Dark and stormy nights…

   Everyone has a scary story to tell around this time as Halloween approaches.

   We get in the mood to scare and be scared.

   Our new 110-year-old house moves at night, ghostly moans, speaks, mutters, and sighs. There are spirits here, no doubt. No home of this age can long go without some semblance of things lurking behind the scenes.

    I realize most people would not admit they believe in spirits, but I know better. Many people do. The truth is you have to shoot straight with spirits. They know your every move. You can’t fool them. They know what you’ve been up to so there’s no point in trying to disguise your bad behavior. Of course, the “badder” we are, the worse the spirits haunt us. Hence, the spirits find me boring and leave me be. I’ve thought about acting up, but I don’t want to be hounded by the spirits.

    I spoke to the house when we first got here. Down in the basement all by my lonesome, I intended to get off on the right foot with whatever ghosts might be around.

   “Listen,” I said, “I intend to be here for quite some time and you are welcome to stay, but if there any shenanigans, out you go. I’m not afraid of spirits good or bad so if you act up I’ll be down here with garlic, an exorcist, stakes and hammers and all sorts of incense and other mumbo jumbo. I’ll play rap music all night. I’m ready to sacrifice a chicken down here just to get rid of bad spirits.”

    I received no answer, so I assumed we had an understanding. So far, so good.

    One late night I was in my study, clicking keys on the computer. The front doorbell doesn’t work, but I heard someone pounding. I went downstairs and no one was there. I went back to my room and the same thing happened. Big bang on the front door but no one there.  I got the flashlight and went outside to patrol the grounds. I considered arming myself with my oversized rubber bat. One smack with that and you will be out for the count. Instead, I tried to walk like John Wayne did, just to scare the neighbors. I heard the bang again. Looking up, a second story gutter was loose and flopping against the house in the wind. Case closed. Good thing too, because I was afraid I was going to have to run, which is impossible with my busted hip.

    I believe in ghosts and such. When I was a little boy I was sitting on my grandmother’s bed a few days after she died. I happened to look into a mirror in her room and there in the reflection was Grandma looking at me. I jumped so high I may have touched the ceiling. Later, I realized that if Grandma had actually visited me it was a good thing not a bad one. Grandmother was Irish, born and raised in the Old Country, but she was a force to reckon with so I figured if anyone could or would come back from the great beyond, she’d be a perfect candidate.

    Her three children, my mother and her two siblings, were so fearful of Grandma they responded to her as she cracked the whip until her dying day. These three were married by then, all had children, but were terrified of Nana’s Irish rage.  Yes, the Irish can have rage. They are not all poets, you know. As for me, I always thought I was Nana’s favorite, so I never got crossways with her and she’s not around haunting my life. On the contrary, I see some of Nana’s good parts in my daughter, which is probably payback to me for being one heck of a darling kid.

    I’m rarely frightened anymore. But I can recall reading a story in a newspaper that has remained with me for many years because it raised the hairs on my skin. The news story was about a missing man and how the man’s daughter went looking for him. They lived on a farm and as the girl checked the outhouse with the flashlight, the story said, “She looked into the hole and saw her father’s face.” This image gave me the heebie-jeebies, which is why I’ll never use your outhouse, thank you very much.

    In our house we have set aside the creepy room. This is a very large L-shaped walk-in closet that we cannot access because a dresser in the bedroom can only fit right in front of the creepy room’s door. Hence we have not been in the empty closet much. Since we don’t go in there, our imaginations go into overdrive about what may be happening behind the closed door. It doesn’t help that there is a leftover elevator apparatus in there that was once used by the wheelchair-bound son of a prior owner. The elevator was removed and is now the creepy room, but the remaining mechanism gadget looks more like a torture device than an elevator.

    There is something creepy about having a room in our house that no one visits. Does someone live up in there? Are there snakes, bugs? Whenever the TV reports a hunt for some escaped desperado I simply assume he’s hiding up in the creepy room where the spirits will give him what for and the authorities will never hear from him again. This is my kind of justice, scaring the stuffing out of bad guys.

   I worry about angering spirits. I had an aunt, for example, who was always mad about something. I tried hard not to aggravate her, but she was always mad at the world, including me. I figured when she kicked the bucket, she would hang around as a spirit and ruin everyone’s day. Never happened. But I know she’s somewhere expending ghostly energy.  

    Every now and then I smell oil, which is my father hanging around. He drove an oil truck and when he came home his clothes smelled of the stuff.

    Lately, I’ve been hearing the sound a dog makes when she awakens and shakes her head. That is my dearly departed Emma, the Lab who just passed recently.

    Also, I’ve been concerned about my mother. I told her when she was alive that I was going to burn the portrait of herself she brought back from New Orleans. I didn’t mean it, but it was fun harassing her since my sister made it clear she was not going to take the portrait. Mother swore that if I did anything to that painting, she would haunt me until the end of my days.

   For years, I hanged her picture in the closet of my writing room, which sounds terrible, although I had a straight view of her each time I sat down to write since the closet door remained open.

     I feel a bit scared these days because Mother has not been placed on a wall in our home because the walls are already too full. From time to time I come across the painting when I go through stored goods and when she looks at me I know she’s a bit riled.

    I have to hang Mother and do so quickly. All she ever said was to make sure she was hanging somewhere. So I’ve decided to put her up in the creepy room. If I survive until after Halloween, I’ll know she’s happy there scaring the wits out of all those escaped cons and bad guys I imagine living up there. Otherwise, you’ll be reading about me in the ambulance reports muttering and shrieking something about mothers, spirits, and all those other things that go bump in the night.