Haunted Objects: Stories of Ghosts on Your Shelf (6 page)

Eli placed it back on his shelf, but when he went to sleep that night, he had another dream. In this one, his grandmother was entering the kitchen with a lit birthday cake. His father was seated next to his uncle, who was about seven. He was jumping up and down in his seat and clapping his hands and the camera shook again as he blew out the candles. Eli saw a hand appear from off camera and give the thumbs up. Then everything went black. His room was fully lit when he woke up, and in the middle of the room was the camera again.

“I was pretty freaked out by now. I knew my grandfather was making all of this happen, and he was a man who would never hurt me. That didn’t stop me from being scared at what was going on. I was always into ghosts. I think something can remain on this side when someone passes. I just didn’t want it in my bedroom.”

He moved the camera back to the shelf and went to bed. The next morning he went down to the storage area before work. The lock was still on the shelf, but when he opened it up, two canisters were placed on top of the box like someone had taken them out of the box and moved them. He brought the canisters and box up to his apartment.

“I got out the old projector and hooked up the first reel. I remember I had my blinds shut and all of the lights off and was projecting it on the wall of my room. I knew what I was going to see, and there it was: my uncle’s birthday party. The movie lasted maybe five minutes and then I watched my grandfather saluting the flag and chasing after my father on the second reel. I just sat there in my room, and it was like all of the air got sucked out of the room. I could smell his cologne in the room and just knew he was behind me.”

The raw film.

When he turned around, the camera was again on his bed. Eli made a pact with himself that he would spend the weekend going through the films in the box and brought them back to the basement.

“That was not the right thing to do. That night it was like watching one of those propaganda films they show in movies. They were all of short scenes edited together with quick flashes. I saw my father getting married, a shot of some people gathering around a rosebush, me one Christmas morning jumping around with a Mickey Mouse guitar. I don’t even remember them all. But the worst was when I woke up.

“The lights were all on again and the camera was floating in the room. It was pointed towards me, like someone was handing it to me. I could smell him in the room again, and then the camera dropped to the floor. I got right up and went down to get the box. The shelves were locked again, and the box was opened and the films were all scattered on the shelf. I put them all in and carried it back to my room,” Eli said.

He knows he had watched all of the movies he saw in his dreams while his grandfather was alive because he remembered parts of them. For him, that does not explain how the camera moved or the fact he felt his grandfather so clearly in the room. The message was clear to him, though. He started a project transferring the film to VHS, and then more recently to DVD. That seemed to satisfy his grandfather’s spirit for awhile.

“After that night, the dreams stopped and they haven’t happened since. I have not made these pictures an obsession, but it has become a hobby for me to do this. I have even gotten a machine that allows me to take old slides and make digital pictures out of them. It hasn’t stopped the camera though. When I go a few weeks without working on it, I’ll come home and my camera will be on the bed. Now I just laugh and tell him I’ll get back to my work as soon as possible.”

What My Grandparents Left Behind: Tim’s Story

Perhaps if I’m going to share other people’s experiences with haunted objects, I should share my own as well.

They say every person has one geographic spot that they consider to be their true center, the place where they really feel “home.” Many of us spend our entire lives looking for that spot. I was lucky enough to have it from the moment I was born.

My mother’s parents lived in a side-by-side duplex house in Randolph, Massachusetts, throughout my life. They didn’t own it, but the people on the other side were their landlords and more like family than anything else. My mother and her three siblings had all grown up there and they swore it was haunted by a friendly spirit that lived in the third-floor attic, where the girls slept.

I had spent many nights there, especially when I was younger. My grandparents would take me every Friday so my parents could have a night out. I slept in a bed in my grandmother’s room. I remember suffering from old hag syndrome—the feeling that something is pushing down on a person’s chest (formerly believed to be the work of a witch, hence the name, but now believed to be the work of spirits or even demons) whenever I stayed there. I wouldn’t wake up to the feeling, as most people do, but would instead awake to see the shadow of ugly claws forming on the wall over my bed and reaching for me. I’d brace myself for the impending pressure that would soon hold my body down, yet I was unable to scream.

In later years, I’d often spend weeks at a time at my grandparents’ house during the summer. Growing up in a family of five children, it was nice to be the only kid sometimes. I’d spend my days helping my grandparents around the house and riding my bike all over town. At night, I’d sleep in a sleeping bag on the living room floor. I’d zip it up over my head because I knew I didn’t want to see what went on during the night. I could hear footsteps up and down the stairs, which were just beyond the far wall of the room, and banging in the pantry off the side of the dining room, right next to the living room. My siblings, my cousins and I used to close each other up in that pantry for a scare, even though my grandmother always warned us not to stay in there alone for too long. She never told us why, but we all knew. That’s where the ghosts hid.

My grandfather passed away when I was 19, and my grandmother followed a few years later. My Aunt Arlene lived with them and remained in the house after their deaths. I was planning a trip to see my aunt on one particular Saturday, and the night before I had an extremely vivid and lucid dream in which I was at the house, sitting at the dining room table and visiting with my grandmother just as I had when she was alive.

In the dream, we were discussing everything that was going on in my life at that time and she told me how proud she was of me. Neither one of us addressed the fact that she was supposed to be dead, but I remember feeling like it was the elephant in the room. Still, it was an extremely calming and serene incident, and it made me feel better about visiting the house for the first time since she passed.

Not long after that came the fire and with it the physical center of my universe was gone forever.

When the house burned down, the only person living on my grandparents’ side of the duplex was my cousin Amy, who was just out of high school. She had originally moved in with Aunt Arlene, but our aunt was getting married and had moved in with her fiancé. Amy was sleeping in the third-floor attic, and the fire started in the living room of the first floor. Many years before, an extension cord had apparently been run across the room, under the carpet. It must have been worn down over the years, surged, and then sparks from the exposed wiring ignited the rug. The house was old and the walls and ceilings were paper-thin. It was probably fully ablaze in a matter of moments.

Amy woke up not by the sound of a smoke alarm, but by the feeling that something was wrong. She opened the door to the attic stairs; the flames were already licking the walls of the hallway. She was trapped. She ran to the window across the attic, looking down on the concrete walkway and the dirt driveway three stories below. There was nothing to break her fall, and the fall would probably break her.

She crouched in the window, unsure of her next move, and felt two hands gently push her forward. Whatever spirit was there with her, it wanted her out before it was too late. Amy hit the ground, shattering both her wrists, but otherwise unhurt.

My cousin was upset, however, when she remembered that a beloved necklace that was given to her by grandmother was left hanging in her attic bedroom. Because she was so distraught, my Uncle Tom decided to go into the house to see if he could locate his daughter’s necklace. He thought it would be like finding the proverbial needle in a haystack, but when he climbed through the charred remains of the house to the third-floor attic—nearly falling through not one but two sets of stairs—there it was, hanging on its hook. Everything around it was charred and burned, but the necklace glistened as if somehow protected from damage by an unseen force.

At the time of the fire, I was in college and still living at home with my parents. I remember going with them to see the devastation the fire had caused, but I wasn’t quite prepared for what I saw. All that remained was a crumbling pile of still-smoldering wood and plaster. All the happy memories I had of that place were forever tarnished by the image before me.

The fire department had boarded up the doors because it was unsafe for anyone to go in there, yet Uncle Tom had found a way in through my grandfather’s basement workshop that had been dug out of the underside of the hill on which the house was built. In the back of the workshop was a staircase that led to the kitchen and the rest of the first floor of the house.

I remember my dad going up the staircase first and quickly coming back down again. He said the kitchen was too burnt, and he didn’t recommend crossing to the dining and living rooms, where the destruction was even worse. Yet I still had to see for myself, so I climbed the stairs and opened the door to the kitchen.

Once it swung open, I saw the kitchen exactly the way it had always been when my grandmother cooked wonderful meals. I could almost taste the fried chicken, the aroma filling the air, and could see every last detail the way I’d always remembered it—from the pan of bacon grease atop the stove to the permanent coffee ring on the counter in front of my grandfather’s coffee maker.

Then I shook my head and blinked my eyes, and saw the kitchen in its actual, truly horrific state.

Later on, while visiting Amy in the hospital, I shared that story with my parents. I often had discussions about ghosts with my mother’s side of the family, but I’d never talked about them with my dad. He’s a practical and rational guy, so I just assumed he’d brush it off and tell me there was no such thing. I was shocked when, in the parking garage of the hospital, he told my mother and me about what really happened when he went into the kitchen of the house. He heard a voice forcefully telling him to “get out,” and he immediately complied. Nothing more was ever said about it.

Before I left the duplex for the last time, I wanted to take something with me as a token of remembrance from the house in which I’d essentially grown up. Nothing in my grandfather’s workshop had been damaged by the fire, so it was a no-brainer for me to take his chair—a simple wooden chair that was probably part of some long-gone dining room set, or perhaps something he’d brought home from his job as a junk man.

He’d sit in that uncomfortable chair for hours at a time, stripping copper wire for cash and tending to his wood stove. I’d sit there by his side, watching him work, his hands hardened by nearly 80 years of life but still able to build nearly anything out of wood or spare parts. It was in that same workshop that he helped me launch my radio career at just 13 years old, wiring one of those old Radio Shack crystal kits.

As I was putting the chair in the back of my car, something else caught my eye. There, in a small flowerbed, was an ugly pink flamingo that had adorned the garden for as long as I could remember. Although everyone complained about this eyesore perched in the middle of all those beautiful flowers, my grandparents never got rid of it. The heat from the fire had melted half of the plastic, making it look like a big pile of pink goo on a metal rod. On a whim, I shoved it in the car, too.

When I got home, I took the chair and the flamingo into my basement bedroom. I had a little living area set up down there, too, with two couches, a coffee table, and an entertainment center. I put the chair in a corner near my air hockey table and weight bench and the flamingo up against the wall on the opposite side of the room. I then left, returning home around 1 a.m.