Ghost Story

How am I supposed to get any work done this evening if they’re going to put “Ghostbusters” on television for me to watch? I mean, jeez Louise!

The story in the family is that I was visited by ghosts once – I told the story many, many years ago to my mother and she believes it still. I have long ago accepted an alternate explanation.

In 1974 I spent the final six months of my senior year in high school living alone in Vermont. I won’t go into the whys and wherefores, but the bottom line was that my parents and brothers and sisters were in Southern California while I was living in our house in Vermont.

The house in question was three stories, eight bedrooms, three baths, and the entire third floor was a family room the size of a basketball court. It was over a hundred years old then and had been many things over the years. We were told that it had originally been built as a parsonage or convent, but then had spent a couple decades or more as a nursing home. When we got it (as a serious fixer-upper) it had been empty for several years. (Who needs an eight bedroom home in Vermont?)

While staying there alone, in order to keep heating costs down, we had closed off the second and third floors and the wing of the house that had the dining room and garage. I stayed in the master bedroom downstairs.

At one point I got sick, the flu of some sort, and spent a couple days bedridden. One late night, I woke to hear footsteps upstairs. I was sick as a dog and didn’t much care, but listened as multiple sets of footsteps walked through the second floor, down the grand staircase at the front of the house, through the study, the big living room, and the dining room.

At this point I saw several figures come into the room, two of them at the forefront, a man and a woman. The woman came and sat on the edge of the bed while the man stood behind her and a few other figures behind him. The woman said that she was one of the former tenants of the house when it was a nursing home. (We knew that there were more than a few of the elderly tenants who had passed away in the house many years earlier.) She and the other former tenants knew that I was there alone and ill, so she wanted to let me know that I would be alright in the morning. They would sit and watch over me during the night, so I should just get some sleep.

I was pretty zonked, between whatever early 70’s over-the-counter cold and flu medicine I was hopped up on and the exhaustion of several days with little food or water with significant “unpleasant bodily functions” to boot. I was probably also seriously dehydrated. Between one thing and the other, I wasn’t freaked out at all by this visitation. I remember it as being very calming and soothing.

I went to sleep as instructed and woke up the next morning feeling much better. In a day or so I was up and about as normal.

I had very vivid memories of the “visitation”, so I told my mother about it when next we talked. To this day, she’s convinced that it was real. She claims to have experienced other poltergeist-like events while she would be alone in the house during the day. Things like the radio station changing or the volume suddenly turning way up loud when she was off in another part of the house completely. Toilets flushing by themselves. That sort of thing.

My explanation for the “visitation” is much more prosaic and boring. Flu + dehydration + hunger and low blood sugar + lack of sleep + intense fever + any cold or flu medication I could get my paws on = hallucinations! We knew the history of the house, so it wasn’t like a seed of suggestion hadn’t been planted. As for my mother’s poltergeist, it was a very, very old building with very, very old wiring and plumbing. We had done the best we could to upgrade and repair, but given a choice between it being proof of the afterlife or just a leaky toilet and a loose wire in a building over one hundred years old, well…

Sorry, my degree is in physics, not psychics, and I’m an amateur astronomer, not an astrologer. And as I had to explain to a cocktail waitress (who truly was a wonderful person) when I was working as a room service waiter for Marriott in college, studying on my dinner break, I studied cosmology, not cosmetology, so no, I couldn’t do her hair for her.

Sorry. It’s a good story, but I have to disagree with my mother on the root cause.