Giving Up the Ghost (3 page)

As I enter the path, I can see Her outline in the moonlight. I step closer and start to see detail.

A Little Girl in a Blue Dress.

She’s wet, like She’s been in water.

She’s staring right at me, eyes wide, cold, and dark.

When I’m only a few steps from Her, She starts yelling at me. It sounds like gibberish. She never moves, never takes Her eyes away from mine. As I come closer, She seems more and more irritated and frantic.

When She is at the point of screaming so loud that She’s shaking, I wake up.

The dreams weren’t always that complete; most times I just experienced moments, sometimes just a few scenes mashed together or in a different order. In the beginning, often all I’d experience was the very end. Her standing there, outline illuminated by moonlight, then the gibberish. Sometimes I’d go months without having these dreams, then I’d have several in
a week. I eventually started putting the pieces together in my head. The Little Girl in the dreams was making the strange noises that I heard in my parents’ attic. It was Her I felt on the other side of a closed door.

Coupled with a deluge of substances calling out “Drink me,” “Swallow me,” and “Smoke me,” the dreams contributed to my losing touch with everyone and everything around me. I ended up strung out and on suicide watch in the mental ward of a local hospital.

Very few people in my life stuck with me through all this. One who did was Laura. It was Laura who really helped me get on my feet again, who put me back together, while I was in denial, the whole time, that I was very much in love with her.

A few months later she left for college.

Not long after that, she was in the wrong place at the wrong time and was killed.

She saved me from my imaginary ghost but became one herself.

One that continues to haunt me today.

“You don’t still believe that little ghost girl lived in your attic, do you?” Matt asks.

I just give him a polite smile.

I have no idea what really happened.

“Oh, come on,” he says. “That was all chemically induced.”

I just shake my head.

“Do you remember inviting Thérèse and me to your little exorcism?”

As he tells me the story, details slowly start coming back to me. Details I buried twenty years ago. What Matt describes as an exorcism was actually more like a séance—a séance to communicate
with and get rid of Little Girl. I’d photocopied some ritual from some book at the library, then tried to get Matt and his girlfriend to read it with me.

I was so high at the time that I was drooling while I tried to read. When I started having trouble saying the words, I picked up a marker and started writing random images and words on the walls of my bedroom.

And that’s about all I remember—forgotten for two decades until suddenly shaken loose over a plate of shitty zucchini-laced pasta.

Matt notices the time. He has to go.

A few weeks after our meal I write to Matt, asking him to tell me more about that night upstairs in the attic. The ritual. The writing. The talk about the Little Girl. I need someone’s help to move beyond the fragments that I’ve retained from that time, refugees of my repeated attempts to forget. Matt agrees, saying he’d be happy to help later.

“Later” turns into later still, as Matt is too busy with work, travel, and his family to go over what he remembers. Eventually, it becomes clear to me that he isn’t interested in going back there. This isn’t his journey.

Not long afterward I’m visiting my friends David and Gina. We are sitting in their driveway drinking beer and watching their night-blooming cereus do its thing. Most of the year, the night-blooming cereus is probably the world’s ugliest plant. It is huge, with strange twisted woody branches. When I first saw this thing in their living room, I assumed it was dead. But one night, only once a year, after the sun sets, the night-blooming cereus opens its huge white blossom, emitting a pleasant perfume. The flower wilts and dies off by the following morning.
Typically a night-blooming cereus produces only one or two blossoms for its one magical night each year, but this year David and Gina’s has somehow managed close to twenty. On the night all the blossoms are set to open, people come and go from their house all evening, simply to stand in their driveway and watch all these flowers slowly open. At some point in the evening, one of our fellow night-blooming cereus watchers asks David which window of their house “was the one with the ghost.”

As part of a series of newspaper columns David had written about buying and renovating their house, they’d brought in a psychic to tell them about their new home’s spiritual energy. The psychic had told them that there was a concentration of energy in the summer bedroom, which is on the second floor, directly above where the night-blooming cereus is currently performing its annual show.

After the conversation moves to other topics, David asks why I visibly shuddered when he pointed the ghost-inhabited room out to the fellow blossom watcher.

While I don’t talk about Little Girl, I’ve always been quick to tell people a simpler truth: that I’m scared of ghosts. I offer it to explain why I’ll walk across a street to avoid some supposedly haunted location or close my eyes and plug my ears whenever a ghost-themed movie trailer comes on in the theater. I will audibly gasp and walk out of a room when some innocent channel surfing lands on a broadcast of
The Sixth Sense
on HBO. People just assume these are more Ericisms. No one ever thinks I’m all that serious about my fear.

When I tell people that I’m scared of ghosts, they all have the same reaction: They want to tell me a ghost story. I’ve always found this particularly odd. I’m sure they don’t intend to
be mean, but that’s pretty similar to saying you’re an alcoholic and having your friend reply, “Oh man, let’s do a shot of Jägermeister! Don’t you love that smack of licorice that kicks in as it burns down the back of your throat?”

It happens every single time.

Most of the stories are third-person. The teller’s mother, aunt, best friend, or trusted co-worker heard a sound coming from an empty room, witnessed a gravy boat move across a table, or saw a disembodied head hovering outside a bedroom window.

Whenever someone tells a ghost story, they do so without a drop of the skepticism they apply to anything else. Why is that? Why do people have a near compulsion to tell and believe ghost stories? Especially since, after centuries of encounters, no one has put forth a single shred of conclusive evidence that these stories are anything other than pure bullshit. People from all walks of life, well-educated people, religious people, old, young, and even those who appear to believe in nothing else whatsoever are willing to entertain the possibility that some unexplainable experience might be the work of an apparition.

Including me.

My own reluctance to share my experience has always been a litmus test for me when it comes to judging ghost stories told by others. To my ears, those who are quick to share first-person encounters with the dead are usually mistaken, lying, exaggerating, or just looking for some easy attention. I put much more stock in those who would rather not talk about what they’ve experienced. Their encounters with ghosts are confusing, even embarrassing and somewhat humiliating. The things they experience don’t make a lot of sense or flow together in a tidy little narrative.

“I don’t know if I’ve ever told you this before,” I say. “But I’m really scared of ghosts.”

“Why’s that?” Gina asks.

While the night-blooming cereus is working its magic, I tell them the whole story. Starting with the noises in the attic, the Little Girl in a Blue Dress, my depression, Laura, everything. It is probably the first time in half my life that I’ve told anyone the whole story. I mean, I know all the pieces, I’ve just never realized how they all fit together.

Telling the story, I realize how tired I am of dragging around the memories and feelings and fears of that time in my life. I don’t want to be scared anymore, and the key to not being scared is starting to confront and unravel the thing I fear even more than ghosts: my past.

Shortly after the night-blooming cereus bloomfest, I put a sticky note next to my computer monitor and start a list, a list of haunted places. I plan to force myself to visit some of them, if for no other reason than to see what will happen. I’m thinking that if I can see their ghosts, it can help me understand my own.

How are the two things connected? The only way I can describe it is to compare it to synesthesia, the neurological condition where people get their senses cross-wired. They smell loud sounds or see colors when they bite into something sour or sweet. People with synesthesia often correlate words and numbers with color and will talk about how music “looks” to them—kind of like tripping on acid.

When I see a trailer for a ghost movie, all I can think about is my past desire to end my life. When I see someone doing drugs, all I can think about is a Little Girl in a Blue Dress. When someone talks about a haunted building, I think of Laura. My memories and fears are all twisted and knotted together,
impossible to separate neatly. In order to remember and make sense of them, I’m going to have to scare each last detail out of myself.

I realize that if I want peace with my past, I have to enlist the help of the one remaining vestige of that time in my younger life.

Ghosts.

“Where are the ghosts, Eric?”

“We aren’t looking for ghosts right now, Curry. We’re looking for mutant wild animals.”

Pause
.

“Where are the mutant wild animals, Eric?”

Neither my friends Curry and Joe nor I honestly expect to find any mutant wild animals. But you never know. It only takes one tale to be true for us to end up shredded, eaten, or running for our lives.

In 1972 Warner Brothers decided to break in to the theme-park business by opening Jungle Habitat, a combo zoo, drive-through safari, and entertainment complex located in rural Passaic County, just outside of West Milford, New Jersey. It was once home to more than fifteen hundred animals, including lions, giraffes, rhinoceroses, tigers, camels, monkeys, and even a few dolphins. Almost from the beginning, things started going terribly wrong. Within its first month of operation, an Israeli tourist was mauled to death by two lions. A woman was grabbed and bitten by a baby elephant. Rhinoceroses slammed into automobiles. Animals began preying on other animals in
front of carloads of children. Tons of animal waste started to leak into the town’s water supply. Several creatures escaped into the surrounding communities.

After operating Jungle Habitat for four years, Warner Brothers had had enough. Ticket sales were down and the problems inherent with combining humans and wild animals in a contained area weren’t getting any better. So they came up with what they thought was a perfect solution: Make it even bigger. They wanted to add roller-coasters, a log flume, a merry-go-round, and other rides to make it more like a traditional amusement park. The township residents were tired of dealing with Jungle Habitat and voted down the expansion. Warner Brothers took that as its cue and finally shut things down for good.

That’s when the rumors started.

There were stories that some of the animals were too old and/or sick to be moved, so the Jungle Habitat staff just left them there. According to the tales, some survived, crossbred, and moved with their mutant offspring into the surrounding woods. There they wait by the roadside for some poor schlub to wander by. There may be some truth to these stories. After the Jungle Habitat people split, a large number of carcasses were found on the property, including that of a dead elephant. They remained out in the open for eight months before someone bothered to bury them. And people routinely spot exotic birds that should not be seen in rural New Jersey.

Today, all that remains of Jungle Habitat is a few ramshackle buildings, overgrown roads, broken fences, and the occasional piece of equipment. We find a few rusted cages and piles of wood, but most everything else is picked clean. Vandals long ago carted away anything that could be carried out of the park,
so all the missing signage turns the place into a daunting maze: twenty-nine miles of twisting and intersecting road. Most of the pavement is in surprisingly good condition for having sat here untended for more than thirty years, but weeds sprout through the many cracks and the surrounding woods creep in from the sides, giving the illusion that former two-lane roads are now only four-foot-wide paths. What was once a three-thousand-car parking lot is now just a sea of broken asphalt and knee-high weeds.

However, Jungle Habitat is just the opening act to our real destination, on the other side of the mutant-creature-infested woods: Clinton Road.

Clinton Road is an otherwise unremarkable ten-mile stretch of patched asphalt and sand about an hour north of Newark, New Jersey. It’s also ground zero for almost every back-road urban legend in America. Think of any preposterous and implausible story that involves a dark and lonely stretch of pavement, and there’s a Clinton Road version of it. There have been terrible stories about ghosts, witches, mysterious deaths, mutants of nature, and occult happenings on Clinton Road going back to the early eighteenth century.

Our task there is a simple one: to do everything that you are never supposed to do on Clinton Road.

We intend to provoke the area’s rumored ghosts and other paranormal creatures while avoiding the also-rumored cults, escaped lunatics, Satanists, hitchhikers, crazy inbreeds, KKK groups, cannibals, and other Clinton Road lurkers who purportedly want to kill, rape, dismember, haunt, torture, or otherwise bother us. This doesn’t even take into consideration the other very real threats along rural Clinton Road: poisonous snakes, black bears, and fields of poison ivy everywhere you look. Oh, and it’s wild-turkey hunting season to boot, so we
have to be careful that we don’t get shot by a hunter who mistakenly thinks he wants to serve us to his family for Thanksgiving.

It always amazes me how when you discover something you’ve never heard of or encountered before, it suddenly finds its way into your life and you can’t avoid it. It’s kind of like when you buy a new car. You had no idea there were so many silver Honda CRVs in the world until you bought a silver Honda CRV. Then, suddenly, you notice them everywhere. You pass them every day and wonder, “Where did all these silver Honda CRVs come from?”