Living Ghost

 

Living Ghost

when I was seven years old, just on the cusp of memory and soft imagination, my mother, sister and I moved into a very strange place.

I remember a lot of pieces of my childhood, like flashes out of the corner of my eye, I can so nearly make out the moments that defined my younger years. Many memories of the trailer my family moved too are hazy. Some more memorable, like birthday parties, or particularly big storms. And other memories are more faint, like the sound my sisters door curtain made when you walked through it. She has this curtain made of strings of purple plastic beads that hung in her doorway, this was a trend in the 90’s and although faint, its a sound that haunted my dreams.

Mu Grandparents lived across the street, and down a long driveway in a two story farm house, aged by the solid whitewashed brickwork that made up the walls. Sturdy and filled with large wooden framed windows.. .The home sat beside a large barn where my grandfather stored hay, and farm equipment. . In hindsight it makes sense why my mom would’ve jumped at the opportunity to live in the old run down trailer. She was a real estate agent at the time, and the mobile home setting was a step down from the home we had lived in before. However being a recently single mother with two children and a third on the way, she must’ve figured my grandparents would be a huge resource in helping take care of us kids, and they were.

I’ve been finding it strange how memories can be sharp, and at the same time have no structure or foundation in reality, like a Fun house mirror exploding in slow motion. I can remember a foam Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle staff I got for my eighth birthday in that house, I remember the sound effects it made when you swing it, or the crash sound when I hit my sister with it. But for some reason I just cant remember what the kitchen looked like. I remember how big the windows were at my grandmas house, the high ceilings with glass running from crown mold, all the way to the floor, and the solid, quiet wooden boards underfoot. My grandparents home was beautiful, and I cant for the life of me remember what it looked like after it burned down later that year.

At the beginning of September this year, I stopped smoking weed, and overall I feel fine. The one thing that caught me off guard though was that in my sobriety, I was having dreams again. I was shocked to realize how long it had been since I had long detailed dreams that I remember. I was so excited after my first dream filled night, I thought about the dream I had all day and relished in telling my girlfriend all about it. It wasn’t until I had the dream I’ve had hundreds of times in my childhood that I regretted my new ability. Its puzzling how something can be forgotten, and somehow still exist somewhere deep down inside of ones self.

When I was a kid I remember having night terrors on a regular basis, I hadn’t remembered the dream so much as waking up terrified and running to my moms room, or being shook awake by my mother or sister because I was screaming. At times I had even had sleepwalking episodes. It wasn’t until talking to my older sister this week that I knew those dreams only persisted as long as we were in that house, and I wasn’t the only one in our small family who was tortured in that house.

There was a plastic fishers price playhouse about 30 yards into the forest behind a thicket right behind the house. My sister and I would spend time playing games, and exploring around the little plastic house. As an adult now, I know that house must’ve been too small for my sister and I to both fit inside of. However I can vividly remember the two of us sitting cross legged in the plastic house, my sister telling me a scary story, and finally me running home in the lowly lighted thicket to tell my mom that “Alice is trying to scare me!’’. Later that night I remember the sirens filling up the night air, and the panic I felt not understanding all the lights, and how something could be so loud as the fire truck. My mother gathered us up and took us across the street to my grandparents, and as we made our way down the long driveway to the still standing beautiful farm house I watched the fireman running to meet the rapidly growing orange glow coming from the thicket next to our house.

My sister was blamed for the fire that had burned up the plastic fisher price play house, as well as a quarter acre of the surrounding woods. Not to mention nearly burning our house down in the process. A void formed between my mother and my sister around this time, and from my childish point of view, my sister hated my mom. What I hadn’t realized then that I am beginning to wrap my head around today, is that my sister didn’t burn down the plastic house in the woods, and she didn’t burn down my grandparents house either. Although at the time, those facts were far from apparent.

My mother and sister haven’t been close for as long as I can remember, they would get in screaming matches a few times a year, and the cops would even get called a few times, never ending in an arrest. Once my sister was sixteen she moved away from home, got married and lived her life. A few short years later I left home with plans to do the same. And once my grandmother passed we all drifted apart and life kind of just went on. When I called my sister to ask about the dream I had last week, was the first time we had talked in the last year. The things we talked about shattered the doors to memories that had been locked away for the last twenty years.

She was three years older than me, and about 5 years more mature than I was when we moved into the trailer across from my grandparents. The wavy dreamlike recollection that I had during those times are far from the ones she held onto. She told me that mom was in a bad place at the time emotionally, that I was just to young to recall. We stayed with our grandparents more than I had remembered, while our mom was out doing whatever it was she was doing. Most of all though, that there was something wrong with that house.

We talked for hours and I was beginning to be able to see beyond my rose colored glasses I had worn before. “you had those dreams every single night” she had said. My sister told me that I would scream, thrash around, and even get up and creep around the house, just like I had some memory of, but it wasn’t just me. Alice had been tormented in that house as well, not in dreams but in the waking moments between them. When I asked her what she meant, she sort of trailed of as if she didn’t know how to explain the feeling. “it was like the house hated us, and everything was just wrong. Everything was just all wrong”.

When we ended our call my mind raced, studying every shiny bent shard of memory of that place, like she said it was wrong. Something about that place, in time was just bad. I wish there was a more elegant way to put it. The very thought of that piece of my childhood made me nauseous. It was all because of this dream. It was a place I had been and a setting I felt very familiar with, although filled with dread. Crippled with nostalgia as I stood in my Alice’s childhood room, staring through the bead curtain, otherwise shiny bulbs tinted brown in the dull darkness. My view into my doorway from here was more than enough to send me directly back to seven years old. I knew there was something in that room, my room. I also knew I had to get past my room to get to my mother for help, but that whatever, or whoever was in my room would never allow me to make it to home base. The sound of those light plastic beads clattering around my shoulders has never faded from my mind. When I awoke, I knew I had lived in this dream for years, a lifetime ago.

I hadn’t asked Alice about the fires, I knew she had been assumed to be the cause, and also knew it was a very touchy subject for our still tender relationship. It was time to talk to my mother. Things weren’t adding up to me, if we had lived in a haunted house, why hadn’t she moved us, and why have we never spoke about it. I didn’t remember my grandparents home burning down, and would at least dig more into the topic. My mother was different than she was when we were kids, in her older age she spent her time working with her students, and decorating her yard. We had stayed close, or at least closer than her and Alice to say the least. She was hesitant to really open up about that place, that house, and not sure what to do with the knowledge I have at this point, or knowing what happened to us there.

She said I was right, that place was bad, and everything felt very wrong there, almost patronizing me in that annoying mom way, but got more serious as she began to describe our situation, “we were poor honey, mom and dad had more than enough space and help to offer us, and I needed all the help I could get with you kids.” she had been in an abusive relationship with my younger brothers dad, whom she was pregnant with when we moved into the house. That had been a trick of the mind, I hadn’t remembered my younger brother living at that house with us at all.

My mother told me about how that house seemed to affect us kids, that we all acted sort of off, and how my sister most notably became very reclusive, and just generally acting bizarre. She had described the time to feel dreamlike, almost like the period was out of place in her memory. “What about the fires

?” I asked. My mother was quiet, almost refusing to acknowledge their rightful places in the timeline. As I waited for what felt like forever, she stammered across her words, I could feel the regret in them. “ we thought your sister set the fires, she had just become so mean, there was something evil rubbing off on all of us. You two had been out in the woods, and she was trying to scare you with some awful story she heard at school like she always was. I scalded her and she hid away until after dinner and just went to bed. When the woods were on fire your sister was the only reasonable culprit in my eyes. When your grandparents house burned down I didn’t want to believe it, but I knew it had to be her. Through the sleepless weeks before, and the sleepless weeks that followed it all just made less sense”

“sleepless nights?” I asked, before she went on to explain. Between my night terrors, and all the sounds she heard outside of that house on a regular basis, she would often stay up with me and watch movies with the sound too high. My mother is a tough woman, but I could tell she was becoming emotional. “your sister didn’t burn anything, I was wrong and I ruined our relationship because I hadn’t trusted her word, but I got you two out of there safe.” before I could say anything she continued, “your younger brothers dad was a bad man. He followed us from Kentucky and stalked us for about three years. He burned down the woods where you kids played, and he burned down my parents house. That entire time we lived there we were being haunted, by him, by that monster.” she was sobbing now, and I was out of words. Before any came to me she continued. “when mom and dads house burned down your sister told me she saw Brad looking at her through her window, she said she had been saying brad was outside looking in her windows for weeks, I was mentally strung out, and about to have your brotyher. At the time I had no capacity to believe anything she said or did. But she was right, ive never forgiven myself for not believing her. The next day I got you kids together and we went to your dads house in Virginia.” my mother told me after we left that house, it burned to the ground. Nobody was ever arrested, Brad had vanished off the face of the earth, my mother told me Brad had killed himself on my brothers fifth birthday. He was a very sick man, one whos face I cant remember, but haunts my dreams still.

Some folks are haunted by memories, others by guilt. A few folks out there are haunted by ghosts, and the very unfortunate few haunted by the living need not dream.