Claudia Pascale ’24
There Are Worse Things Than A Ghost Story
When I was eleven, I had a good friend who often lied. So naturally, I was dubious when she told me that there was a house on her street that was haunted. However, I decided to give her the benefit of the doubt for three reasons:
- Calling her a liar was counterproductive, for every liar worth their salt lies about lying.
- Ghosts are awesome and I wasn’t going to risk not seeing one.
- I was bored and even if there wasn’t a ghost, I would at least get a good story out of it.
Number three was a guarantee. In Louisiana where I lived, people told ghost stories as naturally as breathing. Poltergeists under the bridge, blinking lights above the headstone, phantoms in the fields, ghosts in the magnolia-scented streets. Something would always be haunting the parade and the shops, and clinging onto people’s shoulders. Blood, grief, and all the words dripped from their mouths, and settled in my cranium. This, I believe, is where my love of ghost stories began. Telling them is a part of the culture, and you were obligated to tell the story well, regardless of whether it was the truth, and regardless of how extreme and unbelievable it might be. Yet, even with so many rich stories surrounding me, I was lacking one of my own.
So, with our bikes, in the hot humid summer when the sun was a brilliant blood red like a warning and hanging low in the sky, she took me to there.
The house was only a block or so from my friend’s home, and right next to a dead-end street. She lived in a decent neighborhood, and aside from the fact that the house somehow looked like it had the life sucked out of it, the grey-white paint peeling from the heat, it appeared relatively unremarkable. For a haunted house, it looked awfully average—no gargoyles, no bats, no known, well-circulated lore. However, it did have its outliers: It had been up for sale for a long time, yet through the windows, you could see furniture and other possessions: A dresser, a bookshelf, a mop, curtains that still dangled beyond the window, and numerous other items, all in a cluttered disarray. We couldn’t stay there long, because our moms didn’t want us anywhere near it, which was strange, given how the destination of the house was close and supposedly nowhere near anything dangerous.
Regardless, the house had an intangible coldness to it, and an unsettling feeling repelled me; I remained on the sidewalk. The door reminded me of a mouth. The feeling of wrongness clung like static, and even in the heat, gave me goosebumps. Yet with this unexplainable fear also came a thrill akin to waiting for the magician’s ax to drop, the peak of the pendulum, of being on top of a roller-coaster before the fall. This house, we agreed with the solemnness of two giddy adolescents, was definitely haunted. I had found my ghost story.
*
Not much happened in the following weeks. We’d visit it once or twice as we raced up and down her neighborhood on our bikes with worn sneakers. Sometimes we would have contests to see who would dare get the closest, and if I was feeling exceptionally bold, I would tag the door. During sleepovers, sometimes we would leave offerings, candy or such, and check the next morning to see if anything happened to what we’d left. Other times, my friend would recount occurrences that happened while I was away—that a woman, or something shaped as one, would stare as my friend raced the streets by herself. A woman with long hands that would pull and fiddle with the curtains, a woman with unsettling eyes. Red eyes, my friend had said. Tapping, rapping at the window frame.
Even so, I didn’t fully believe there was a ghost. My friend could have easily been messing with me, in numerous ways. I was positive she did. Maybe she messed with the offerings, maybe the woman was only a story. However, every time I visited, the items inside would be re-arranged, and I would always dare getting closer to the house than she did. Though, maybe that was a lie too, maybe she only broke in when I wasn’t looking to sell the story. Regardless, it was more fun believing there was a ghost, so I never said anything.
Everything changed when I brought my sister there with us. My mother was busy, and nobody was available to keep an eye on her; I wasn’t going to change my plans, so there we were. It was our usual game: who would come closest to the house? And my sister, calmly, went to the mouth-like door. With each step, my heart felt like ice and goosebumps trailed my arms, despite the heat. When she was a breath away from the door, my sister asked if we knew whether it was locked or not. We said that we didn’t, and she reached for the doorknob.
I don’t recall exactly what I said, I think I only told her to get away from the door. But as soon as I said it, all went cold, all went still. It was like time had slowed down. I don’t remember much but the feeling of my nerve-endings going nuclear and every muscle in my body tensing. It felt like I was possessed, I felt monstrous, and that my voice wasn’t my own because it couldn’t be—my sister never listened to me, yet she slowly walked backwards from the door as though I controlled her movements. My voice was somehow an absolute that it wasn’t before and hasn’t been since, and with that we all walked away like the house radiated poison or had a wild animal that would pounce if we moved too suddenly. My sister later scoffed at me and how I behaved at what was a perfectly average house. But it didn’t matter, because she was away from that door.
In that night, I finally asked mom what was wrong with that house. After some persisting, here were three things I learned about it:
- There was never a ghost.
- A homeless woman lived there and refused to leave.
- The woman was also armed.
I didn’t tell my mom what occurred, but I do remember asking why nobody did anything about it. She only glanced at me and asked if that’s the kind of person I wanted to be—the kind to kick out desperate old women from a place they’ve made their own. I quickly said that I didn’t. With that, we ate like nothing happened, and I didn’t breathe a word about the house, the dares, the odd gifts, and knick-knacks we left behind.
I didn’t sleep that night. Was the ominous feeling because of the ghost story, or did I somehow know something was awry? Was the woman only desperate, in need of a home, or in her paranoia would she have shot the gun if she saw that we were in there? If she saw that my sister had opened the door? What if this story wasn’t true either, and my mother only said it so I would stay away and not cause any mischief? Then again, why lie? Why that story? If it was an innocent house, the worst that would happen would be my friend and I playing games like house or tag, or we would simply break in to get out of the sun without going home, which, while not ideal, would be ultimately harmless. If it wasn’t structurally stable, why not just say that? If something like carbon monoxide was concern, why not tell us; and in such a case wouldn’t everything be shut off anyway? No reason could be worse than there being someone armed and ready in the shadows, and worse, it was plausible. The town I lived in wasn’t the educated kind, rather a town that lived in the pit of the south where the local Walmart was not only thirty minutes away, but also had a gun section. Plenty of people had one, it was easy to get one, so why not that woman? These questions, however, were useless. It was like asking what came first, the chicken or the egg? So, I eventually slept, feeling uneasy.
I was never able to forget that house. My friend and I never went to it again, other than occasionally staring at it across the street, like the proverbial moths to the flame. Even long after I moved, I thought and thought and thought about that house. And with those thoughts came new ones, whenever someone claimed that something was haunted.
*
Silver is believed to ward off demons, imps, vampires, and evil spirits in both folk stories, gothic tales, and in horror. Fictional protagonists, religious households, and churches alike use them to ward off monsters and stop curses. Interestingly, silver also naturally kills bacteria, fungi, and even some viruses. When there is a wide-span of history where nobody knew nor understood how illness operated and why some became ill while others didn’t, let alone that such things like bacteria even existed, how could such a metal not be considered holy?
Zombie stories and ghouls are believed to stem from people suffering from rabies and similar diseases. Consider the similarities: It’s transferable by clawing and biting, someone in the group is moving and acting odd, foam dripping from the mouth, irregular eye color, and a loved one that isn’t a loved one anymore. In a time or place where resources nor knowledge were available, the old story ends the same: Put them out of their misery, before they infect the others too.
Napoleon is theorized to have died from illness after exposure to hauntingly vibrant green wallpaper, which was, like many paints, dresses, and jewelry of the time, infused with arsenic to give it such bright color. People are believed to have died like this, when the rooms were green, because those outside of the room never suffered the same way. Edgar Allen Poe, a man with a haunted, long face, shows a side-effect of carbon monoxide poisoning, with the mouth and eyelid drooping from partial paralysis. Historians don’t know what killed him in the end, but slow carbon monoxide poisoning wouldn’t be implausible.
What if the house in Louisiana was abandoned suddenly, and the inhabitants behaved so strangely because there had been a gas leak? What if the shape in the window was a vagrant in desperate need for a dry place? What if the creaking meant the house was unsteady, and doomed to fall apart? What if the bodyless hissing was from pipes ready to burst? What if the so-called mysterious humming was a loose electric wire?
There are worse things than a ghost story.