shows up to visit me for the weekend. And you could have knocked me over with a feather when I opened the door and it was him. Normally, it’s Rob who rides shot-gun in my dreams. Very seldom do I dream that Rob doesn’t figure at some or all points.

Here’s the odd thing – as if dreams with dead husbands stopping in for visit aren’t odd enough – he was not young. His hair was longer, curled like Dee’s does at the nape, around the ears and that same cowlick that drives her to distraction and salted with gray. His face was lined a bit and his goatee salted as well.

This has happened once before where someone who’s been gone a while showing up in a dream looking his real age. My Uncle Jim popped into a dream not long before Will and I married, looking very much like the 65-year-old man he would have been and not the 39-year-old man he was when he died.

When I asked him what he was doing there, he said,

“I thought I should visit now.”

I had been on my way out to meet friends, but his arrival prompted me to suggest we stay in. He didn’t want me to change plans. He would come along after he changed into a clean shirt.

He was not the 30-year-old I remembered from before the ravages of illness. More solid. A bit thicker and hairy, but not on the order of a grizzly.

Throughout I was aware that he shouldn’t have been there but I got no further explanation from him about why other than he deemed the visit “necessary”. I sorta felt like he was less happy to see me than I was to see him and that the visit wasn’t for pleasure but one of those dutiful things a person does.

He watched me with an appraising sort of look. He seemed tired as though he’d come a long distance to spend time with me, but whatever he’d left behind him was still on his mind. He mentioned at one point that he wouldn’t be able to stay for more than the night. He had to get back. I didn’t ask where or why, and he didn’t volunteer any more information.

I’ve thought about it all day and I can’t figure out why – after all these years – he put in an actual appearance in my dreams. He has never felt the need before. It has a ghost of Hamlet’s father feel to it. Blunted purpose chiding? Perhaps.

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Two of Three


Graves at Old Holy Cross Cemetery

Image by Fritz Liess via Flickr

Last Thursday, the ghost tickled the crown of Rob’s head while he stood at the kitchen sink washing dishes. Not an “attaboy”. Rob performs housework without the need for warm affirmations or pats on the head. It was a “heads up”.

So, when the call came later that evening to let us know that his uncle had passed away, the ghostliness of the day made sense.

But it was hardly the only sign this month, lights have been on that shouldn’t have been and there was that incidence with the shadow in Dee’s room. For myself personally, it’s been this persistent feeling that someone was going to die soon. It’s caused me no end of anxiety. First with Dee’s class taking a field trip into the city during the icy weather earlier in the month and then Edie and Silver driving through the mountains to and from Vancouver on their vacation.

It’s not as if we didn’t know about Uncle Francis. He had lung cancer and recently went into hospice, but death comes in threes. It just does. What’s true for the rich and (in)famous holds true for we lesser mortals.

This morning I awoke from a bad dream about a dinosaur trying to bite me (long back story that I’ll go into another day) to see Rob sitting up next to me. At least, I thought it was Rob. The room was Devil’s Den cave midnight. I couldn’t see my own hand when I reached up and then had to bring my hand down to find Rob, who was lying down and asleep next to me.

It was frightening. I sat up and noted that there were dark shadows ringing the bed and then I lay down and went back to sleep.

Tonight, we returned home after depositing Rob’s mom and future step-father at a hotel near the airport. They are heading home on an early flight. A message was waiting on the machine from my mother. My Aunt Peach died last night sometime.

You might remember Peach. I’ve written about her before. She would have been 103 this coming March. She was my grandmother’s youngest sister and the last of the Fagan siblings alive.

Gran lived to 94. She might have gone longer but for the dementia. Uncle Fran and Auntie Anna were 102 and 104 respectively when they passed on. The ones that cancer didn’t get young lived to 75 at the youngest and if they didn’t have bad hearts 90 and beyond. Remarkably long-lived, my dad’s relatives. If Dad hadn’t queered the deal with his drinking and smoking, he’d have cleared 100 easy, I’m sure. He still has two siblings – though I fear for not much longer – who are in their mid-80’s.

Will one of them be the third?

I really hope not though I know many folks who would roll their eyes and say that living to extremely ripe to bursting old age is long enough for anyone, so what’s the big deal?

It is a big deal to die, regardless of when. Death is one of the milestones. It represents fruition – which is a big fucking deal – and opportunity, which is nothing to sneeze at either.

Aunt Peach always made me a bit uncomfortable as a child and teen. She was forceful and larger than life though I towered over her even as a 10-year-old.

The last time I saw her was on our visit to Iowa last spring. She was playing bridge. It took us a good twenty minutes to track her down. No one knew where she was though everyone in the nursing home knew who she was.

She gave Dee a doll and probably more of her interest than she’d given me since I was that age myself. She barely acknowledged Rob or my mother, who was with us.

There’s quite the family reunion going on, if I know my dad’s relations – and I do.

I wonder if they are waiting on anyone?