I do believe in ghosts ... I do believe in ghosts ...

When I was a kid, I loved scary movies and haunted houses. It wasn't that I was immune to being frightened; it was that I actually enjoyed being frightened. I also enjoyed seeing how movies and haunted houses would try to frighten me, as if I dared them to do so. And sometimes a particular scene in a particular movie would scare the living hell out of me (The Screaming Skull comes immediately to mind). 

My siblings also enjoyed haunted houses, and when we were kids we once tried to create our own haunted "house" for Halloween by filling the high-ceilinged crawlspace under our home with handmade props and decorations, including ghosts made from discarded sheets. We thought we could make a killing (so to speak) by charging admission, but none of our friends and neighbors wanted to pay, so we ended up letting them go through the haunted house for free. Even so, I'm not sure they got their money's worth.

Back then, I believed the adults' storyline that ghosts were just a figment of people's overactive imaginations, something you'd see only in movies and in Saturday morning cartoons like Casper. Now that I'm an adult myself, I don't believe that storyline anymore. 

I believe ghosts exist.

The change in my thinking began when I was about eleven years old and came home from school one day to find something really weird on my older sister's carpeted bedroom floor: her gallon-jar fishbowl … unbroken … upside down … still containing most of its water and all of its guppies. The jar had somehow toppled from its spot atop my sister's dresser and landed—rather gracefully—on the floor, unperturbed.

How could this have happened? My siblings all swore they had nothing to do with it, and I believed them because they seemed as surprised and baffled as I was. But was it necessarily a ghost that had moved the jar? Or was it some other supernatural—or even natural—phenomenon? Our parents had no clue what caused it, either.

The mystery was never solved, and we never really talked about it again. Over the ensuing decades, I both heard about and personally witnessed several other paranormal events, but none of them were quite as baffling as the fish jar—until the year 2010, when my wife Jules and I bought an old farmhouse in Kings Valley, Oregon.

The house had been built in 1882 and sat on a half acre of flat land, surrounded by pasture on one side and and forest on the other. It was the perfect place to realize our homestead dream: a big garden, chickens, pristine well water, good sunlight, nature all around, and just a half-hour drive from town. We were in heaven.

The homestead as it appeared around 1942 (sixty-eight years before we bought it). Look haunted
to you? (Source: Kings Valley: My First Fifteen Years, by Richard B. Nelson)

The same house in 2009, after extensive remodeling by the former owners. 
(Source: Kings Valley: My First Fifteen Years, by Richard B. Nelson)

Almost immediately, however, weird things started happening. Desk lamps turned themselves on and off at all hours of the day and night. Three-inch-long screws inexplicably fell out of our dining room chairs. One night we heard what sounded like a party in our living room, along with footsteps on the stairway outside our bedroom. Sometimes at night the smell of ripe melons would waft into our bedroom from the living room. Light bulbs unscrewed themselves upward, defying gravity. Small, white plastic triangles began appearing on outside pathways and fence railings—always in plain sight.

When we told a neighbor about some of these odd occurrences, he said he knew of at least one person who had died in the house. Since the house was well over a hundred years old, we suspected more than one person had died there. Was our house haunted by poltergeists*? Not the mad kind in the movies, mind you, but, I dunno, maybe … friendly ones? To be clear, we never once felt threatened or harassed by these ghosts; they didn't seem mean-spirited (so to speak) or even unhappy. They seemed, rather, to want to amuse and intrigue us. Which they did.

The Nelsons, pictured at right in the homestead's kitchen, owned the place in the 1940s.
Could the ghost of one or both of them have remained behind?
(Source: Kings Valley: My First Fifteen Years, by Richard B. Nelson)

Most of the ghostly happenings lasted about two years, after which we only occasionally found the white plastic triangles lying in our path. We've moved twice since then, with no recurrence of any paranormal activities in our new homes. So it was definitely the house that was haunted, not us. I say this a bit wistfully, because it was kind of fun to see what the poltergeists would do next to entertain us. But at least I finally got the haunted house I had tried to fabricate as a kid.

*By definition, a poltergeist is "a ghost or other supernatural being supposedly responsible for physical disturbances such as loud noises and objects thrown around." Judging by the word "supposedly," the author of that definition is likely a skeptic. If so, I'd love to have him or her spend a night or two in our old house, and then see whether he/she goes back to work and deletes the word "supposedly" from the definition.

That time I found a live scorpion under a rock...in a creek...in western Washington

Sometimes during my summers off when I was a teacher (eighth-grade English and US history), I made extra money working as a laborer on a friend's blueberry farm in western Washington, near the base of Mt. St. Helens. One summer I was tasked with building a five-hundred-foot-long rock wall along my friend's gravel driveway, using rocks from a creek that ran through his property. As the rock wall would require hundreds of rocks, each weighing between ten and thirty pounds, my friend insisted that I use his big John Deere tractor to transport the rocks from creek to driveway, a distance of perhaps three hundred feet.

One day while selecting rocks from the creek, I noticed what appeared to be a rather large, brown, ugly bug of some sort hiding beneath one. Curious, I rolled the rock over slowly to expose the bug, at which point the bug reared and struck a menacing pose with … a curved tail and two extended claws.

What the hell? I thought, instinctively drawing back. Is that … is that … a scor … a scorpion? Hiding under a rock … in a creek … in western Washington? I thought scorpions were desert creatures, like in Arizona and New Mexico?

The creature, nonplussed by my gaping mouth and stupid expression, maintained its stance, doing its best to scare me off and leave it alone. But because I couldn't believe my own eyes, I knew no one else would believe my story, so I had to devise a plan to present them with some kind of … evidence. But how? No way was this little monster going to let me pick it up, put it in my pocket, put a leash on it, and take it home to show all my friends.

So I did the only thing I could think of to do: I ran back up to the house (the tractor would've taken too long), went inside, found an empty Mason jar with a lid, and ran back down to the creek. If I can just get the little critter to let down its guard for a minute, I thought, I can maybe coax it into the jar, quickly put the lid on, and take it back up to the house to wait until I'm ready to head home. Easy as pie, right?

But as anyone who's ever made a pie will tell you, it ain't at all easy. And neither was this. The scorpion had an impressive assortment of evasive maneuvers, performed while alternately lunging toward me and scooting backward—sometimes doing both at once, it seemed, although I knew this was rationally impossible. For a while it seemed like I was going to be outmaneuvered and outwitted by this prehistoric, two-inch-long bug with the attitude and stealth of an eight-ton T. Rex.

However, I finally managed to figure out the scorpion's game, waited for it to make a wrong move, and quickly scooped it up into the jar, along with a little creek water to make it feel at home.*

When my friend, Martin, returned to the farm that afternoon and I showed him the scorpion in the jar, he was just as incredulous as I was. He had not only never seen one, but he never knew they could exist up there. I asked him what he thought we should do with it, and he suggested that he take it to the local Extension Service office the next day and see what they had to say.

A few days later I called Martin to ask what the Extension folks had told him. He said they had heard of a species of scorpion that lived in certain areas of the Western U.S., but they had never seen one—and hadn't personally heard of anyone else who had. Later I learned that the species is called a Pacific (or western) forest scorpion, and that they inhabit mostly forested areas in the Cascade foothills (including, specifically, the "south side of Mt. St. Helens"), living under rocks and logs. I also learned that I was needlessly concerned about being stung: their venom isn't lethal, and it only hurts about as much as being stung by a bee or wasp. They are also shy, nocturnal, and "rarely seen."

So rarely that in my nearly seven decades of hiking, fishing, and traipsing around in forests of the Pacific Northwest, I have seen only that one. Maybe I need to build another long rock wall?

Western forest scorpion
(source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uroctonus_mordax)

*Note: Looking back on all this now, I vehemently disapprove of my actions. I should've left the poor scorpion alone, or maybe tried to find a camera at the house instead of a jar. But I was young and dumb, and frankly, the shock of finding a live scorpion in that creek, at the base of Mt. St. Helens, overwhelmed any sense of compassion or wisdom I otherwise might've mustered.