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 and The Exorcist come 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 it for free. I'm still 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 tipped 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 just some other supernatural—or even natural—phenomenon? Our parents had no clue what caused it, either.
The mystery was never solved, and we 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.
Almost immediately, however, weird things started happening. Desk lamps turned themselves on and off at night and during the day. 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 movie, 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.
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 poltergeist 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.
No comments:
Post a Comment