The House Ghost

I noticed a little bit after the fact that when you buy a house, there are no disclosure requirements about ghosts; I didn't think to ask about it until it was too late, all the papers signed and my big check written and cashed. I think we had been living here about two weeks when I first heard it: it was in the middle of the evening; the kids had just gone to bed and I was sitting alone in the downstairs living room, which is a newer addition to my house (which is itself what you'd call an older home, built ca. 1875, and so of course you wouldn't be surprised to discover a ghost living here, would you? I've wondered that sometimes as I've been out walking around where the McMansions are cropping up and I think to myself, how does any soul ever manage to dwell in such an unsoulful place? Luckily for us we live in a home that's one of a number of other older homes on the block, else I think I'd likely be overrun by spirits looking for an appropriate place to hang.)

I have already decided that when I'm able to (by which I mean, at the point where my kids are grown and educated and my financial involvement with their lives is largely over [which, at the rate things are going, is probably going to be tomorrow: my niece was here with her new baby last week, and she said, well, by next Thanksgiving Maya will be walking all over the place. No, I told her, by next Thanksgiving Maya will be applying to college..] ) but when I'm able to, I'm going to return to college one last time and get that Ph.D. and I'm going to study folklore and my concentration is going to be ghosts. And then maybe I'll have finally figured out what I'm most curious about, when I think about ghosts: what exactly is it they want?

Mine seems to want to run down the stairs. The first time I heard it, as I said, both kids had just gone to bed and I assumed the thudding down the front staircase that came right after was one of them--I thought my daughter--heading back down to say something they'd just remembered, you know how kids are when it's bedtime but there's that one last thing on their minds. I waited, and I admit I waited a little annoyed, since I didn't want to deal with one single more interruption (you know how mothers are when it's the end of the day and the only thing that's on their minds is some silence and solitude). So I waited, and no one appeared--thankfully, I now think to myself--and I forgot about it until the next night, and the next night after that, when the same footsteps ran down the same length of staircase and by that time I was pretty sure I wasn't dealing with any figment of my imagination, and the thought of it and the sound of it kept me in a state of low-grade uneasiness for awhile, enhanced by how we were all three already uneasy much of the time, living as we were in a new house, in an unfamiliar town, and all the rest of it.

It doesn't confine itself to the late evening hours, this ghost of mine. One night my daughter heard it too, as we sat in the living room together and that familiar thump thump thump came on the stairs and she looked up and said oh, Wyatt must be coming down for something. I waited, watching her out of the corner of my eye, because I knew that Wyatt wasn't going to appear and I wanted to see her face as she began to figure it out. Either she never did, and forgot about it, or else she's keeping it to herself, because she didn't mention it again, and after a few minutes our conversation picked back up on another thread altogether and so far, house ghost is not a story we have told each other.

I have told a few other people about it, though, but just a few. One night I mentioned it, on the phone, to my boyfriend; he came to visit me some time after that and on a Saturday night, I fell asleep on the couch while the rest of them watched television. He woke me when it was time to go to bed, and sounded a little shaky when he told me, I heard your ghost. Same thing as me: the kids had gone to bed, a few moments later he heard someone thudding back down the steps, and waited to see Wyatt enter the room. When Wyatt did not, he realized what it was he'd heard--I don't think it scared him, necessarily, but I don't think he'd quite expected it, either.

I'd grown used to thinking my ghost was a little girl, my boyfriend thought it was a boy, judging by the way it clomps on the carpeted stairs. I'm not sure, but now I'm thinking we were both wrong, and this is why: last week the steam boiler that runs the radiators in the old part of the house quit working. The first thing I tried--the only thing I could try--was replacing the batteries in the thermostat that operates it. That wasn't the problem, and of course, when I took the batteries out everything reset, so I had to run through the program redoing the time, the date, that sort of thing. I could not get the temperature gauge to reset properly, though, and so I left that for the repairman I called to deal with. When he came in the next day he asked me, why did you set this to military time?

Well, I had not, but I think I know who might have. When I bought this house I bought it from a woman who was selling because she'd become widowed. Her husband had died here about a year earlier; all I knew about him was that he had died from kidney cancer, and that he had been career military, retired from the Air Force. I told my boyfriend when he called that night, I think I know who the ghost is, I think it's probably the Colonel. Who else would reset the only clock I have that can be set that way, to military time? And since I said that out loud, the footsteps at night have fallen silent, the evening hours are quiet again, and now I think, maybe that's the only thing a ghost ever wants, is for someone to know its real name.