Not Haunted

I've just put the finishing touches on the process of remodeling my bathroom when I walk out to the kitchen to get a glass of water and find a colonial man sitting at my table buttering a Ritz cracker.

I am momentarily lost for words, and back up so quickly I hit the island counter with my aching lower back. Ow.

"Whoa, Nelly," the colonial man says. He looks a little like Benjamin Franklin. Chuckling, he selects another cracker from what I notice is an almost completely depleted roll.

"I just bought those yesterday," I say. He ignores me, pointing down at the stick of vegan butter I keep on the counter with the point of his knife.

"This cow is very sick," he says. He has a vaguely British accent.

"Listen," I say, digging in my paint-spattered jeans for my cell phone, "Breaking and entering is a serious crime. You need to leave immediately or I'll call the cops."

British Ben Franklin bites into another cracker, undeterred.

"Fat lot that'll do for you," he says. "If you didn't want me up and about you should have thought of that before you took that primitive steel pecker and made all that racket."

Steel pecker...? Is he talking about my electric drill? Who the hell talks this way?

"Listen, I'm only going to ask you one more time-"

An unholy clanking sound from below my feet interrupts me.

"Aha!" Ben says, rising from the table at the sound. He starts toward me, and before I can get out of his way, I feel a sensation like someone's dipped my body in ice. Before I know it, he's on my opposite side.

Did he just go through me? I need some time to process this.

"Are you supposed to be a ghost or something?" I ask Ben Franklin's back.

I suppose it makes a kind of sense. The people who sold me the house kept gushing on about how the original framework had been built in the 1600's. They'd also spent a weird amount of time assuring me it wasn't haunted, which in retrospect is probably only something you do if the house is, in fact, haunted as fuck.

"Yes, Donna," Ben says snootily. "Though I prefer the term 'specter'. Ghost is such a classless word. Do I look like a sheet with two eyeholes poked in it? Do I moan and flit about like an empty-brained imbecile?"

I think about all I know about ghosts. "It was the renovations, wasn't it?" I ask. "Literally all I did was paint the walls, replace the sink and toilet-"

"The toilet was my home!" Ben bellows so loud I'm pretty sure I've gone deaf in one ear.

Suddenly I am reminded of the number of times I've had to take a shit in that room and been overwhelmed by a musty smell that seemed to perfectly replicate exactly what I imagine it smelled like in the room where the founding fathers signed the Declaration of Independence.

"I think you're overreacting. Why haunt a toilet anyway?"

But Ben is focused again on the godawful sound coming from my basement.

"How long has evil shifted belowdecks?" he asks.

"Huh?"

"I'd know the sound of it anywhere. That's the demon that took my daughter the year she had scarlet fever."

"No, that's the coins I forgot to take out of my jean pockets."

Ben will not rest until I've shown him, so I lead him downstairs and open the overheated dryer. He stares inside before climbing in. His bulk barely fits.

"Shut me in," he orders.

"Uh."

"Shut me in, I must get to the bottom of this!"

I do as I'm told, and the dryer lurches to a start again, this time sounding like there's two hundred and forty pounds of bloated sausage thunking around inside. When the cycle ends Ben comes out wearing the beige JC Penney skirt I got on clearance yesterday and a shirt featuring the ninja turtles. It is so tight on his sixty-some year old body that he looks like a cased ham.

"Observe how I have suited myself to blend into these modern times!" he announces.

I ask him if he found the demon. He shushes me and begins to walk around the basement. At one point he stares at the wall and says, "Aha, little Mary's portrait of the arch bishop!" There is nothing there.

I go upstairs and to my room and open my laptop, searching the internet for exorcism tips. When I come downstairs again, Ben is watching Food Network on my flatscreen tv, laughing at intervals like its a sitcom.

"Listen, what do you want?" I ask him. "Is there something I can do for you to be...at peace or whatever?" He turns the volume up. So it's going to be that way.

.

Over the next few days I try everything. I buy some crystals from Amazon and set them up in the windows while Ben runs up and down the halls at three am, the smell of his crusty ghost feet everywhere. I stand in the doorway to the kitchen putting down salt while Ben stands in front of my pantry reading off the boxes inside. "TOR- toe-lee-NI. Pray- GO!” I even get out a prayer book and some sage and attempt to smudge the living room while Ben watches 90 Day Fiance on the couch.

At last I'm all out of ideas. Defeated, I cede Ben the territory. He's getting increasingly active and increasingly annoyed that I call him Ben (he says his name is Henry). I go to my laptop and draft a listing to put in the paper. "House for sale. $50,000 cash, flat. Fully furnished. No tours provided, see pictures for interior. Available immediately to highest bidder." I stop and look over my work, then add: "Not haunted."

Just for good measure.