Holy Ghosts

by Gary Jansen

  My grandparents never had much money, and my parents were very poor in those early years. My sister Julie and I lived with them in my grandparents’ tiny unfinished basement, parts of which had a dirt floor, not to mention exposed water and sewer pipes. I had a lot of nightmares growing up there, but my mom was always there to reassure me that everything was all right, that there were always angels watching over me, and not to be afraid.

  FIRST GRADE CAME AND WENT, and my childhood tastes matured. Soon after, I left behind Casper, his best friend, the cute little blond witch Wendy, and their trusty white-haired spectral colt, Nightmare, for a more grown-up, much more skeptical (yet still animated) take on the supernatural. That’s right, Scooby-Doo. Here was a totally different look at the world of ghosts and monsters. Even though Casper would always hold a special place in my heart, Scooby and the gang—goateed Shaggy, ascotted Fred, nerdy Velma, and the desirable Daphne (I have a crush on her to this day) with their Mystery Machine and scientific, albeit far-fetched, approach to solving crimes—would instill in me two very important ideas: one, there are no such things as ghosts; two, if you looked hard enough, there is always a logical explanation for things that go bump in the night.

  With all the noises going on in our house, these ideas turned out to be therapeutic, and I would repeat them to myself when I felt afraid. And if Scooby-Doo episodes were not enough to convince me that spooks were just in your imagination, Catholic school most definitely was. The nuns, priests, and teachers drilled into us during religion class that God was good, that Jesus saved us from our sins, and that there was only one ghost—the Holy Ghost, the Holy Spirit. There was no talk of ghosts or specters, or angels or demons, for that matter.

  As a result, the reassuring Scooby-Doo mantras became infallible truths in my young life. They came in especially handy when my family and I would continue to hear unexplained noises in the night: the shuffling of feet upstairs when no one was there; the staircase creaking on its own, as if someone were sneaking around and listening to our conversations; the faint indiscernible whispers we’d hear while my sisters and I played with our toys; the ringing of the doorbell in the middle of the night and no one being there; the sound of breaking glass when there was no evidence of a broken window or dropped plate or bottle anywhere.

  And while I quickly became sure that there were no such things as ghosts, and that everything had a logical explanation (chanting this mantra over and over again), not everyone in my family was convinced.

  ONE NIGHT IN THE FALL OF 1977, my mother told me during dinner that there was a ghost in our house. I was still seven years old, and we were sitting at the kitchen table. It was just the two of us. My father was away on a hunting trip, and my sisters were in the living room watching TV. I was always a slow eater and Mom was keeping me company at the kitchen table. What I remember most aren’t the words she said, but the rubbery texture of the pork chops I was eating. It was a little like trying to eat old, chewed gum—flavorless—and no matter how much you chewed or how much saliva you excreted, the pork pieces never broke down enough for easy swallowing. My mother was convinced that one of us was going to die of trichinosis, so she boiled all pork products until they were the color of dirty laundry water. Botulism from dented cans was another concern. Since our family didn’t have a lot of money at the time, what we ate was mostly of the half-price dented can variety. I had once heard on the nightly news that the contents of a dented can could mean sure death. I would envision drowning in a pool of my own vomit, and that image, not some ghost, scared the shit out of me.

  Meals in our house always felt a little like a last supper; creamed corn, lima beans, glazed carrots, all chambered bullets in the fatalistic game of dinnertime Russian roulette. On more than one occasion my mother reassured us that she could cook the bacteria out, but I was always skeptical. After each bite I took I would wait a minute to see if I was going to die.

  Back to my mother and me, alone at the table. “What did you say?” I had asked between horse chews of pork.

  My mother, who loved her velvet Jesus pictures and old Hayley Mills movies, did not fool around. With a serious look on her face, she took a drag of her cigarette and a sip from her cup of tea.

  “There’s a ghost in our house. She’s in the front room.” She said these words matter-of-factly, as if she had said, “Today is Wednesday” or “Your aunt is on drugs” or “Your grandfather buried them three deep last weekend.”

  “You can see a ghost?”

  “No. I can feel her. She leaves an impression on me. She likes to stand by the picture window in the front room. It’s as if she’s looking for someone.”

  I didn’t know what she was talking about. “Should I be afraid?” I asked.

  She said no. Maybe it was her deadpan, surgical delivery, or maybe I was more focused on how in God’s name I was going to finish my food without throwing up on the table, but I didn’t feel afraid. I never felt afraid around my mother. I can’t say I believed her at the time nor can I say I disbelieved her. There was no reason for my mom to make up the story. She wasn’t trying to scare me and she never talked about it much. Only on occasion, over the years, would she mention the ghost in our house, reminding me that the woman was just lonely and since she wasn’t causing anyone any trouble there was no need for us to cause her any trouble either.

  MY MOTHER was a very sensitive person, not just emotionally (though she was known for crying at the drop of a hat while watching Fred MacMurray movies), but in other ways, too. She knew when it was going to rain and when it was going to snow regardless of what the weatherman said. She claimed to feel souls of the departed in church, but not in cemeteries. And long before there was caller ID she was able to tell you who was calling before you answered the phone.

  And then there were her dreams. They were dreams of lost kittens and dogs who would show up days later on our front stoop like shipwrecked sailors in search of dry land. My mom took many of these wandering animals into our home temporarily, but not every stray was given sanctuary. Sometimes angels come to our door, she would say, sometimes something else comes to our door. We let the angels in. We don’t want the others in our house. What that something else was and how she knew the difference, she never said for sure. It’s just a feeling I get, she would tell me.

  As I was growing up I always enjoyed being with my mom and listening to her stories. But I just didn’t share her enthusiasm, her belief in an unseen world of ghosts and angelic and demonic forces. This was probably because I felt that nothing weird ever happened to me, except for the noises in our house, which never went away but became so familiar that most times you would forget about them. Even when the house would seem to be doing something funky, I, like my father, was a rationalist. Everything had a reasonable explanation. What those explanations were, well, we never knew. And I didn’t really care. It was hard to convince me of anything, even when my mom’s gift for seeing things others did not see proved to be prescient and terrifying.

  LATE ONE NIGHT in March 1983, when I was thirteen years old, I heard my mother crying downstairs. My bedroom was on the second floor. I had been sleeping but woke up to go to the bathroom. On my way back, I could hear the sound of whimpering. All the time I was growing up, both my parents were hotheaded and fought on a regular basis. The sound of yelling or crying wasn’t anything unusual. But what was strange about this instance was that, as far as I knew, there had been no argument. I often woke up when they started to yell, but that night, except for the sound of faint sobbing, everything was quiet.

  I walked downstairs to see what was wrong. There was my mother, sitting in the dark in the front room, smoking a cigarette and staring out the large picture window that overlooked our block and the VFW Hall across the street. Also visible was the spire of St. Agnes Cathedral a short distance away, silhouetted against the night sky. She was sitting on an old chair in an upright fetal position, knees tucked under her chin, and she was crying. In her left hand was the faint, orange glo
w of her cigarette, and in her other hand she held an old plastic ashtray. I’m not even sure if she saw that I had walked into the room.

  I whispered to her, asking what was wrong. At first she didn’t respond. It seemed as if she was in a trance. I moved closer to her and whispered again. I felt afraid, not of my mother, but of the situation. Maybe she was sick.

  She took a drag of her cigarette and just sat there, rocking back and forth slightly in the chair. Her hair was pulled back behind her ears. My dad had always said that she looked like a little girl when she did that, and for a brief moment I felt as if our roles were reversed. She had always asked me what was wrong, had always reached out to me, had always tried to make things better; now I wanted to do the same.

  Once again I asked her what was wrong. She took a deep breath in and as she did, tears started running down her face. Quietly, she cried out these words: “The light in the church has gone out.”

  That’s it? I thought. She’s crying because the bishop forgot to pay the electric bill? I stood there in my pajamas, a bit relieved, a bit perplexed. I waited for her to say something else, but she didn’t. She did, however, start to hyperventilate, and I asked her if she needed a bag. She nodded.

  Every once in a while, usually after arguing with my dad, my mom would lose her breath and she’d need to breathe into a brown paper bag. I never understood how that would make her feel better. Nonetheless, I dashed off down the hallway to the kitchen, found a bag and raced back to her. I opened it, rolled it down a bit, handed it to her, and watched the bag expand and contract like an external lung.

  I stood there, confused by what was going on. I thought for a moment about getting my dad but decided against it. I looked out the window, down the block toward St. Agnes, and she was right, the light at the very top, just below the iron crucifix, had gone out. Though I had seen the church when I first walked into the room, I hadn’t noticed how dark it looked. It did seem a little strange, since for as long as I could remember that light was always on. Regardless, why was this upsetting my mother?

  When she was done breathing into the bag, she looked a little more like herself. I asked her again what was going on, why was she so upset?

  “It’s a bad sign,” she had said. “They are telling me something terrible is going to happen.”

  I asked her who they were? And she didn’t respond. I asked her what she was talking about.

  “Something terrible is going to happen to someone close by. Someone is going to do something horrible.”

  Up until then I had never felt frightened by anything my mom said or did. That all changed in an instant. I stood there, feeling as if my legs had turned to tree stumps, with thick roots grown into the floor. I wanted to turn around and run back upstairs, but my mother started talking fast. At first, she said, she received the message incorrectly and thought that I was in danger. Then, they said no, no, no, she’d had it all wrong. They were confusing her, the voices were all mumbled, she said, and she kept talking faster and faster.

  I felt the room start to spin as if I were in the eye of a tornado, and I just wanted it all to stop, I wanted my mom to stop talking, I wanted my dad to walk down the stairs. I didn’t know why, but I wanted to be living in my grandmother’s basement again, I wanted to be far, far, away from home, and I wanted the goddamn light to appear at the top of the church. I wanted to tell her it was going to be all right, that everything was a bad dream. She kept saying they, they, they, they . . .

  “Who the hell are they?” I finally yelled this at her, and she seemed to snap out of whatever it was she was going through. Her body relaxed as if some spell had been broken and she looked me in the eyes, her head tilted to the side.

  “God, Jesus, and Mary,” she said.

  “What?”

  “And they won’t do anything to stop it.”

  “Mom, it’s just a nightmare.”

  “Go to bed,” she said.

  I said nothing but turned and walked upstairs. My room was right above the room my mother was in, so I went to the window and pulled back the curtain. I looked outside at the cathedral, shrouded in shadow, looking like some ominous blind monster waiting to pounce on me. I felt bad for my mom and wanted to go back downstairs, but soon I heard her footsteps rise up the stairs and a door close. I looked back outside and tried to remember if I had ever seen the steeple black like that before. I couldn’t think of an instance ever, but then again I didn’t always look outside at night, so how would I have known?

  I got into bed and tried to sleep, but I kept thinking about what had just happened, my mom’s face and her words, which rolled over in my mind like a toy falling down a flight of stairs. I felt dizzy, but after awhile I came to believe that my mother had simply had a bad dream. Eventually sleep overtook me.

  ON MARCH 20, 1983, a week after the incident with my mother, I was sitting in the living room watching the evening news on television. It was a Sunday, a week before Palm Sunday and two weeks before Easter, and my family and I had spent the morning spring-cleaning in our backyard. It had been a quiet day, a weekend like plenty of other weekends. Everyone was getting along and my parents had taken me to a comic-book store I loved in nearby Levittown. We had eaten dinner around four o’clock as we normally did on weekends, and my mom and sisters were in the kitchen cleaning dishes.

  The breaking story was about the murder of a fourteen-year-old boy from Long Island. Since all the major stations at the time—ABC, CBS, and NBC—were based out of New York City, Long Island hardly ever received mention on the evening news (the Amy Fisher incident was still years away), so I paid close attention. Besides, I was only thirteen at the time and it was startling to hear that a boy so close to my own age had been killed. As the newscaster continued, the story grew even more unsettling.

  The murder had taken place in our town, Rockville Centre. The victim had been stabbed several times and left in an alley near an old abandoned gas station on Merrick Road. A brief picture of the area, roped off by police, flashed on the screen. I knew that place! My father and I had driven past there for years. It was right across the street from the hospital where my youngest sister, Annie, had been born two years earlier.

  The newscaster continued, revealing the name of the boy, Christopher Grun. I replayed all the names I knew from school and around town, and thankfully I didn’t know a Christopher Grun. I did know a Christopher Gruhn, an eighth-grader at St. Agnes. He was a friend from school, and had taught me how to make toilet-paper balls and then throw them against the ceiling in the boy’s lavatory. He was also the brother of a girl in my grade. But that couldn’t have been the same person, could it? The newscaster pronounced the name Grun like “run,” not Gruhn, like “broom.”

  I turned away from the TV and saw my mother standing in the doorway of the kitchen, her face drawn of all its blood as she started to cry. A few moments later, the phone rang and my mother and I stared at each other. Time seemed to stop, each ring lasting an eternity, the silence in between even longer. Finally, my mother picked up the receiver. It was one of the mothers from St. Agnes.

  The newscaster had mispronounced the name.

  Chapter 3

  In June 2007, Grace called me at work to tell me she was pregnant. This was great news. She was happy, as was I, but she spoke in calm, cautious tones, much differently than she had earlier in the year when, out of excitement, she almost accidentally stabbed me in the eye with her First Response home pregnancy test. The last few months had been a great struggle for her both mentally and physically. She was sad and tired all the time and she kept replaying the scene in the doctor’s office when she first heard the news about the miscarriage. She questioned everything about the time leading up to that moment—the foods she ate, the exercises she did, the vitamins she took, the thoughts she was thinking—hoping to find some explanation about why it had happened. She was “twisted up in knots” and just “felt off,” she would tell me.

  And she had trouble sleeping. So did I.
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br />   BAKHTAK IS not only the Persian word for “nightmare,” it is also a demon who sits on a sleeping person’s chest with the intent to suffocate. In English folklore the evil spirit is known as the Old Hag, its name derived from a medieval belief that witches would ride unsuspecting victims at night, drawing away the breath and crushing the lungs. Sufferers of such attacks recount the sounds of footsteps entering a room when no one was present, abhorrent smells, or the sight of a ghastly, revolting creature crawling upon their bodies. Today, science refers to it as sleep paralysis, a medical condition where a person’s brain awakes from a cycle of REM sleep, but the body’s nervous system remains at rest, leading to panic and hallucinations. While many doctors believe that it can be caused by lack of sleep or stress, many outside the medical community believe it is a form of psychic attack from a malevolent force.

  On and off while growing up I had a recurring dream where I would see a figure with really big, black eyes standing over my bed. He was the color of shadow and wouldn’t move until he realized I saw him. Then he would walk over, grab me by the throat, and start to choke me. I would fight back, but it would be no use. He would push me down into the bed, and I would feel pressure on my chest as if he had placed concrete blocks on me. The dream never lasted long, but it was terrifying. When I woke up, I would be shaking and gasping for breath. I hadn’t had dreams like that since I was a teenager, but recently they had started up again.

  Late one night, I had switched places with Eddie, who was also having trouble sleeping. He went with Grace in our bed, and I took his. The strange electric surge in his room had waned a bit. I would still feel it from time to time but not like I had in the spring. I assumed that I had been correct in my initial assumption that whatever it was had to do with the weather and the temperatures inside and outside the house. (Granted, my son’s electric toys—his trucks, his trains, his talking animals—would spontaneously fire off on an almost regular basis. Grace noticed this also, but we continued to chalk it up to bad batteries.) I fell asleep with the door to the room open. At some point I awoke, or at least I thought I did. I was lying on my back and I turned my head and saw the bathroom light was on. Then, something dark moved across the hallway and stood in the doorway. It looked like the shadow of a person. It had no face. It had no hands. It didn’t move. My heart started to race. I tried to jump out of the bed, but I couldn’t move. I felt like my chest was being crushed and the more I moved the more my rib cage felt like it was going to explode. I panicked. I gasped for air. I felt like I did when I was fourteen and challenged my cousin to swim across a small lake and almost drowned, the brown muddy water surrounding me and filling my lungs and dragging me down, saved only by some strange burst of strength and clarity. I tried again to lift myself up, but to no avail. I didn’t know what to do.