Meet my (maybe) (not) ghost

Gather round, children. Let me tell you a tale about my ghost. (Or maybe my maybe-not-ghost. lulz(1).

Once upon a time we moved into a new place, an older home. (It's always an older home isn't?(2)) This was good. We were pleased. Movin' out of the ole family's domicile, into our own space.

I wouldn't consider it a big house or a small house. It was, shall we say, a goldilocks house. Two stories, three bedrooms upstairs (though one is the size of a walk-in closet), a living room, "dining room" (I'll get to that in a second), kitchen, bathroom upstairs, and a bathroom/small room downstairs in a tiny addition.

It sounds bigger than it is.

Broad cement and brick covered porch. Crumbling front stairs, iron railing separating from fat brick posts, broken stairs in the back, plaster inside with paint fracturing off the walls in a grime peach color; lead paint and arsenic wallpaper peeking out from underneath.

Big ole basement with mold, where two "rooms" and a fat, top-blocked-off, 3d cinderblock square skulk into the walls. I know the rooms and sharp cornered square (probably a vat) are remnants of a different era's water technology. They still look very suspicious for the 21st century. Dead body suspicious.

Yes, we live here.

And yes, we're happy. We love it. Mostly. This is our stage.

When we first moved in, the house was absolutely empty. Cigarette smoke drenched the walls, which oozed amber tar, the miasma requiring outer space moviesque space hoods. Smoke residue was everywhere, soaking everything: painted plaster, hardwood floors (that had seen so much better days), weary art deco fixtures from the forties, and the chipping trim covering lead marinated varnish. Even the outlets hiding less than desirable wiring were covered in sticky caramel colored drips.

Did I mention the house measured at 16.9 radon levels? (3)

Ok, I kind of hate this house too. Not for spooky reasons. Never trust a realtor that pushes you to move in because they're on vacation.

(Trust me, 'I don't have a fax machine out here, you're already halfway through the paperworkyou'llloseyourdepositlemmetwistyourarm' agents are far scarier than ghosts.)

The first few weeks we slept on a tall, fat air mattress, going room by taped off room, saturating the house in Vamoose(4), eradicating the cancer tar and smoke stench. We'd saved all our money to put in a radon system, which the company said "...couldn't receive the normal guarantee of radon level reduction" based on the condition of said basement.

After a while the air mattress started to sag.

Because of a ghost?

No.

Because I roll like a whale all night long.

We finally cleared enough rooms to safely bring in furniture, so we did. We only had a few pieces; one is my bed. Ah, my bed. This thing is like sleeping on a cloud. A cloooowwwwd.

I've had it ten years; it was a fancy dancy bed my ex-girlfriend's parents were giving away. Having cash I could never dream of, they traded up to cloudier cloud mattresses. We packed their bed on my dad's skinny blue pick up truck, out country roads, to a place we lived before.

Oh God, I loved that bed. Softest thing I've ever slept on. That bed went through two more places after that, taking quite a beating at one point in two different uninsulated 700 sq ft shacks. Both filled with love (thank you mommies for the roofs), but still in states where my daughter joked we were living in 1875.

Regardless, the bed took its beating and still managed to make things comfortable. When moving time came, we scrubbed that bed with the best baking soda we could find, then hauled it ceremoniously to our new house, our final home perhaps.

We slept good, slowly working through the days on different parts of our abode, scavenging furniture from friends all too happy to clean out their storage spaces.

That bed. That's how I first met the "ghost".

Did I say we have a dining room?

Bedroom. That's my bedroom.

Yessiree bob. Where people have been having their Thanksgiving family fights for 100 years is where I sleep.

And did I say I loved that bed? Love. I love that bed. After a year of not having it, the day we moved it in I sank into it with a deeply satisfied sigh. I repeated the “sleeping on a cloud” mantra for like, three months.

We also have a cat. Or had a cat. Or have/had a cat. We had to leave our cat behind in the move. At the time we had misguided beliefs the cat would be moving with us once the house was in a safe liveable shape. Meanwhile we still had cat muscle memory.

Cat muscle memory: when you are so used to having a cat around that it holds space with you even when it's not there. Weird noise upstairs? Must be the cat. Cup falls off the table? It's the cat. Mouse head in the hallways? Cat of course. You don't have to see it do things to just know your cat is around.

One day, I was sleeping comfy in my cloud-bed in the not-dining room when I felt our cat lightly jump on the mattress, do a little turn, and then curl up next to my ankle. It was delightfully soothing. The move was big, and it's always comforting when our kitty comes to lay on us.

The next morning I got up groggy and went to look for the cat. I'd barely scooted my butt to the end of the bed before I remembered, "We don't have our cat."

Huh. Weird. Must have been dreaming.

A week went by, I was sleeping all toasty, when again, our cat hopped up on the bed, the blankets giving a little puff, the feel of feline paws landing comfortably. The blankets pushed just slightly against my foot and calf. Look y'all. I should have "ruh roh'd" the oddity, but I was tired.

So I smiled, content, in my sleep. Sure is nice to have our kitty back.

That was really all there was. No other signs of anything strange, so I didn't really think anything of it.

Lol, I'm lying.

The first month we were in the house we heard noises like someone was upstairs (where no one slept due to our attempts to "renovate"), or in the basement (where also no one slept because, what are you? Uncle Fester?). The pops and clicks were so convincing we'd stop everything. Trembling, I'd go check it out, the kids backing me up from behind.

It happened so often that we suspected someone was sneaking in, so I'd talk very loudly about how we didn't want any trouble and we would be ever so grateful if someone were inside the house if they could just...leave. It got to the point that we jammed a slab of wood, a random plank, and something heavy all up against the inner basement door. Take that, not-someone that was definitely not-sneaking in the outer basement door, who definitely now couldn't not-creep up into the house proper.

When the kids were gone and I was headed to sleep, I took to positioning the furniture in the living room such that a huge ruckus would be made if someone tried to sneak from the upstairs landing down and across to my sleeping room. I made it suuuuper easy for them to sneak right out the front door without bothering me.

All I asked, loudly while arranging furniture as if talking to myself, would be if they could lock the door on their way out. If there were someone upstairs. "Which I'm sure there isn't. It's totally preposterous. But in this fictional scenario if there were someone upstairs it would be wonderful if they could just sneak out the front, which I totally can't see from my room, and lock the door behind them. And don't come back."

Yes, I announced this more than once. Yes, we changed the locks a few weeks after we moved in. No, the sounds didn't stop. But I could rest assured no one was ever coming up from the basement.

The thing is, I'm an agnostic ghost skeptic. Schrödinger's spiritualist if you will. I think there are not, in fact, ghosts; that everything has a scientific explanation. But I also think that nature is a thing and science is a thing we use to explain it, and every decade for millennia we discover there are a lotta things we don't understand.

So I believe it's possible there are things that we run into that could in fact be ghosts, or at least energy phenomena of some related sort, but I also choose not to believe in them and instead think about 21st century explanations.

This has served me well.

We used to live in a murder house. Things would vibrate off the shelves. I'd push everything carefully back away from all edges. I'd leave the room and then bam! macaroni boxes spilling all over the floor. Bookshelves I inspected personally would just… collapse…off walls. The toilet would flush. Then flush again. Then flush again.

I marvelled at this with confidantes, pondering the possibility and impossibility of otherworldly sources, since I couldn't find a non-spirit explanation. I kept trying to figure out what in the actual world was causing this to happen.

My conversation companions were convinced it was spooky spectral action; the murder in that house being quite famous. One fabulous cynic pointed out there was an active explosive-using chalk mine about ten miles west.

"Those vibrations travel pretty far at frequencies you can't hear."

I looked it up, and sure enough, it wasn't spectral, it was normal ole spooky action at a distance. But more like...just action at a distance. The internet was helpful too. The toilet flap was probably deteriorating, causing the flushity flush flushes. Which made sense since the landlord was...well, a landlord.

Despite weird things still happening there, like a shadowy boy in a baseball cap shaking my ankles until I woke up, this persistent skepticism continued to serve us well when we moved into our newest (and perhaps final) abode. (We call this one 'the house on Woodpier Boulevard', or Woodpier for short, as opposed to our former home, the house on Poe Street). By served us well, I mean kept us calm to carry on when spooky action went 'Boo!'

Sorry to disappoint. It wasn't a ghost.

I figured out that at least one of the freaky “is-someone-in-the-kitchen-where-no-one-is” noises came from the fridge that came with the house. It was doing a weird, weird thing, but it was explainable after investigation.

I concluded that most sounds from upstairs were actually reverberations of firecrackers that residents on Woodpier apparently loved(6), and that those sounds echoed through the house in an odd fashion because of our position on the boulevard.

I found one particularly disturbing set of sounds came from stepping in a certain spot. You'd think it'd be obvious—if you step on a floorboard and hear a creak that it must be cause and effect—but it really wasn't.

I eventually figured out how to replicate it, which led me to discovering that the AC ducts in the living room were getting stressed, twisting slightly, and causing a chain reaction up the walls to the second floor. Hence the sound of someone stepping three times at the top of the stairs and down the upstairs hall into one of the empty rooms.

So when I was having midsleep ankle-snuggling-cat sensations I told myself there was a logical explanation, I just didn't know what it was.

Time passed and the hopping stopped. I almost didn't realize it until a day we were having our actual cat come to visit in preparation for its transfer back to us. It hopped up on my bed, exactly like the nightly sensations. My mind instantly transported, going: "Huh, I haven't felt that in a while."

A few weeks later (the cat not having transferred), one of my kids walked through the room into the kitchen. Poof! As their back disappeared I felt the little dusting of air on the blankets around my ankles and the little impressions of cat shaped feet. I smiled. I'd figured it out.

A few days later I announced that I'd had this silly notion that the house had a ghost and I thought it was a cat ghost, which I'd immediately dubbed ‘ghost cat’. But! I'd figured out what was making that poof! As people disrupted the air currents when passing through the dining room to the kitchen, I explained, it caused a pressure shift that gave a little ripple of air which caught the edge of the blankets. Voila!

My daughter, 18, looked at me with a deep relieved wince, confessing in a scandalized whisper, "I thought I was imagining it. I was feeling it too and it felt like a cat jumping up and curling next to my legs."

Imagine my surprise. "Why didn't you say anything?"

"I didn't want you to think I was crazy."

After comparing notes, it was very clear that the pressure phenomenon felt exactly like a family cat curling up and purring to sleep. My theory was a plausible one.

I felt like the cat that ate the canary knowing I had solved it. See? It's our ghost cat. But also not a ghost cat. It's our neat scientific phenomenon, but also, could have been a ghost phenomena. A very homey spirity happening.

The thing is, unlike the fridge and the firecracker pops, and the air duct creaks, I haven't been able to replicate the phenomenon. Not once. Not an inch. Not an incident. I sleep in that room every night and every day. People pass through it regularly while I'm sleeping because I have non-24 sleep disorder. I've tried to replicate it by instructing people to walk through the room this way and that. I've tried to walk through the room in different manners, with different doors open, with different weather pressures.

Nada.

Still, my explanation was in hand, the case neatly closed. And then...

...then one day the upstairs bathtub started sounding like someone was turning it on and running bathwater. When no one was up there....when no one was running any faucets...sometimes when only one of us was home...

The internet was not helpful. Search after search and nothing came close to describing what we were hearing. No flaps, or valves or air burps brushed away the mystery.

And one day it stopped. When I started doing a thing.

I could tell you what it is. If you want…

Here lies the end of our tale, quietly sleeping...

Foot Notes

(1) lulz = internet speak with so many beautiful connotations. It comes from lol— which means laugh out loud, but does not itself mean laugh out loud.

(2) Except when it's not. Remind me to tell you about my mom's house in the early 2000's.

(3) If I were a commenter I would immediately urge myself to move out. These are bad levels. Unfortunately, unless you are a very rich philanthropist who would like to shower us with money - and I wouldn’t say no - it's very much not possible.

(4) I stg(5) y'all, this is the best cigarette smoke remover ever. I don't get paid to say that, and one day I'll put up a review. Just read the reviews carefully because most people that don't like it don't read the reviews and don't know what they're in for.

(5) stg = swear to god.

(6) I say loved, because for some reason they stopped the following spring and barely returned for Memorial Day and the Fourth of July before disappearing again.

ENDNOTE: While writing this my chair made a sound as if little cat claws had dug into the canvas hopping up. It's helping me write! Thanks, ghost cat. You're so thoughtful.