A True Ghost Story
One of the writer’s block questions here at Live Journal recently was ,”Have you ever seen a ghost?” No, I haven’t, so I didn’t post an answer. I have, however, experienced a ghost. A few years ago I wrote that experience into a short story entitled “The House on the Bayou” that was published in Space and Time, so there’s the remote chance that someone reading this already knows that version of it. But “The House on the Bayou” was fiction and I swear – the part of this story that I can vouch for is perfectly true.

The house on Bayou Desierd was where my father and uncles grew up. It was a shady, white-painted, single storied home, built in the 1920s as a hunting lodge I think, and it sat high on the bank overlooking Desierd. I still associate that house with all that was romantic and secure about childhood. Mystery permeated it, but it was a pleasant mystery for me as a child, the mystery of fairy tales and my father’s past. The only thing that ever came close to truly frightening me there was the bearskin rug in front of the fireplace in the Sun Room where our grandmother entertained, and after a while I managed to make friends with it (though I could never bring myself to touch the its eyes. I was positive it would blink.)

Whenever we visited, my sister and I would sleep in the room Dad had once shared with his younger brother, and I would always sleep in Dad’s old bed. It was an incredibly heavy sort of metal cot, very comfortable, but next to impossible for a single person, even an adult, to move. It was also very low. My sister and brother and I knew every hiding place in the house and its front, back and side yards, and that cot was no more feasible to hide under than the old chiffarobe in our grandparents’ bedroom. One look at the bed’s dark, low-slung underside and its barrier of metal levers and hinges was enough to send most sensible kids scrambling to find someplace else in a game of hide and seek.

Which as why the behavior of that bed baffled me. Frequently – not every night I slept there, but often enough – it would shake so hard I’d wake up.



I’m not talking here about a delicate tremor. I’m talking about the mattress bouncing up and down, the springs squeaking, sometimes even the iron legs of the bed scraping on the wooden floor. It was as if someone had hopped onto the bed and was jumping up and down with all their might while doing the twist, so that the bed not only bounced, but shimmied. A couple of times, when I was sleeping on my side, I woke up as the movement tipped me over onto my back.

Considering what a nervous kid I was at other times, I don’t know why I was annoyed rather than frightened. Unlike my bedroom at home, there were no giant spiders or man-eating green blobs at the house on the bayou to keep me awake at night. Maybe it was because my sister and I loved that room so much. The windows faced the back yard and the bayou, and were crowded with honeysuckle so that during the day the sunlight poured through in greenish dapples, and the air that came in was sweet. There was an old fashioned radio on the table between the two beds, one of those from the 1930’s that looked like a small, brown cathedral. There was also an alarm clock that showed a tipsy man leaning against a light post, raising a foaming mug of beer to his mouth with every tick. Pictures of Dad and my uncle as teenagers were hung over the beds, two old black and white portraits showing them with short, brylcreemed hair, smiling, suspended in grayish blobs against a white background.

So the shaking of the bed was just an irritating mystery to me. I asked our grandmother about it once. She shrugged and looked a little puzzled, said something about perhaps trucks passing on Loop Road. The next time it happened I listened, but I could hear no traffic at all outside. And besides, it was only the bed that shook. Nothing else in the room so much as creaked, as you would expect if the cause was a truck going by.

At some point I resolved that when it happened again, I would throw myself at the foot of the bed and grab whoever or whatever was doing it. (What I intended to do after that, other than shouting “A-HA!” I don’t know.) The opportunity came one night, I was awakened by the shaking, and I hurled myself forward, arms outstretched, so that I landed at the foot of my bed. The bed gave one final, almost defiant shiver and was still. All I had was the bedspread clutched in my fingers. I could hear our grandmother snoring in her room down the hall, and in the other bed my sister was curled up, plainly asleep.

I wish I could remember the last night the bed shook, but I can’t recall that any more than I can remember the last night I spent in it. When I was about fourteen, our grandmother died, quite suddenly, of a stroke at a bridge party at the Bayou Desierd Country Club. The house stood empty for a while after that, but not unused. For a couple of years it served as a sort of summerhouse. Sometimes in the summer a friend and I would ride our bikes over to the house, put some cokes in the now almost empty refrigerator, and spend the day swimming off of the dock. It was only in that period that I felt a sense of disquiet in the house. There was something about the stillness of its rooms in daylight that made me reluctant to stay inside. Everything was in place, but it was waiting to be broken up and carried away and thinking about that made me sad. Finally one of my uncles moved into the house with his family, who made it their own.

By the time I was in college in Greensboro, I considered the mysterious shaking bed part of my distant past. Once, when Dad took me out to dinner at The Elms, I told him about the bed and asked him if that had ever happened to him. He grinned and said, “Didn’t I ever tell you about that house?” He told me didn’t remember his bed shaking, but he always felt, even as a little boy, that there was something eerie about the place. I tried to get him to tell me more, but Dad, though he smiled as if there were more he could tell me, wouldn't go into any more detail.

I graduated from University. I moved to Pittsburgh, then San Francisco. The shaking bed became little more than an anecdote. Then one weekend a few years ago, my youngest brother, J, and his wife drove up from LA for a visit. We sat in the living room sipping wine and reminiscing, and the subject of the old house on Loop Road came up. “Do you remember that old metal bed that used to be Dad's?” I asked, about to launch into my account of the shaking bed, but before I could continue J laughed. “Oh yeah,” he said, “That was the weirdest thing that ever happened to me!”

“You slept in that bed?” I asked.

No, he hadn’t. Here is what he told me:

About a year after our grandmother died, he and my other brother, T, were at the house on the bayou playing hide and seek. J would have been about six or seven, T ten or eleven. I don’t know where the adults were – possibly my father and uncles were down at the dock doing maintenance on the boat. T began counting down in the back yard, leaning against the old pecan tree that shaded it, and J ran into the house to find a hiding place. For some reason he decided that the best place would be under Dad’s old bed, and with a great deal of squirming, he managed to cram himself under it.

And get firmly stuck.

At first he was merely uncomfortable and annoyed, but wriggling only got him more firmly wedged, his head stuck painfully between the floor and the bottom of the bed. There were cobwebs down there, which meant spiders, and he quickly went from mild discomfort into panic. He began yelling for help.

It was summer and the windows to the bedroom were open, so it sounded to T, who was still in the backyard, that J was calling from somewhere outside. “Where are you?” he shouted anxiously. “Tell me where you are!”

By this time J was hysterical, struggling and shrieking. He could hear T running around the back yard, beating the bushes for J and shouting “tell me where you are!” over and over again, but J was crying so hard he could barely make himself understood. His head felt as though it were about to be crushed and he was sure he was going to die there in the dark under that bed.

Then suddenly, the pressure vanished. J felt the bed being lifted and he rolled out from under it. He turned to see who it was who was standing at the foot of the bed holding it up, and he sat there on the floor, fuzzy with dust and cobwebs, still sobbing, watching fascinated as the end of the bed settled gently back onto the floor.

As you have probably guessed, nobody was there.