My Halloween story.

I spent a good part of my childhood living in the Quail Creek neighborhood of Oklahoma City. It was a big old stone house, one of the first to be built in that part of town, but my grandparents had been the first owners. My parents were not well-off, and we moved into the house while my grandparents were still living there. Eventually, the grandparents divorced and moved out, separately, leaving us in the house. My sisters and I had our rooms in the upstairs of the house. When you walked up the stairs, one attic was on the left at the top of the stairs. If you turned right, you walked through the room I shared with the middle sister, and then into my oldest sister’s room. In one corner of her room was a bathroom. The second attic was accessible through that bathroom. Other than their locations, the attics were completely identical…except that the second attic was haunted. No, I never saw a ghost. I never even heard creepy footsteps or strange voices when nobody was there. But something was there nonetheless. I was terrified of that room. Although I could play contentedly for hours alone in Attic #1, I never once went into the second attic unaccompanied. I never even used that bathroom. I hated being sent upstairs to bed before my sisters because I would be in the general vicinity of the ghost, and often I simply refused to go. If I was forced upstairs, I hid under the blankets or locked myself in the closet, where I was safe, and rarely slept until my sister came up to bed. Of course my parents never believed me. What parent would? At least, I didn’t think they believed me.

A few years ago, I talked to my mother about that house and the attic, and asked her if she thought that it was haunted. Yes, she said, she did. She had always felt sort of funny about it, but being the sensible woman that she was, she ignored her feelings about it and assumed that my hysteria was rubbing off on her. But then, something changed. When I was about 10 years old, we moved to New Mexico. Our last day there, almost all the furniture had been loaded into the moving truck, and my siblings and I slept in the van. It was an awful evening, for many reasons. My parents had a violent fight, in which my father tried to push my mother off the ramp of the moving truck. My siblings and I sat in the van, crying and praying Hail Mary’s, good Catholic children that we were. My father slept in the moving truck, and my mother slept in the house alone. No one else entered the house all night. The master bedroom was directly beneath the second attic, and all night long she heard thumps and footsteps and ghostly unintelligible whispers. She was incredibly relieved never to have to spend another night in that house.

She doesn’t think it was the ghost of a dead person, though. Nobody had ever died in that house, although of course it’s possible (likely, in fact) that deaths had occurred in that location in years past. But she believed that the “ghost” consisted of bad energy which had accumulated in the attic, having flowed upwards first from the fights and anger and hatred of my grandparents’ marriage, and then from hers and my father’s as well. She could be right. I don’t know enough about ghosts to know if they can be the offspring of bad energy. I do know that something wasn’t right in that house, and I was glad to hear that my mother at least didn’t think I was crazy for it.

~ by teaspoon on November 1, 2007.