Well, it’s finally here. The one month of the year devoted to all things that go bump in the night. Also, the season of pumpkin spice, though to be perfectly honest with you, my dear reader, if I made a post on that flavor when I started seeing it around, you would think I was out of my mind for posting it in late August. But I digress. The purpose of this post is to discuss something perhaps equally as scary as the pumpkin spice craze: ghosts.
Mind you, this won’t be a full post on the history of ghost stories or how the concept of ghosts has influenced aspects of our culture, this would be a seemingly never-ending essay, reaching as far back as Cicero from the days of ancient Rome. Rather, stories I have heard from those close to me, as well as some of my own accounts.
One of the stories that stands out to me comes from a man I see only a few times a year when I go up to visit some family friends at their lake-house in New Hampshire. The man in question got into restoring old houses in his younger days, and still enjoys telling the stories he has from years of doing it. This story involves a house rumored to have belonged to the first governor of New Hampshire. The man was having something delivered to and installed in his basement, a washing machine I think, and it was a father/son team who did it. When going down to inspect how to get the washer into the basement, the man saw the son with his eyes fixated on a certain point in the basement. “Thomas is watching us,” he said. Among the children of the man suspected to have owned that house, there was a Thomas who passed away when he was a child, which only supports the theory of the house’s original owner. Though the man and his son did get the washer into the house, the son refused to stay around any longer, and they left without connecting the washing machine to the water pipes.
Though I had been fascinated with the paranormal nearly all my life, my first real experience with ghosts didn’t come until late in high school. I was signed up for a dinner with some paranormal investigators I had come to know from a talk one of them had given at my school a few months earlier on local history. As part of the team, the had a psychic medium stationed in one of the rooms of what purported to be the most haunted restaurant in the state. Almost as soon as I walked into the room, she looked up at me and smiled. “Oh, they like you.” Maybe I should have been a little freaked out, but I had been waiting so long to have a genuine paranormal experience, I was thrilled to hear something like that. The investigators had tools there called divining rods, which some believed could be used to communicate with spirits. While some others had only faint reactions when they tried using the rods, I was given much more definitive answers whenever I asked questions using them, which I thought was such a thrilling experience.
The other experience I have I can’t say definitively whether or not I did experience something paranormal, but the story I was told after I had lived there for about two weeks did shed some light on some unexplained occurrences. During the second abroad program I went on to Italy I stayed in an apartment with three other guys, one of which I shared a room with…for a while, anyway. Some strange things happened, like doors swinging shut of their own accord when there seemed to be no breeze in the air, or returning from the bathroom to find something not where I left it, but I just found ways to explain it away, such as breezes too calm for me to notice, or just tricks memory plays on us, but that changed after my professor told my roommate and I the story he heard from the people he rented the apartment from. The story he heard went back to World War II, where the Allies were bombing areas in Italy. Apparently, the apartment building itself was a library back in the early to mid-1900s, with the specific apartment we happened to be renting being used by the librarian as her main living and working quarters. According to this professor, the woman snapped after days of Allied bombs dropping across the city, not having the peace and quiet she craved, and she took an axe to as many people in the library as she could, before ultimately hanging herself. My love of the paranormal manifested itself in my reaction to the story, though my roommate did not share my enthusiasm. About a week earlier, everyone who resided in that apartment decided to throw a casual dinner party, which was basically ordering a few pizzas and a few bottles of wine. At this dinner party, my roommate and my professor discovered a collection of old books, perfectly preserved. After hearing this story, he was panicking because he personally had disturbed her books and was so freaked out over it that he slept outside of the room for the rest of the time we stayed in that city. As for myself, after I heard that story, I found some time to myself when no one else was in the apartment, and I apologized for being there, saying I knew I was just a guest in her home and that I was leaving in a short while; that her spirit would never see me again after that week was up. It was not until much later that I realized that I had spoken all of it in English, and that the spirit probably didn’t understand a word of what I had said. Nonetheless, I did feel a sort of tension decrease after I had said that, and though I did poke fun at my roommate for his fear, there were times I too was afraid I had overstepped my boundaries, stepping somewhere I ought not have, though I cannot change what was.
There are many other stories that I have heard, from one man encountering what he believed to be the ghost of an entire Roman legion marching in his basement to the “Voodoo Queen” of New Orleans appearing in the form of her pet snake by her own gravesite, but those are all things I have heard from strangers. One of these tales I heard from a family friend, the others happened to me personally, so yes, I believe in an existence after death. I can only hope to have many similar experiences before I become one of them.