Oct 31 2005
Ghost Story
No, this isn’t about the Peter Straub novel I’m reading…this is a real ghost story that happened to me. I’ve been meaning to tell this tale for quite a while, but I just never got around to it. It seems that Halloween would be the perfect time to make the time, so here goes.
When I was very young, my paternal grandmother — who just passed away recently — married a man I’ll call Jay. He was a giant, at least to someone who was only four or five years old. His smile was as broad as he was tall. And he was bald. That smile and that bald head are the things I remember most about him. When my parents took me there for a visit, I would sit on his lap and pat the top of his head, which always made him chuckle like Santa Claus. I called him “Baldy,” and he never seemed to mind.
But before I knew it, Jay became ill. I later found out that it was cancer, but I was too young to really understand what that meant at the time. All I knew back then was that this jovial, gentle man was suddenly bedridden and my opportunities to see him became more and more rare. Jay knew he was dying, and was determined to die at home, not in a hospital. His wife, my grandmother, was a nurse, so she at least knew how to take care of him. He died in her house, in the back bedroom.
Forgive me for a moment as I describe the physical layout of the house. When you walked in the front door, you entered an oddly-shaped parlor. To your left was a wall that divided the living room from one of the bedrooms. Straight ahead, for only about eight feet, was living room space populated with a couch, a chair and a hassock, all covered with my grandmother’s crocheting, a mishmash of different shades of variegated yarns that never matched each other. To the right, about fourteen feet from the left wall, was a fireplace and mantle. To this day, I’ve never seen a real fire in that fireplace. My grandmother was always sufficiently entertained with one of those fake lighted logs that simulated what a fire might look like if you really had no skill at lighting one. To the left of the fireplace, the front parlor opened up into a second room that was really too small to be anything of any importance. Perhaps a dinette table would have been perfect for the space, but my grandmother kept it open, choosing instead to line the walls with bookshelves for her Reader’s Digest titles.
This second parlor led to two doorways. The first, along the back wall, was to the kitchen. The second, to the left, led to a short hallway with closet along one wall and cabinets across the opposite wall. (Both were filled to the brim.) At the end of the hall was the bathroom. Each of those rooms had transoms over the doors, a common feature of houses built around the 1930s.
Walking down that hallway had never bothered me before Jay died. But I knew he had died in the bedroom to the right. After his passing, I was always nervous about that hallway. I didn’t think Jay was waiting to snatch me away into the world of the dead or anything like that…I suppose I wasn’t sure that whatever had happened to Jay couldn’t also happen to me if I went near that room. It’s silly now, but it wasn’t silly then.
Usually, that bedroom door was closed. One day, when I was walking down this hall — literally about fifteen to twenty steps or so — I noticed that the door was standing open. It didn’t open before my eyes…it was just open. I felt a chill and stopped in my tracks. I really didn’t want to go any further, but I didn’t turn around and leave, either. Maybe I was afraid my parents would think I was being silly if I told them I was scared. I’m sure my dad would have explained that as much as Jay liked me, he’d never do anything to hurt me, and I already knew that, anyway, so hearing it from my dad wouldn’t have accomplished anything.
But as I stood there, in the middle of the hall, looking into that room (but not setting foot into it), I saw him. Jay. Standing there, tall like he always had been, that jovial smile from ear to ear. He was wearing one of his plaid shirts, although there seemed to be no real color other than a whitish-blue. He raised his hand to wave to me. I’m sure it was a wave. He wasn’t beckoning me to “join him” on the “other side” or anything like that. It was a benevolent gesture. The smile never left his face. From his torso to the floor, there wasn’t much detail at all, as if the lower half of him was mostly some sort of mist. He was there another minute or so, then he was gone.
I went to the bathroom and took care of the business that had led me there to begin with, and hesitated in opening the door again. I was afraid he might be standing there. But he wasn’t. Then I was scared to look towards that bedroom because I thought the door would suddenly have closed itself. It was open, just as it had been. There was no sign that anything unusual had happened.
Was it in my mind? Maybe, maybe not. No one else in that house ever saw Jay after he was gone. But, no one else in that house was a five-year-old who didn’t really understand for sure what dying meant. I choose to believe that it was really Jay, not my mind. I choose to believe that he knew I was scared, and appeared just that one time to let me know not to be afraid of death. The funny thing is, though he never said a word when he appeared to me, I somehow got that message from him.
I never saw him again after that, and I never had a fear walking down that hallway again. I owe Jay a debt of thanks for easing my mind with that familiar smile…a smile that even his death couldn’t take away.
