Musings
an Online Journal of Sorts

By Alyce Wilson

When a friend shared a link with me to an online joke which purportedly involves a picture of a ghost, I told him it was weak for a variety of reasons. One of which, because it was so obvious.

Real ghosts seldom are.

"Go ahead," I dared him, "ask me why I won't sleep upstairs in my mom's house."

"Okay, I bite. Why not?"

"Several reasons, I told him. To be specific, several spirits."

I was in a hurry that day so I gave barebones details, but now, as promised, I'll give a fuller explanation.

I should start off by mentioning that my mom also grew up in a haunted house. In her case, most likely they were ghosts of her actual blood relatives.The house had been built by her great-grandfather, and in a large extended family, some of the children slept in the attic. Two actually died on the attic stairs, one falling down the steep stairwell and breaking her neck, the other burning to death after playing with matches.

This, we believe, is why Mom used to hear the ghostly sound of a heavy object falling down the stairs and hitting the door at the bottom with a crash. If you opened the door, there was never anything there.

I should also mention that everyone in my family seems to have the ability to "see dead people," as the line from "The Sixth Sense" terms it. And so I wonder sometimes if the spirits we encountered in the house where I grew up were tied to the house or whether they simply wanted to be seen and so they went someplace they could be.

Until I left for college, none of the sightings upstairs in my Mom's house involved my bedroom. At first I thought it was because the room had no radiator and until I started using it (I kept the door open in the winter to pick up second-hand heat from my brother's room who also, consequently, had to keep his door open) the room had simply been a sewing room and wouldn't have had as much of a personal connection for spirits seeking to return to favorite haunts, as it were.

But I now wonder if I project some kind of unconscious "ghost be gone" forcefield. Or, to put it another way, ghosts are generally afraid of me. I have in the past helped cast a spirit out of a house (which is a story for another day), and it seems that no matter what sort of strange occurences happen in the house where I'm sleeping, they stay out of my room at night.

When everybody else in the house was spooked, including the animals, they ran into my room for protection.

The skeptic would say that perhaps the rest of my family is simply more susceptible to believing in spirits than I, the analytical Virgo. But I would counter that I, too, have had strange experiences in that house. They simply never happened in my bedroom until I moved out.

I used to think my brother was just overreacting when, in the middle of the night, he would call from his bed for me to turn my light on quick. When I did, he'd sigh in relief and say simply, "I thought I heard something."

It wasn't until years later when he revealed what he'd heard. He would hear the sound of a dog entering his room at night, walking to its favorite spot in the carpet, turning around and lying down to sleep. The light would reveal that the family dogs were not in his room; in fact, they would not sleep in his room, preferring me for company.

My sister, who is seven and a half years younger than I, used to seek refuge in my room at night. I can't blame her; when my grandmother visited, she was always given my room and I was expected to bunk at my sister's. I always had an uneasy feeling in that room but could never put a finger on why.

Again, it was years later that she told me what she'd experienced. I think, perhaps, that talking about such experiences while you're still living in a house makes them seem more likely to happen again. As if the ghosts, overhearing, will say, "Oooh! They saw me! I'll have to do that again!"

She woke up one night to see an old man standing over her bed, looking at her. Almost this exact same experience was repeated several years later when my brother's wife — then his girlfriend — was sleeping in the house. She also saw an old man in her bedroom (or the hallway, I'm not certain). She assumed it was the ghost of my grandfather, whom she'd never met and who had lived with my mom in his last years. But given the similarity of the description, I'm assuming it was the same spirit.

The attic door is located in the upstairs bathroom directly across from the toilet, and it used to swing open, unnerving me in the middle of the night. This, admittedly, could have been a function of the air drafts and the fit of the door frame or some such. But due to a dream I had one night that the ghost of Bruce Lee lived in our attic, afterwards I would just chuckle and say that it was Bruce Lee again.

If it was air drafts, it seems illogical that it should have responded to vocal commands, as it seemed to do. The door liked to float open when I was alone in there, either using the toilet or brushing my teeth. Sometimes, even after I closed it, the door would open again. And again. Finally, out of exasperation, I would say, "Okay, that's enough. Stop it, please." And the door would almost without fail stop swinging open.

When my parents had moved into the house in 1975, they had built an addition which, for many years, never was troubled by spirits. They didn't seem to know it existed. But since then, things have changed.

Now, if you sit in the living room at Mom's house (she and my father having divorced years ago, he taking the apartment over his office) at night, once it grows dark you can often hear what sounds like footsteps or even crashes, like something falling on the floor or someone jumping in my mom's bedroom, above. Usually, a quick check of the animals reveals that they're all spending time with us downstairs. However, my mom is such a pet lover that most of the time, when we heard such a noise, we would attribute it to some pet or another, despite the fact that a nine-pound cat could scarcely make the noises we heard.

Once, I was having a slumber party downstairs with some friends and they started telling ghost stories. Just as they were getting to a particularly scary part of the story, a picture fell off the wall with a crash. No one says the ghosts in my mom's house don't have a sense of humor.

The strangest occurence I had in the house (aside from seeing what appeared to be a blood-like substance dripping down the chimney in the attic, which could have been caused by a number of things) happened one day in the middle of the afternoon. I was in my bedroom, standing at my dresser and looking for earrings or something.

From the hallway, I heard a young woman's voice. "Alyce?" it said.

"What?" I asked. I walked out into the hallway. No one was there.

"Mom, did you call me?" I asked, knowing full well it hadn't sounded like her. She wasn't anywhere upstairs. Neither was my sister. Finally, I tracked down my mom, who was downstairs in the complete opposite corner of the house. There's no way her voice would have sounded so close. Still, I asked her if she'd called me. She said no.

But undoubtedly the strangest sighting took place in my room after I'd left for college. My sister had begun sleeping in there, believing that it was a safe space from the strange happenings. Boy, was she wrong.

Her best friend from high school was sleeping over that night, and they were sharing the double canopy bed I'd left behind. My sister's friend woke up screaming. Somebody, she said, had grabbed her arm as she'd slept. Apparently, my bedroom was no longer a refuge without me being there.

I don't expect everyone reading this to believe these stories. I have no photographic proof, no opinion by experts, nothing that couldn't be easily discounted by those who have a "rational" explanation for every strange phenomenon.

But perhaps a dream I had once says it best.

I used to have a recurring dream that I lived in a haunted house, and that we could hear ghosts bumping and bustling through the upstairs. One night, in the middle of one such dream, the ghosts started laughing.

"It's not a dream," they told me. "You can't wake up."

Copyright 2003 by Alyce Wilson

Musings Index

What do you think? Share your thoughts
at Alyce's message board (left button):