The House Ghost, Revisited

Wyatt came home from school a few days ago and wanted to know where he could go to find out information about the history of our house. I told him my best guess, but of course I wanted to know why he wanted to know. Well, he said, I think we have a ghost. He went on to describe the things he sees--I already knew how, some nights, he thinks he sees lights hovering in his room (I probably shouldn't belittle his experience by saying he thinks he sees, but I do remember what darkness in childhood is like, how it's often your own mind that's haunting you, that it's always your own mind filling in the blanks when your eyes see something they misinterpret or don't completely understand.)

Then he said this: the other day when I came out of the computer room, I looked at the picture that's hanging on the wall there, and reflected in the glass, I saw a little girl standing. When I looked over, she wasn't there. Now, that got my attention, and my first thought was, I knew it was a little girl I heard running down the stairs...and my second thought was, this is getting a little creepy. What I said out loud was, that's your mind, honey, putting together pieces and adding information that isn't really there. It's very human, it's what everyone does. I stopped short of telling him outright that he's seeing things because again, I remember what it feels like to be a child and nobody believes you...

Here is what I know about our house: it was built in 1875 by a wealthy family named Faulkner. It was in that family for many years, and has in fact changed hands relatively few times--I seem to remember someone telling me I was just the fifth owner in its nearly 135-year history. But my mind may have made that up, may have filled in information I forgot to find out on my own. I know that the land around me, now filled up with mostly modest houses, was once all farmland. I do know that sometimes I wake up at night and hear my children murmuring in their sleep, and when that happens I always feel a bit uneasy, and it's difficult for me to get back to sleep afterwards.

And, I also know that this doubt of mine over whether we are, in fact, possessed of a ghost in this household--never mind the doubts I still harbor over whether they exist at all!--is turning into my own preoccupation with what it is I'm actually seeing go on around here. This is what happened the past few days: our stockings are all hung with care just now, across the front of a long bookshelf in my living room, as it happens, and the other night, I noticed that Maeve's had been turned around on its hook, so that the backside faced out into the room, and its toe marched counter to the other four stockings that hang there (we still put Dave's up, and of course the dog has one, as well). Both kids were in the living room with me: who turned that around, I asked them, but of course, no one had. A day or two later as I sat at the dining room table, I noticed that the child's rocking chair that sits in the doorway between that room and the next was also turned around, facing into the dining room instead of away from it. Again, no one seems to know how it came to be that way, and although I imagine there are probably any number of so-called logical explanations for it, the one I keep coming back to is, we've got a ghost, and it's feeling mischievous.

Or, perhaps it's my own forgetfulness and my perpetual distractedness that together are the real ghost here, and I'm moving things around without being aware and forgetting where I set things down, which is why stuff disappears for awhile and then reappears in odd places later on. Perhaps Wyatt, sensitive and imaginative, takes too much to heart the paranormal shows he watches on The Discovery Channel, and perhaps the children whisper and sigh in their sleep because that's what teenagers do, what with all those hormones coursing around and keeping things on edge. Perhaps my own hormones are beginning to shift, and that accounts for my jittery sleep, my own restlessness in the face of what is more-or-less a good life.

Or, maybe if there is a house ghost, we can appeal to it to become a helpful member of the household. For instance, I'd like some help in finding the television remote, which has been missing now for nearly a week. For that matter, I need to remember where I put that one box of Christmas presents, which I think got delivered here sometime in the past week--although I can't decide if that's an invented memory. But even if it is, it's one so strong it had me searching every cupboard and cranny and hidey-spot in my house last night. To no avail. My son tells me that ghosts sometimes become active if they're upset over changes to their households. It's a fair deal, I think, and so if there is a house ghost here, I promise to leave your place the same as I found it, if only you'll promise to leave my things alone, as well.