Communing with the Ghosts

 

My stepdad had always claimed that our house (read: two trailers that were welded together) was haunted. He suffered from insomnia and said from time to time he would sit up, communing with the ghosts.

Now, I will tell you that the previous owner of our abode had suffered tragedy. His daughter, so my parents told me, was a vivacious softball player and 4-H club member who died when her car was hit by a train. She was 17. And not long after we had moved his trailer to the plot of land we lived on, the owner died from electric shock.

I will also confess to being somewhat of an unreliable narrator here. These were stories that I most likely misremember since I was 5 when we moved in, and after the following incident, I don’t remember talking about the man or his daughter since.

When my brother, Joey, was 4, he began screaming in the middle of the night. My mother rushed into his room to ask what was the matter. He told her a girl floated across the cow pasture that faced our house and into his bedroom. Mom tried telling him it was a dream, but he told her that the girl had a “baseball shirt” on. Was it the man’s daughter trying to find her way back into her old house? My mom believed so.

That story, by the way, is also something that I can’t confirm because I overheard my mom telling it to a friend while they were drinking and smoking a joint. I was most likely at my dad’s that weekend because I have no recollection of it happening.

But I do remember this: Our parents were out for the night, so we were left with our babysitter and her sister, Gina, who was a friend of mine from school. Joey and I had been gifted with toy guns that had lights that blinked when you pulled the trigger and made a fantastic space-age noise. We’d been playing for quite awhile in my room, firing the guns non-stop, when I heard a blood-curdling scream. I dropped my gun. That was the first time I ever truly remember being paralyzed by fear. I backed out of the room and ran in to tell my babysitter what I heard.

As I started to recount the story to her as she sipped a beer from my parents’ fridge, another voice spoke up. His accent was distinctly British and crisp: “I’m terribly sorry. He didn’t mean to frighten you.”

Not surprisingly, my babysitter didn’t believe me. Also not surprisingly, I’ve never been able to say definitively that I didn’t believe in ghosts. Because the memory of that scream — and that disembodied apology — will haunt me forever.