Making peace with my ghosts

When I was a kid, I used to play in a former graveyard. Back then, I thought the forest behind my neighbor’s house, with its mini ditches and adjacent mounds, was the perfect place for hide and seek with my friends. It wasn’t until years later, after I left for university, that my father told me the land once was a cemetery — which had since been relocated. But not everything had moved on. 

Terrifying as it might sound, I wish I had known sooner. That would have explained the odd things that happened in the house I grew up in. Full disclosure, I wasn’t and still am not one of those people who can see or hear ghosts like Cole Sear from The Sixth Sense or Amy Adams from The Dead Files. Spirits cannot whisper in my ear and trust me to translate their message with accuracy. But that didn’t stop them from trying. 

It’s hard when you’re a kid with an overactive imagination to be able to decipher something you thought you saw or heard from what you actually saw or heard. 

Scratching in the walls

“My sister used to hear scratching above her bedroom. It would stop for a few years, then start up again, so that the sound came to make up the soundtrack of my sister’s childhood. ”

My sister used to hear scratching above her bedroom. Our house possessed a finished attic that our Dad regularly stored things in. But try as he might, he never found the source of that scratching. It would stop for a few years, then start up again, so that the sound came to make up the soundtrack of my sister’s childhood. 

Then there were the little shivers of cold in the hallways, when the house would be roasting in the dead of summer, and shadows that seemed to shift when all the lights had already gone out. But the thing that always got me was the clock.

You think that’s bad? Wait until you hear about the clock.

My parents’ house boasted a sitting room plucked straight from Marie Antoinette’s Petit Trianon. And in that room perched an antique clock that never told time — no matter how enthusiastically we wound it up. It sat silently for years. We never gave it a second thought.

Until one Christmas evening, when it chimed in the middle of the night. Twelve bells it struck, reverberating through the quiet house like Big Ben sounding out across the Thames. Since we were on reindeer watch, my sister and I weren’t asleep anyway, and heard the dings as surely as our own voices when we asked if the other had heard that. We tiptoed down the stairs and peered round the corner into the sitting room. It was 100% the clock, no doubt about it. We raced back up to our rooms and pretended to wait for Santa.

The next morning, we worked up the nerve to approach the clock to see if something had triggered it to life. We tapped on its face, we lifted it up... but when I tried to wind it up, the dial would not budge, frozen in place as it had been all these years. The hands hadn’t moved. I couldn’t even open the top to see if there were dials and wheels and all manner of clock-like things on the inside. Nothing.

We decided that a spirit had rung the clock. Now every Christmas, and only around Christmas, the clock will ring in the holiday, as if it had taken a page from Charles Dickens. 

The ghost (ghosts?) will also mess around with the dogs every now and then. My little Pekingese, who unlike most of his breed is economical with his barks, usually saves them for porch invaders like the evil postman. But sometimes around 3:00 am, he’ll awaken from his snort-filled slumber and yowl into the darkness, as if the postman had actually managed to get to the middle of the same sitting room where the clock lives. 

Other times, and always at night, I’ll hear a child crying, “Mama!” — it’s never my child. I know because I always check. But other than that, the ghosts, for the most part, have been relatively friendly. 

When ghosts are Total nightmares

“Now every Christmas, and only around Christmas, the clock will ring in the holiday — as if it had taken a page from Charles Dickens.”

Unfortunately, my husband’s hauntings were the stuff of nightmares. They gave me malevolent night terrors with scenes out of horror movies... blood, guts, and often in a medieval setting. I would have attributed the nightmares to a combo of stress, jet-lag, and one too many historical films — if it weren’t for his older brother claiming to have had the exact same dreams. 

He also confessed to hearing someone whisper in his ear when nobody was there. Frankly, I would have taken that rather than having books fly off their shelves at me. The ghosts never acted mean-spirited towards my husband nor his brother, who also lived in the house. Instead, the ghosts would sit on the edge of their beds or play with their hair.

I have a long history with ghosts. I’ve never really questioned whether or not I believed in them or if they really existed because they have been persistently present. Unfortunately, those souls who have proven restless beyond death seem unable to escape from their living trauma or regret, and I can only pray that they may find whatever it is that can bring them resolution.