Ghosts

All rights reserved, 2023

Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep
If I should die before I 'wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.

When I told Dad I had seen ghosts, he appeared unfazed. Without a hint of irony, he suggested I try to talk to them. “Ask them a few questions. Start up a conversation and see what they say.” Dad had two master’s degrees from MIT, and I suppose this was his way of using the scientific method to debunk my ghost sightings.

Dad tried the same thing with cigarettes. He would sit on one of our beds and tell my brother and me that when we turned 16, he wanted us to smoke a cigarette. He’d then say, “Take out your handkerchief and breathe into it to see all the junk you just inhaled.” He was sure that would cure us for life. He never quite seemed to catch on that teenage boys in the 1980s no longer carried white handkerchiefs to school.

I don’t remember when I first started seeing ghosts at night, but it was when I was very young. We still lived in the ranch house in Charleston with the impossibly long hallways. I don’t remember what the first ghost looked like, but he did the same thing most of them did - stood next to my bed, stooping down to my level, looking at me, his face inches from mine. Not saying anything, just looking. I turned away with my face towards the wall, not daring to look again, hoping to get back to sleep. Across the room, my brother slept peacefully, oblivious to my fear, undisturbed.

The next couple of ghosts I saw were some of the most bewildering ones. One stood at the end of my bed. It was simply a fishing pole, wearing a loose shirt, and somehow, just looking at me quietly. There must have been a story there. I looked down to the floor and on the carpet was a horseshoe crab, swimming across the carpet. I am not making this up. This is what I saw.

Sometime later in that house I woke up in the middle of the night and there on my brother’s bed was some kind of crippled boy with metal braces, dancing a kind of jig as only crippled boys can. It did not wake my brother up, but I am telling you I saw this.

When we moved to Bethesda, I hoped these visits would stop. But they only got more frequent. Particularly on rainy nights, I would hear them downstairs first, and then they would make their way up the stairs, one step at a time, slowly, a full minute or so between each step. We had seventeen steps, and I would count them down, one by one. All I wanted to do was to get back to sleep and ignore them, but I could hear each step, each one bringing them closer. Then I would hear the door open and I knew they were standing there next to my bed, watching me.

A few times I glanced up and there they were – this one redhead had a huge Afro, I remember that. But mostly I kept my head down. I knew they would not bother me if they thought I was asleep, so I would turn my head towards the wall and try to lay perfectly still. In the summer, sweat would roll down my face, but I dared not budge. It felt like hours before I could fall back to sleep. Once or twice they poked me to try to get me to move, but like a Buckingham guard standing at attention, I disciplined myself not to react. Morning always came as a relief and a grace, light pouring in through the windows, no ghosts in sight.

His Love to guard me through the night and wake me in the morning's light.

That is how I spent many of my nights as a child. Whatever the scientific facts, this was my reality: never knowing what nights the ghosts would show up, nights of sleeplessness and terror. After I left for college, my parents sold our Bethesda house. There was a gray smudge on the bedroom wall where my face pressed up against it each night, a greasy icon of memorialized fear.

The ghosts were always singular – except for one instance. We were at my grandparents’ house in Summerville, a place they named “The Hollies” because each time a child was born, they planted another holly tree. Mom and Dad were not there, and I was sleeping in the guest room with the big bed. When I looked up, there were two ghosts staring at me – one looked like a regular man, but the other one had a red face with horns. You have to understand – we were Episcopalians. These things were not supposed to happen to us.

I got up, bawling, and ran into Granama’s room to ask if I could sleep with her. She graciously allowed it. My grandfather, GD, had had a stroke a couple of years earlier, and had his own room set up next door with medical equipment. I crawled into bed with Granama, but the two ghosts followed me into her room. They sat on the chairs at the vanities on either side of the bed. I could hear them. I knew that’s where they were. I literally crawled under the sheets to Granama’s feet, thinking they could not reach me there. I guess they didn’t. I pray the Lord my soul to keep.

In fourth grade I told my teacher, Mrs. Alexander, that I had seen ghosts and she did not make fun of me. Mom was skeptical of my stories until she became a born-again Christian. Then she believed me when I told her one of them was a devil.

When I told most people about these experiences, they were almost always met with great skepticism, which even I allowed was entirely proper. The noises were probably raindrops. I must have had bad dreams when I was little and kept convincing myself ghosts were present, when nothing was there. My sister told me she used to tickle me after I had fallen asleep. I don’t know.

All I know is the promise that I made to myself as a child. I understood that as I grew older, I would come under intense rational pressure to deny my experience. So I made a solemn promise to myself that as I aged, I would not become one of those sullen adults who have no room in their minds for children’s tales. I saw what I saw, and I promised myself that I would always believe it.

It’s true that if brought before a Presbytery commission to answer questions of cold, hard logic and be reminded of the non-binding nature of unlawful oaths to myself, I would relent. My heart is deceitful above all things. I am no Emersonian genius who thinks that my experience is true for all men. When I was a child, I thought like a child, and so forth. I would confess before the commission that I must have been wrong, and of course, there are no ghosts. We would pray, close our laptops and exchange the latest gossip before heading home.

But a promise is still a promise. Sometimes you keep your promises to yourself even if nobody else understands why.

In time, the ghosts stopped coming, a little bit less every year as I got older. Then, finally, they stopped altogether, right around seventh grade as I went through confirmation class at our church. For a confirmation gift, Mom told me I could pick out any present from the National Cathedral gift shop. I picked a simple, thin brass cross and hung it up over my bed. I am not superstitious. I don’t believe in such gimmicks. All I am telling you is that after I hung that cross, the ghosts stopped visiting.

There was one last time afterward on vacation in England when we spent the night in a friend’s 800-year-old house. Ghosts came that night. But if you don’t think ghosts are going to show up in that situation, there is not much I can do for you.

Sometimes now I dream that I am with a large group of friends and family in a cabin somewhere, the whole room crowded with beds. There is some sort of vague threat outside that nobody speaks of, but inside I am safe and warm, in a crowd of friends. Not alone, not pressing my face up against the wall. Those are good dreams.

All I can tell you is what I saw and heard and knew for me. That does not mean I can explain it. Even now, at age fifty-six, some nights I lay awake in sharp leg pain from Lyme-damaged nerves. I dance upon the bed in crippling anxiety. I try to fall asleep by praying for others, but if that does not work, then I pray for Jesus to send His angels to comfort me and help me sleep. And somehow - I can’t explain it - that has always worked.

Angels watch me through the night and wake me with the morning light.

All I know is what has been real for me. Because do you know what else is real? Sleepless nights are real. Anxiety is real. Smudged bedroom walls are real. But so are Mrs. Alexanders. So are brass crosses on our walls. So are Dads who talk calmly and think we still carry white handkerchiefs. These are all just as real as anything we hear go bump in the night. Because, most of all, imaginations are real, just as real as anything we can taste or feel.

I don’t know what I saw those nights. But I know someday a Greater Imagination will take hold. I know I will fly away from here. I will fly up to that place where there will be no more fear, no more sorrow, no more silent staring in the night. A place with rooms full of people who love us, rooms of mirth and warmth, laughter and light. That is what I know, ghosts be damned.