Giving Up the Ghost (34 page)

“Hello, I’m sure this will probably rank as one of the most unusual letters you’ll ever receive,” I wrote. “My name is Eric Nuzum. I grew up in your house. While I lived in your house—and this is the unusual part—I thought your attic was haunted.”

Over an afternoon cocktail on my front porch, my neighbor summed up what everyone I’d told about my final ghost hunt was thinking but wouldn’t say: “They are never going to answer that letter,” he said. “And if they did, they’re never going to let you into their house.”

It did seem like a bit much. Not only the whole backstory but also my request. I asked if I could come visit, go back up into the attic, and see if I could figure out if I was right or not.

Yet three weeks later I’m walking up the driveway of the house that I grew up in—someone else’s house.

My parents sold the house in the late eighties to a couple who did extensive renovations to the place, almost doubling its size. That isn’t supposed to happen, is it? Aren’t our previous homes and schools and workplaces supposed to simply freeze in time when we’re done with them? They are supposed to be kept as sacred relics of our life there. We’re allowed to change and grow; those places are not. If we ever see them
again, even decades later, the first thing we do is focus on the differences.

I have no idea what the owners of the house are expecting when they open the door. Less than a week after sending the letter I got a voice mail from a guy named Tony, who owns the house today. The message simply said that I was welcome to come by whenever I wished. Tony said he found my letter intriguing, then he paused before saying softly, “Considering what we’ve experienced in the house, I have no problem believing your story is true.”

I’d kept the descriptions in my letter deliberately vague. When I returned his call, I got a bit more specific. I told him about the thuds coming from the attic.

“Yup, we’ve heard that too.”

I told him about the feeling that someone was on the other side of the door or watching me.

“Yup, that’s happened a bunch of times,” he replied. “Sometimes I get the feeling that someone is looking over my shoulder. And no matter which direction I face, I can’t shake the feeling. When it happens, it’s, like, everywhere.”

I couched my story by saying that I was a young kid at the time and a bit on the fucked-up side.

“Listen, I’m fifty-eight years old,” he interrupted. “And I’ll tell you, I’ve never experienced anything like this, any other place, at all.”

After Tony and his wife answer the door, there are some awkward but genuinely friendly greetings. I can’t help but feel overwhelmed by how familiar yet disjointed the place feels. The entrance hallway is supposed to be lined with photos of my family, not some woodland paintings and pictures of strangers. The whole place is carpeted, covering up the beautiful original hardwood floors underneath. The walls are the wrong color. I
compliment them on the addition and renovation work, but inside I’m a bit shocked and hurt. This house was my family’s home. By changing so much of it, these people were saying that its previous manifestation wasn’t good enough.

“Well, would you like to see the upstairs, then?” Tony says.

“Yeah, sure,” I say, waiting for him to lead the way.

Despite the number of changes to the house, the doorway to the attic is exactly the same. Same finish. Same door handle. In fact, when he opens the door, it is like stepping back in time.

The last time I was up these stairs was the morning I went to Timken Mercy. I start to feel a little sick. It’s fear building up in the pit of my stomach.

Tony stands aside and waves his arm in front of the open stairway. “After you,” he says.

As I reach the top of the stairs, I can’t help but wonder if this is unwise. Despite all the work I’ve done to confront my fears and memories, being here sets me right back to where I was at the beginning of my journey. What if She’s here? What
if She can follow me back out, hitch a ride, and hang around my house in Washington?

As I silently walk around my old purple bedroom, now a tasteful shade of blue, Tony starts talking about the experiences he’s had in the house. The door to the spare room in the back of the attic stands open, but I can’t walk anywhere near it.

“Yeah, we used to hear lots of noise from up here,” he says. “That was probably the bats.”

“What’s that?” I ask. “Bats?”

“Yeah. We found a lot of bats living in the chimney. They’d made their way into the walls as well. We could hear scratching.”

“But that doesn’t fit,” I say. “I heard thuds. Heavy, thick thuds. Bats don’t make thud sounds.”

“Well, we heard bats up here. They were everywhere when we bought the place.”

Whenever people buy a house, they convince themselves that the previous owners were crazy idiots with no taste and questionable home-remodeling and maintenance skills. I realize that, to Tony, we were those crazy idiots, allowing bats to take up residence in our chimney. I just let it go.

Tony shares details of his other spooky encounters in the house, but they don’t match my own. Most of his experiences happened in their bedroom, which is in the new addition to the house, which wasn’t even built when Little Girl was haunting me here. And he always feels like there’s something in the room with him, even telling me that, on several occasions, he feels something sit on the bed while he lies there.

“But up here,” I say. “Have you ever felt or experienced anything up here in the attic?”

“Here? No. This was the kids’ playroom. We turned this into a big fort when the kids were young,” he says. “This was always a happy place. It was really neat.”

Tony keeps talking about his experiences, but they feel more and more tangential to me. Whether it’s supernatural phenomena or an active imagination, it becomes apparent that his experiences—real or otherwise—are his experiences. They have nothing to do with me.

I finally work up the nerve to walk toward the spare room.

As I step inside and stand there, it is completely foreign to me. It shouldn’t be. Outside of a coat of paint, new windows, and carpet, it is exactly the same room. I turn to Tony. “It’s so different than I remember” is all I can think to say.

He agrees, yes, it is. That was a long time ago, he adds with a chuckle.

It was. Though it is perfectly preserved in my head, that place doesn’t exist anymore. If it was an evil place or a place with bad mojo and history, the only place that badness existed was in my memory. To cleanse it, all I have to do is let it go.

I pause for a moment after realizing that what I’m really feeling is nothing. If anything, I guess I feel … alone. There is no ghost hiding up here. There is nothing up here to be scared of. Whatever was here at one time has moved on, probably long ago. I should move on as well. None of it is still here. The only place it existed was inside me.

“You know, at the time I lived up here, I had a friend who died,” I say.

Tony looks a little confused.

“Was she the one who you thought haunted here?” he asks.

“No,” I say, adding a smile to demonstrate that I am, in fact, not crazy. “She haunts somewhere else.”

“Well,” he says, shuffling a bit uncomfortably. “Have you found what you were looking for?”

“Thank you for doing this, but I’m not sure it was ever here,” I say, turning to head down the stairs.

So, after all this, do I believe in ghosts?

If by ghosts you mean cloudy spectral things that float around a room, say “Boo,” and then vaporize into thin air, then no. I don’t believe in that.

After spending many hours in some of the most notorious haunted locations I could find, I’ve been brought to the inevitable conclusion that I don’t believe that
places
are haunted, but I do believe
people
are haunted. People carry around the ghosts of their pasts, the people they’ve known, the world they’ve experienced. Most of the time, we never notice they are there. If there are any ghosts in my life, I no longer would count the Little Girl in a Blue Dress among them. Am I haunted by Laura? Yes. Am I haunted by the other loss I’ve experienced? Again, yes. Yes I am.

All this ties to a question I’ve had for years: Why do almost all ghost stories involve a spook that comes out only at night? Every time I ask this of a ghost hunter or paranormal expert, I get the same answer. They note that people have ghost experiences during the day all the time; they are just far less common. But at night, the world quiets, slows down, and goes dim. The noises, trappings, and energy of the daytime fade
into darkness. All we are left with is ourselves and the things we carry around with us all the time: memories, thoughts, and experiences. During our everyday lives, we are too distracted. For all we know, ghosts could be everywhere and we are too frantic with our daylight lives to notice. But when we’re alone at night, our senses can focus on different things: sounds we’d otherwise miss, images or motion that wouldn’t stand out in the middle of the afternoon.

When the world fades away, we are left in the darkness with ourselves and the things we carry with us. But are they paranormal presences? Ghosts? Spirits? Specters? Phantoms? Poltergeists? I don’t think it matters what we call them. To those who experience them, they are real.

But do
I
believe? Do I believe that what happened in those dreams and in that attic was real?

I think I’ve come to a place of peace with that question. My answer would be that this quest has convinced me less and less that these questions really matter. This quest started off trying to prove whether ghosts were real or not, but it ended up being about casting them off, being done with them, coming to a place where I am ready to let them go.

The Little Girl in a Blue Dress had some meaning in my life regardless of whether or not She was real. She was a provocateur, a guardian angel, or perhaps a messenger. In the end, whether She was a ghost, a drug-induced hallucination, a lost soul, or a complete illusion really doesn’t make a whole lot of difference. While a definitive answer has eluded me, I’ve come to realize that the answer doesn’t have a lot of bearing on my life.

Throughout the course of this quest, I found myself becoming increasingly comfortable with the “haunted” places and things I was experiencing. While I never once encountered
definitive evidence to prove anything one way or another, I encountered plenty of potentially freak-out-inducing phenomena. I’ve since watched other people shudder and squirm when I share stories I learned along the way, and I realize that they didn’t really bother me so much.

In fact, up until the other night, I would have told you that I had made tremendous progress in dealing with my fear. That changed during a dinner with my aunt, uncle, and cousins. They asked me about my ghost adventures, so I told a few stories about Lily Dale and Mansfield Reformatory and so on. They squirmed and laughed and shook their heads. Then my cousin’s boyfriend, Jerry, who’d been quiet the entire time, spoke up. “You know, I’ve had a fair amount of ghost stuff happen.”

Jerry once had a job as a maintenance worker at a state park in New Jersey, which entailed periodically staying overnight in some old buildings on the grounds. Along the beach were two old, abandoned lifesaving stations that were used to provide medical attention to those injured on shore or at sea. It also once served as a temporary morgue for drowned swimmers and shipwreck victims.