Forever Isn't Over Yet

Time for another “true” ghost story. This one I heard when I was in college in Greensboro. It’s the weirdest variation of the phantom hitchhiker story I’ve ever heard, and so far my favorite.

At the time, I was waiting tables at a restaurant in Four Seasons Mall. It wasn’t a long commute from where I lived, but I did have to go through a dangerous intersection where drivers had to wait under an overpass for the light to change. Because of the overpass columns, visibility on both the right and the left was nonexistent, and smart drivers did not pull immediately out at the green light. I hated getting stuck there. It was gray and noisy and you were hemmed in on all four sides by concrete, and even after waiting a second or two, rolling into that intersection was an act of faith. There were many accidents and many fatalities there.

Once, after work, I mentioned to Sonia, one of the restaurant managers, how much I disliked that place. Sonia told me this story:

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It’s been a while since I told a ghost story. I heard this one from a young couple I met almost thirty years ago at a party in Louisiana. Obviously I can’t vouch for its truth, but I still think it’s a good story.

They had bought a house a few years before somewhere in New England, exactly the kind of home they’d always dreamed of having, old, picturesque, in a neighborhood of old, picturesque houses. It had two stories, hardwood floors, fireplaces, moldings, a large kitchen. Because the previous owner had lived there for a very long time – had in fact been born and raised there – there were all sorts of artifacts. They’d found stacks of magazines dating back almost a century in the basement, along with an ancient furnace and one of those round-cornered refrigerators from the 1930s. The strangest thing they found, though, was built into the house.

In the kitchen, on the wall facing the covered driveway, was a little door, hinged at the top. It was quite low on the wall, and rectangular, about two feet high and three feet wide. It had plainly not been used for a very, very long time and the hinges were in terrible shape, but once unlatched it could still be pushed, creaking, an inch or two outward, like a flap. Obviously it had once had some practical use – it was just high enough to have been used to load the bed of a pick-up truck – or, given the age of the house, a horse-drawn cart -- pulled up under it on the driveway. After scratching their heads over it, they concluded that it must have been intended as an aid to moving out, perhaps for loading trunks and other luggage before a trip.

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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.

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Last Friday M and I got in late, but were still a little too restless to go to bed. We hit the sofa and turned on the TV, and I was delighted to see the opening of the 1960 version of Thirteen Ghosts. This, along with The Tingler, is one of the first horror movies I can remember seeing. I watched it on TV with my dad when I was five or six and was profoundly affected by two things in it. One was the possibility that the sinister housekeeper might actually cut out a little boy’s tongue for calling her a witch. (I’m sure I was disappointed when it didn’t happen.) The other was a close shot of a revenant’s ragged, cobweb-covered feet clumping down the halls at night. These two things and a floating Ouija board planchette were absolutely all I could remember about it, so while M dozed off, and eventually stretched out snoring, his head in my lap, I sat up and watched.

Often, when you revisit fondly remembered movies from your childhood, it’s a disappointment. Not in this case. Sure, the special effects are cheesy and the story riddled with logical loopholes, but there’s a strain of subversion running through this film that I completely missed when I was in kindergarten.

The plot is simple. A Los Angeles family learns that they’ve inherited a dilapidated mansion haunted by at least a dozen ghosts. It seems a wealthy, almost forgotten uncle had traveled through Europe collecting phantoms and bringing them home, kind of like William Randolph Hearst’s famous raid on Old World antiquities. Uncle Plato has died under mysterious circumstances and left the house to the family, stipulating in his will that they must live there or the property reverts to the state. In addition to the ghosts, the place comes with a hatchet-faced, broom-wielding housekeeper played by Margaret Hamilton, who I guess was having a little fun before the Maxwell House Coffee people got in touch with her.

All this seems fairly straightforward and generic down to the cardboard sets and that pale early-sixties black and white -- until you sit down and actually watch the movie.

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In New Orleans the old spirits still walk
Madame Lalaurie, waving her crusted whip,
And chasing a black girl,
The white-faced soldiers in blue,
Gibbering from their window,
And the sausage maker’s bloody wife
Thumping and flubbering up
From the grinder.
The girl with iron roses still knocks
At the tomb where the harlot sleeps,
And the rented ovens still bake bones
Where long grass waves and lizards skitter.
Tourists are still hurried along
Through the narrow lanes of the dead,
Warned by the guide, “Never come here alone.
Not even in daylight.”

Take your picture quickly and return
To the city of flesh.
Cayenne and onion,
Bell pepper and garlic
Still sing their song
In iron skillets,
Waiting for meat to conjure up
Its own smoky and beckoning ghost.
Under black metal lace
Diners still sip their cafe au lait
At tables that tilt on the broken sidewalks.
Bourbon and rum is still set aflame.
Music still roars on Bourbon Street.
And at night, plump students carry plastic cups
And shout and shimmy, while the stores
Spill light and masks, t-shirts and beads,
Onto dark streets shining with piss and beer.

I hope Marie Laveau still sends
Uneasy dreams to the pale and the guilty
Who toss her a coin,
Hoping for word from the darkness that covers
Those places where we won’t go when awake.