This new house, the house that we bought this summer, has no ghosts.
Our last one did – it wasn’t scary at all, just a sense of a presence in the house. A couple of them, actually. There would be the sudden, strong scent of pipe smoke. And she, presumably the old woman who lived and died there, would be felt as a usually benevolent presence. You could catch movement out of the corner of your eye when you thought you were alone, or hear a voice talking. She hid things, too – things that we just KNEW we’d left in the usual place. We could turn the house upside down looking for the missing item, to no avail. Always, though, in a day or a week, the item would appear someplace very obvious, such as in the middle of the dining room table. It seemed a way for her to say “I’m here. This is still my house.” We co-existed without stress or tension.
There are other ghosts that you sense in a place that you have lived for a while. Memories, really, that come back to you unexpectedly: quick flash of making love, just there, in front of the fireplace. The crack in the vanity mirror where a thrown coffee cup shattered during an argument. The dress that I wore on our first Christmas Eve together.
Ghosts. We live with them all around us.
I miss the ghosts in my mothers home. Even my father can not deny that they exist. The apartment I live in now on a Marine Corps Base had a Marine die in it about twenty years ago, he wanders through the unit, opens and closes doors, flushes toilettes and managed to scare the shit out of my husband when we got back from leave.
It seems our ghostly resident missed us… then again, when Logan pays attention to him he gets more active.
-Al
I’m not really sure what ghosts are. Before we lived in our last house, I would have said that people leave impressions of themselves, their emotions, on the place that they lived. But the lady in our house was a definite persona, and I strongly got the impression that she still lived there. She was aware of us, and wanted us to be aware of her. Strange.