The Five Strands of A Sedentary Empress

Boo.

I love Halloween and always have, probably due to my superstitious Irish genes. I love the visual of rolling fog and the moon glimmering through cracks of coasting night clouds and I revel in strolling through broken-toothed cemeteries, soaking up the names and the dates. I go to places reputed to be haunted in the hopes of spotting a phantasm or a lost soul. I have purposely stayed in a hotel because of its so-called haunting of a young woman who reportedly died when her candle ignited her room while she watched for the arrival of her seaman lover. I heard nothing that night, and M., who had agreed to stay there to humour me, heard things moving about all night in our room and could not sleep. A non-believer who might be willing to be convinced, he was surprised at the sensations he felt, and the fact that I lay snoring softly, oblivious.

I have consoled someone who has been disturbed by visions of the dead. A girl I worked with, Giovanna, who had been coming to work with dark circles under her eyes and a pained expression. The other employees wrongfully assumed it was boy trouble, but I took her aside to ask what was wrong. She hesitated at first, knowing her story would sound ludicrous, but when she realized whom she was speaking to, she let her guard down. She told me that she'd been readying to go to work a few days before, and had seen her father walk into the bathroom and close the door. She waited for ages, she'd said, and when she realized that she might be late for work, she knocked softly on the door and asked him to hurry. When there was no answer, she knocked again. When there was still no answer, she tried the doorknob and it twisted easily, which was odd given that her family always locked the door. She opened the door slowly and was embarrassed to find him sitting on the toilet, so she quickly pulled the door closed before realizing that the man she'd seen was not her father after all. She cracked the door open again to find an older man sitting there, seemingly oblivious to her, and she froze. After a few seconds, he looked toward her before 'disappearing' in front of her.

"I didn't know what to make of it," she said with wide eyes. "I thought I was imagining it."

A couple nights later, she went with her mother across the street to a neighbour's house for tea. She didn't want to stay home alone, she'd said, still uneasy by the experience she'd had, 'whatever it was'. While there, she let her eyes roll over the photographs on the fireplace mantle. Suddenly, she stopped: she had come to a photograph of the man she'd seen sitting on the toilet. She excitedly asked the neighbour who the man was. The woman said that he had been her brother-in-law, that he'd actually lived in Giovanna's parent's home before they moved in, and that he'd died of cancer some years before.

"I nearly fainted," she said, with tears in her eyes. "I never believed in ghosts before, and now I don't know if I do, or if I'm crazy."

The thing is, I love that kind of story, especially when it is someone else's and not my own. I read about the paranormal a lot because it fascinates me, relieves me even because it means there's more to life than what we see. I'm all about the possibilities because it seems hopeful. I calmed Giovanna when I told her that the man probably didn't know he was dead, that he was just going about his daily routine the way he did when alive and that she'd interrupted one of his more private practices. We both found that funny. I told her that he didn't watch her in the shower, that he wasn't staring at her when she slept, that he probably was just going about his day the way he did in the living form and he was just as unaware of her as she'd been of him until that morning. 'Tell him to go,' I'd said, like I actually knew what I was talking about. 'Get a priest to bless the house,' I added, knowing they were strict, Italian Catholics.

Eventually, her parents came to believe her story after initially thinking she was mad, and they asked their parish priest to throw some holy water on the place. Giovanna said that she never saw the man again, that the house seemed free now, 'but, I am still afraid because I believe in ghosts now.'

I think I'd like to know they're real. I think I'd like to see one, as long as it wasn't in my own house. My parents claim to have seen my grandfather the day after his funeral. The weird thing is that they were in two separate rooms in the house and were not speaking to one another due to an argument. A few days afterward, my mom was telling me that she thought she'd dreamed of him standing in the living room that night, that he'd been standing by the television smiling at her. My dad asked if my grandfather was wearing his checkered shirt with the red suspenders and my mother said, yes, how did you know? My dad said he had seen him around the same time in their bedroom, that he'd suddenly appeared, smiling, bringing a finger to his lips as if he were 'ssssshhhhhi'ing' to my father. They are both convinced he was there, that it was his way of saying things were okay. My mother's father had been an atheist, a believer in the theory that all goes black after this, that we become dirt and nothing more. If he was really there, I think he might have found the whole thing kind of funny. It fits perfectly with what they allegedly saw.

One of my old stores had 'issues'. The staff toilet next to the office often flushed itself, and we found it funny at first, until many of the staff refused to use it. One day, my stockperson was working on a huge shipment and left the area to come speak to me in the adjoining office. As we spoke, we heard his radio switch stations and he called out to the offender that he was listening to the radio, that he hadn't gone anywhere so please leave it alone. The stations continued to flip, and the stockperson became a little irritated, calling out again for the person to leave the radio alone. Finally, the radio settled on a classical station and I rose up and walked with the stockguy toward where it sat. When we got around the boxes, we discovered that no one else was there. Even stranger was the fact that the radio was no longer plugged in, and was still playing. We both made little surprised noises and ran out of the room. Eventually I got brave enough to return and found discovered that the radio was no longer playing. There had only been one entrance to that room, and we had been standing in front of it. It wasn't possible that anyone had gotten past us without us seeing. The weirdest incident was the night I put my tea by the stockroom door. I would often slip back, crack the door and steal a few sips before returning to the floor. That night, three girls were working with me, and one of them bought me a tea. We stood by the stockroom door, chatting, and I put the tea on the shelf before closing the door and returning with her to the floor. Twenty minutes later, the four of us were readying to close up and I went back to steal another sip. When I opened the door, my tea was no longer on the shelf. Had I brought it to the floor without remembering? Had one of them moved it? No, they insisted, none of them had left the floor at all. We searched everywhere for it, on the tables, in the stockroom, in the office...I was worried it would be spilled and ruin merchandise so I insisted we keep searching. Eventually, we gave up and decided it would be found the next morning when fresher eyes were available. When we went into the stockroom to retrieve our belongings, there in the middle of the floor, was my tea. Odder still, the tea was still piping hot. Two of the girls screamed, and the third one forbid me to drink it. It isn't possible that it's still hot! You cannot drink that! We never did find out what happened, but two of them refused to work at night ever again. I had a hard time explaining that to the other managers, who rolled their eyes and laughed. I'm not in the business of converting the skeptics. They often end up being the ones who see things firsthand anyway, in my experience, so I left it alone. To this day I wonder about all those incidents, but if there is a logical explanation, it has not presented itself to anyone.

My sister has seen five different 'people' in her house. My sister used to believe in nothing, was a bonafide cynic, and the experiences bothered her so much that she'd get tearful just relating them. One of them, she believes, was our biological, maternal grandfather who died in 1963. None of us ever met him, but she recognized him as he leaned over her as she lay awake on her bed. The next three looked to be a family from the nineteenth century, two adults and a small boy, and they were standing in her kitchen as she sat watching television in the same room. They were staring at her when she spotted them, and she 'froze stiff', before they evaporated in front of her. She was very detailed about their clothes and was particularly descriptive about the little boy who was wearing a white shirt and suspenders. His mother's hands were on his shoulders as the three of them studied the blonde woman who sat petrified by the kitchen fireplace. The last one was a middle-aged man in a floral shirt, 'Hawaiian style', in her bedroom. He wore khaki pants, she'd said, and he felt 'friendly'. He disappeared too, but not until after she'd squeezed her eyes so tight her forehead hurt.

While these incidents bother her a lot, and even terrify her, I find myself a little jealous. I know that this is weird.

'Why do you like spooky stuff, mom?', my wee one asked me yesterday as we drove through the leaf-crusted streets.

'I don't know,' I said truthfully. 'Maybe because none of it seems real, that being scared is exciting if I know there's no chance they'll ever hurt me. They're all in our imaginations.'

Maybe I wouldn't like it anymore if one of them walked through my wall and stood behind me, stroking my hair. I might hate it if I happened upon long-dead woman in my kitchen, or found a ghostly man sitting on my toilet reading the heaven columns. I might not like it, but I can't say I wouldn't find it a little bit cool.