Ghost Hunting

How many dollars is a life-changing amount? If we ask twenty people that question, we might get twenty answers. A rich guy may not notice an extra million dollars. To a homeless guy on a cold night, eighty bucks for a motel room and a meal can mean he'll live to struggle another day. It turns out my number, the one that makes the money life-changing, is twenty thousand.

I should probably back up some and start this story when I was about sixteen, because that's when things started going sideways. I had an okay home life - better than okay really - so this isn't a sad story about poor me as a boy. That's just about the time I discovered the joy of alcohol and drugs. High school was a joke. I could finish the whole semester in a week, so I didn't bother turning in assigments until just before grades came out. As long as we were winning the games, Coach would talk all the teachers into giving me full credit, so I managed to hide behind letter jackets and Dean's lists until graduation.

I could have gone to college, but since I already knew I just wanted to play music there wasn't any point. Living at home didn't work out because the parents thought I should live by their rules, so I moved out. The next ten or fifteen years is a little hazy. I sometimes held jobs fixing stuff, but mostly got by on what I could make playing shows, selling my art, and teaching private music lessons. Some of the bands I played with recorded albums that got some radio play, and we toured several states. I had a lot of friends to party with, and my band was my family, at least until some of them started getting married. After the band broke up, sometimes I had a place to stay and sometimes I didn't. When life was hard - every day - I got high.

Living on the street is hard. But life sober is impossible. I tried it for a little while, after my family and a couple of friends ambushed me with an intervention. The next thing I knew I was in a rehab center 800 miles away. At least Mom had packed a little black notebook so I could write song lyrics while I was there. After I detoxed, I found an uncashed check from my last gig in my pocket and bought a bus ticket home.

Life happened, and I decided I could take care of myself. I had to. My musician friends and I called each other Brother, but whenever I woke from a blackout I'd find another one had bailed. I didn't blame them, I'd have bailed on me too. Occasionally it would get real rough and I'd decide to get sober, but it never lasted. By the time I'd gone through three rehab programs, I had figured out how to live semi-homeless. I didn't have a car and I didn't pay rent, but I didn't sleep in the street either. Sometimes I couch-surfed or lived with a girlfriend. When somebody bought a derelict house to flip, I'd stay there while I did the remodel work so they could rent or sell it. There wasn't any furniture, linens, or pots and pans, but camping inside beat freezing outside, and it gave me a place to lock up my stuff for several weeks at a time. My tools disappeared a lot. About the only things I'd managed to hang onto through all the moving were my lyrics notebooks and my sketchbooks.

One house I stayed in had been vacant for maybe a decade because after the owner died it passed to family members who lived out of town. Eventually they sold it to a guy so cheap even he couldn't believe they'd made the deal. It was at least a hundred fifty years old and super cool with high ceilings and huge rooms trimmed in wide ornate wood. I was hired to stay and work after another crew refused to come back. One guy - Roy - claimed he'd seen ghosts walking around in the house. I don't believe in that stuff, but this old place had a little too much character and I wanted to get the job done and get out.

I could see how a guy that believed in ghosts could get spooked. A couple of times I thought there was someone next to me, and once I thought there was somebody behind me in the mirror over the fireplace, but when I turned to look there was never anyone there.

When the sun went down I'd be on the main level and hear animals scurrying overhead. Around ten o'clock I'd hear footsteps walking across the floor above me, always beginning in the front bedroom and crossing to the back of the house. After midnight was when the voices in the basement would whisper through the return air vents. The basement had little rooms that looked like maybe they could have been extra bedrooms, only the locks were on the outside of the doors and there were jail bars in the windows. Like I said, I don't believe in ghosts, so the baseball bat I started carrying was in case of animals or burglars.

My brother came to see where I was working, and I told him about the noises and stories from the former workers while we looked around. The basement lights didn't work and my flashlight battery needed to be charged, so it was like walking through a dungeon with a weak strobe light. Each flash revealed a black and white picture on the wall, the bars in the window, the graffiti on the concrete, or the weird concrete room with a double metal door. It's not a double door like a patio door, but two doors installed back to back. When we got one opened we were looking at another door. When we got that one opened we were in a little concrete cell. Neither of us was willing to admit being scared but the feeling of being in a B horror movie finally chased us back up to the main level, where I locked the basement door just in case a vagrant tried to break in. It didn't help that Roy's sloppy paint job made it look like there was smeared blood around the door trim.

The next couple of days sucked. Half of every week did, really, because I had to stay sober long enough to pass my weekly drug test, but that's a story for another day. I got a lot done though, and had the main floor looking pretty good by Sunday night. I was touching up some baseboard when I heard a dog and a couple of voices. I leaned over to pick up the bat, trying to decide whether to investigate, and noticed a glow from the basement coming through the floor vent. I hadn't fixed those lights yet, or even gone back down there since the tour with my brother. I called my boss and told him I needed help to move something. Then I got my power tools and some long screws out, tiptoed back to the still-locked basement door, and screwed a board across the door and frame. Someone else could investigate it; I'd seen how those movies ended.

My boss showed up and didn't act too surprised that I wasn't moving heavy furniture. He didn't point out that there wasn't any furniture to move, heavy or otherwise. I told him there may be squatters trying to get in and suggested that he stay the night in the house to help run them off, but he made up some excuse and went home.

It was like the house had been waiting. As soon as the front door closed behind him I heard footsteps overhead, beginning in the front corner bedroom and slowly crossing the house to the top of the stairs. I grabbed the bat and positioned myself behind the wall next to the stairs. This time, instead of stopping, the footsteps slowed down and started down the stairs. My heart was jumping up and down and I gripped the bat, waiting for whatever it was to reach the bottom of the stairs and turn into the dining room where I stood. I meant to say, whoever it was. The steps slowed even more, until there was maybe a half a minute between each footfall. When I heard the foot on the bottom step, I held my breath and stared hard at the spot where my visitor would have to take that last step down.

Maybe hours or maybe five minutes later, I still stood there with fingers cramping around the bat, trying to imagine who was standing on the first step on the other side of the wall. I wanted to lean around the wall and look, but couldn't bring myself to do that. Then the thought that he (I'd decided it was a man) could just lean around the wall to see me galvanized my legs around the corner as I waved the bat and yelled fiercely.

There was no one there.

Had he figured out I was still in the house and somehow snuck back upstairs? Barely breathing, I crept up the stairs, then jumped off the final tread with another yell, twisting and swinging the bat as I landed, ready to attack like a ninja turtle. The momentum knocked me back down a step, but I could see the entire landing and upstairs hall with its open doors to the big bedrooms. They were empty bedrooms. I cleared them all just like I'd learned from television cop shows, then went back to the front corner bedroom, where the footsteps always started. There was a built-in window seat and a big closet that sloped toward the roof right about where the sounds began. Short of climbing in a second story window that was painted shut, I saw no way for an intruder to have entered the room, but I knew what I'd heard. I attacked the back of the closet with frenzied dread, removing a section of the wood wall to expose whoever could be hiding in the attic behind it.

There was no one there.

I shone my spotlight into the attic and could see that there was no way anyone could have been spending time there, at least not recently. There was no flooring between the supports, and the dust and sparse insulation was undisturbed. But it wasn't empty - there was cash, and lots of it!

I don't know where the money came from or why it was hidden behind the wall, and I don't care. If I ask too many questions somebody might claim that money. It was hard enough to show it to my boss, but we split it and I still ended up with twenty thousand dollars. Which brings me back to the idea that twenty thousand is the number of dollars that would be life-changing for me.

At least it could be. I mean, with my track record, it's entirely possible that twenty thousand dollars could vaporize with nothing to show for it. But that's not what I want to happen. Twenty thousand dollars could buy me a work van for tools and musical instruments, with maybe enough room for an air mattress. That would make life easier for a while, maybe even long enough to get on my feet. Whatever that means.

But I've been thinking a lot about what I saw and heard in that old house. I've even used some of it in my song lyrics. Sometimes it's hard to tell what's real and what's not, but maybe there's a way to know the difference next time. I think I'll spend a chunk of that twenty thousand dollars to go to rehab one more time, and change my life permanently.