Believing in ghosts has caused me to have some very embarrassing conversations with serious people, but there’s no help for it. It was my upbringing; I was raised on ghost stories. My mother was a great one for tales of deaths foretold by shadowy apparitions and strange creakings of furniture on the anniversary of an untimely demise, but the real ghost aficionado in my family was my aunt Mary Ann (with whom I later co-authored The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society).
Strange creakings were just the tip of the iceberg for her. My earliest childhood memories of Mary Ann include her seated at a table with a cup of coffee on one side and an ashtray on the other, regaling my cousins and me with eerie tales of murderers identified by the ghosts of their victims and tvs that spontaneously flickered on with messages from the dead. There were heiress ghosts and cat ghosts and soldier ghosts charging through forests.
But all of this was mere frivolity in comparison to The House. When I was about eight, Mary Ann and her family moved into the only indubitably haunted house I’ve ever been in. It stood high and lonely at the top of a hill, up a long and frightening driveway.
There was only one neighbor (who later tried to found a kingdom and murdered one or two people) and the house itself was surrounded by dark trees. It couldn’t have been more haunted-looking, and it couldn’t have been more haunted. I only saw a pair of disembodied shoes climbing up the stairs before me one day as I snuck up to a dusty closet to get a gander at Mary Ann’s wedding dress, which I wasn’t supposed to play with, so I could never admit to it, but I heard plenty of doleful whistling that my cousin and I tried to tell ourselves was coming from the mailman, plus assorted unlikely sounds emanating from empty rooms.
And Mary Ann—specter detector that she was—repeatedly saw the ghost in all his glory, stretched out on the living room rug in a suit. If his intent was to disturb, he was a successful ghost. I was disturbed, and so were my cousins, and the cat, and several sensitive guests who walked into the house and ran out of it again, never to return.
Characteristically, my aunt held seances to demand of this ghost what he wanted, which usually ended with the electricity suddenly cutting out, plunging the entire neighborhood into darkness. It was an unnerving house. I’ve always been a bit of a loner by nature, but if I happened to find myself alone in that house, I bolted outdoors at once.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
