Ghosts Bark

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There are no ghosts.

 

I’ve been slumming with the militant anti-paranormal crowd for quite awhile now, for all the usual reasons.  Paranormal stuff- you know, the vacationing spirits of dead people, telekinesis, stuff like that- always breaks down when subjected to scientific investigation.  Perpetual stage fright, or whatever.  And besides, based on every TV show I’ve ever seen, people who embrace such things are usually inbreds or imbeciles, or, occasionally, both inbreds and imbeciles.

 

There was a time when I spent a considerable amount of energy looking for ghosts, back when Reagan drooled in the White House.   Many of my best friends were inbreds, and to this very day, I’m often mistaken for being a complete imbecile.  If anybody was qualified to be a believer, it was me.

 

We’d hop our bikes, and later- after we’d been issued learner’s permits- ventured out in “borrowed” cars, trespassing abandoned farm houses and decrepit cemeteries.  We snuck around a mansion once owned by a spice baron, and spent the day poking through the abandoned headquarters of a satanic cult, marked by large rock piles, a towering upside-down cross and huge animal bones littered about.  There was also an ash-filled fire pit.

 

Nothing.

 

We also poked around the cornfield where a teenage girl (who’d been living in the house behind ours) was slaughtered by some madman; and cruised the neighborhood where my brother’s classmate hung himself with a dog leash, but never bumped into anything creepy.

 

Well, that’s not entirely true.

 

We bumped into the cops on a couple occasions, and stumbled upon groups of teenage lowlifes, splitting six-packs of warm Schlitz and smoking cigarettes.  Once in awhile, if we were lucky, we’d get chased by these drunken ruffians, which was sort of scary in its own way.

 

But no ghosts.

 

The problem had to do with where I lived.  Every seven or eight years my parents moved us into new homes in new subdivisions, shuffling the seven of us from one side of town to the other. These homes were always brand new: eighteen-hundred square feet of pre-fabricated American Wet Dream, middle class castles situated in neighborhoods carved out of what just twelve months earlier had been an unprofitable soybean field.

 

There are no ghosts in new houses.

 

A bump in the night was just the sump-pump kicking on, and late night voices wafting up through the air vents meant my brother was downstairs whispering on the phone, trying to score some weed.

 

About the same time I started getting laid, I gave up on the paranormal.  Shelved the spook fascination, and moved on with my life.  Fast forward a gazillion years: I’m married with children, losing my hair; the whole, wonderful mid-western disaster.

 

We moved out to the country.  Bought an old Victorian-era Queen Anne in a town time had (mercifully) long-since passed by.  The home was built around 1902 and situated on a leafy corner lot just two blocks from an old cemetery, where dead people lay fenced in by wrought iron gates.

 

We liked the house.  It had a wrap-around porch, big kitchen, and a backyard where our two young children could play.   The Philistines who’d occupied the joint prior to us had managed to strip the home of much of its architectural charm; removing the decorative spindlework and gable ornaments outside, covering the hardwood floors with piss-stained carpeting inside.  The beautiful oak staircase and pocket doors?  Painted dog-shit brown.

 

The windows still had their original glass, but were sealed shut.  With baseboard heating and frozen sills, there was never any air circulation in the home during the four years we lived there.

 

We found the place listed on the internet and drove out to this sleepy little town we’d never heard of.  Unannounced, we stopped in a realtor’s office and found a dumb-struck volunteer to show us the place.   She said a widow lived there.

 

They’d been having trouble showing the place, the plump young lady from the realty office explained, because there was an issue with the lock box.  People were never able to get in.  Insert cliche: the door opened for us on the first try.

 

The next weekend, after several other prospective buyers had once again been stopped short by the faulty front door contraption (of course), my wife and I gained access for a second viewing, unimpeded…

 

We decided to go against our better instincts and buy the neglected place.

 

I’d seen one or two episodes of Bob Vila’s show, and although I’m not really wild about power tools or handiwork, I embraced the silly little challenge.  Translation: We didn’t have enough money to pay people who were actually qualified to do the work.  We ripped out carpeting, stripped and stained the staircase, installed some spindlework outside.  Painted the place from top to bottom, put new flooring in upstairs.  Had the bathroom redone. Worked on the yard.

 

It didn’t take long for me to become totally immersed in the house, in the work.  You got a bunch of half-finished projects and you have no choice but to soldier on.  And it didn’t take long before I started witnessing things I’d never seen in my boyhood homes.  Things like inanimate objects moving on their own.  Doors that slammed in my face.  Footsteps coming up the staircase, although both kids were sleeping in the same room with us.

 

Listen, I’d seen Amityville Horror and all the Stephen King stuff, Freddie Krueger, but this wasn’t anything like that.  This wasn’t really scary, it was just….odd. 

 

When I saw a potted plant move in my dining room, I remember just staring at it like a monkey, jaw dropped, thinking “C’mon, that’s not really happening- is it?”

 

After awhile, after a series of similar incidents, it was “Oh, ok, that stuff again,” then back to work on whatever.

 

Poltergeists are such needy little bastards, aren’t they?

 

There has to be some logical explanation for these things.  I’m neither a psychologist nor a neurology expert, but there must be something about how our brain distorts stimuli.  How we take the things we hear and see and repackage them into experiences seeming unnatural- or supernatural.  For whatever reason, my brain was distorting things on a fairly regular basis when I lived in the Queen Anne.

 

Maybe it has to do with asbestos or lead paint or whatever.

 

Guests who spent the night at our home would share strange stories from their visits.  My mother-in-law, who was spending the weekend, fell asleep on the couch down in our front parlor.  She awoke in the middle of the night and noticed a young girl in period clothing standing next to a large dog in the middle of the room, just staring at her.

 

Frightened, she rushed upstairs and spent the rest of the evening in our children’s room, but didn’t tell us what had happened for a few weeks, after she was safely back at home in the suburbs.  It was probably just a strange dream, so why bother?

 

A year or so later, my wife and I were at a party outside of town.  It was a country function, where a bunch of denim-clad guys with beards stood around drinking keg beer from plastic cups, talking about snowmobiling and fishing.  During the course of the evening, we met a man who’d grown up across the street from our home.  He told us some harmless stories, and warned us to be careful of gardening in the backyard, as there was an extremely large dog buried out there.

 

A 225-pound St. Bernard.

 

My wife and I just sort of glanced at each other.

 

The next day we called mom and asked her about the strange dream she’d had at our house.  The things she saw a year ago.  We asked her, what kind of dog was it?

 

She said it was big, like those ones you see in cartoons with barrels strapped beneath their chins. 

 

You know… a St. Bernard.

 

Now, fast forward another gazillion years and we’re back in a newer home, in the suburbs.  I haven’t had a door slam in my face or seen any inanimate objects move since we left the old home.  And to the best of my knowledge, there haven’t been any St. Bernards loitering in the family room.

 

 

I actually miss our old house.

 

Before we moved, I stopped by the county’s historical society to do some quick research on the original owners of the home.   Family by the name of Moss.  Turns out they had a teenage daughter who was killed in an automobile accident during the 1920s, having slid on some ice during a cruise with her boyfriend.  Apparently they wrapped their car around a tree, or something.

 

In keeping with the traditional custom of the times, she had been waked in our front parlor.

 

There are no ghosts, trust me.

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Filed under Time Well Spent

Tags: Ghosts, Halloween, paranormal, Scott Simkus, Stephen King