Everyone is gearing up for Halloween and in the spirit of the spooky holiday a few other writers here at Mainly Media LLC have been publishing their ghost stories. Brandi Neal, an editor here, wrote about her experience with an annoying office ghost. Molly Lovell, also an editor, wrote about dealing with the prevailing ghost stories on her college campus. After reading these, I have decided to throw my hat into the ring, and by “hat” I mean of course, tales of horrific madness and nightmare.
    I grew up in a 200 year-old house in Limington, Maine. In our backyard cemetery there are gravestones marked with the name “Small”, one of the first families to live in the town. There are also some marked “Wells,” an old family name of ours, and even more with no markings at all. They poke out of the earth at peculiar angles and when we were younger my brother and I would sit on the graveyard’s iron fence and joke that the people buried were grabbing onto the bottoms of the gravestones and throttling them every which way in some strange attempt to rise. Ha ha.
    I want to start by calling myself a hypocrite. When people tell me ghost stories I tend to listen with half an ear, as they could easily be completely fabricated or even if the person telling the story thinks they are true these stories are still subject to the whims of personal experience and dictation. As you read the following I want you to be aware that these events have never happened to me alone, and that I was always with someone who can verify to the Nth degree both the form and the matter of the stories. If you are reading this at night you may want to close that window, or put the dog on your lap.
    Footsteps coming from the upstairs, echoing off of the stairwells or from rooms not inhabited were a common thing in that three-story home. Many people have died, their last breaths escaping them, between the walls there. Upstairs there are a series of strange drums and Haitian wooden-dolls which sit amongst a complete set of ivory-handled knives. What are these things? Who brought them to the house? What strange purpose do they serve? No one really knows, no one cares to ask, and so far no one has been hurt.
    When I was 9-years-old my mother ran a daycare. We would play with the Ouija board like any curious kids, but we could never make the board respond and spell out messages like it was supposed to. Instead, and as I mentioned before I have a list of people who can attest to this, the cursor would just shoot away. It would physically bolt sideways off of the board and away, no matter who touched it, no matter how many people touched it.
    When I was 10 my mom was mowing the lawn and I was raking the Autumn leaves. With my back to the house I began to hear this banging noise, a sort of dull fwapping coming from behind and above me. I heard my mom’s mower stop. Her face, which I will never forget, was halted, strained and completely terrified. I turned around to see the window on the third story of our house (which solely lit a triangular shaped room with bare walls and floors, the only part of me that has ever been in that room is my head as I straddled a ladder and peeped in) being forcefully brought up and back down again. The rate and intensity of the slamming was inhuman, and only stopped when the window exploded. No one else was home that day.
    When I was 16 I was walking at night with my best friend Adom. From the woods behind my house we heard three rising notes being played on what sounded like an enormous flute. The noise filled the forest and we did not sleep.
    My brother and I both awoke one night to the sound of babies crying right outside the window of the room we shared.
    I should mention now that we shared this room because of fear, and no other reason. There are plenty of rooms in that house, but many of them go uninhabited because our family simply cannot deal with what happens in them, the inertia of past events keeps them perpetually condemned.
    One morning about two years ago I was home for the summer and awoke to the sound of someone screaming, in my room. My brother woke up too, tears in his eyes, and asked me, had I heard the screams? As he spoke they erupted into a chorus, and we ran to our parents’ rooms. I was 20 years old and he was 16.
    There is a photo of myself and my friends taken on our driveway by a daycare provider, which clearly shows us walking with a soldier holding a rifle, and burned to a black crisp. There was no such character present that day.
    One night my brother and I were playing video games when we saw our father stand in the doorway of our room. I did not look at him immediately because it was only 1 a.m. and I knew he and my mom had probably just got done watching a movie in the living room.
    At least, I thought I knew that.
    The fact is they were both gone that night, this thought came to me about 15 seconds after he placed himself silently in the doorway.
    I stopped playing.
    When I turned to look at the figure it was not my dad at all, but a faceless pillar of shadow, like a black shroud draped over a mannequin. It moved without the use of its legs, and simply slid out of the door frame, into the adjacent room. My brother still has nightmares about that one.
    Ghost stories unnerve me because they so readily appeal to this wild, speculative side of our senses. If we can believe these things to be true, what else can happen? In this sense ghost stories embody the infinite possibilities that swirl around us every day and it really makes me wonder, if I can be subject to things like incoherent ghost-screaming, figures that move in the night and angry poltergeists, what is holding it altogether?
    What prevents our reality from merging with our nightmares? Would there be a concussive force tangible enough for us to note the transition between the two? In a house where Halloween happened every week I often asked myself how I would cope— and in the inevitable event of something bizarre happening— and to what remote island of sanity would my brain be immediately portaled too in that instant of horror?