Believe me, the last thing I wanted was for my autobiography to be a ghost story. All I’ve ever wanted was a normal life. Is that so much to ask? Instead I get ghosts. So much for normal. Trust me, nothing about ghosts is normal.
So unfortunately, this is going to be a ghost story. But I suppose I ought to be up front about it right from the start: This isn’t going to be a scary story.
There it is. Now you know. If it’s a scary story you’re looking for, you might as well go find a book by R.L. Stine, or Christopher Pike, or Steven King, or, if you like the classics, Edgar Allen Poe. See the truth is, like it or not, real ghosts aren’t all that scary.
I know. You’re thinking, “What do you mean ghosts aren’t scary?”
People think: ghost and they imagine themselves waking up at night with a misty figure looming over their bed holding his head under his arm like a basketball.
Maybe you’ve fantasized that you were alone in some dark, dank cellar when suddenly you feel something…creepy, an icy breeze, a vague tingling of the hairs on the back of your neck…slowly you turn around…and Aaagh! There it is! A horrible half-rotted zombie with maggots crawling out of its eye sockets…
Ah Hollywood.
One night I watched a video of that movie, The Sixth Sense. You know, the one with Bruce Willis and that weird little kid, “I see dead people.”
Now that was scary. Dead bodies hanging by the lockers at school, that spacey looking kid with the ‘70s haircut and the back of his head blown away…eeew!
Bloody, gory, puking dead people.
Well, I’d been seeing dead people for more than a year when I watched that movie, and it still scared the crap out of me. It even scared the crap out of the guy I was watching it with.
And he’s a ghost!
I guess what I’m trying to say is that you should lose your preconceptions about ghosts.
It would be nice if I could leave you fully enlightened on the subject. You know: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Ghosts but Were Afraid to Ask. Or maybe: Ghosts for Dummies.
Sorry.
While I might know more about ghosts than normal people, there’s still a lot I don’t get. Why is it that there are some ghosts you can talk to, (and some you can’t shut up), while there are others that don’t even know you’re there? Why do some people become ghosts when they die and others don’t?
I’ve got some ideas, maybe even theories. (I’d have to go back and look at my old 7th grade science book to know for sure if my ideas really qualify as theories, but you know what I mean.)
I think some ghosts (but not all of them) decide to become ghosts when they die. Why? Who knows why anybody decides to do anything? Everybody’s got their own reasons. Still, I’ve talked to some ghosts and that’s what they tell me.
Other ghosts just seem to show up. Those are the ones that can really creep me out. It’s like they don’t even know that we’re here, like they’re in their own little world, (the world of their former lives?) An example: Once I saw this Indian guy stalking invisible game on a school playground – moving stealthily through the crowds of screaming kids, bow notched and ready. But he has no idea that those kids are there and, of course, the kids were just as clueless about him.
There’s this lady near where I live now. From her clothes, I’m guessing she’d from the 1800s or so, anyway, every now and then (always on a Sunday now that I think of it), she comes screaming down the sidewalk by my house, “Stop them! Stop them! Somebody! You’ve got to stop them!”
Stop who? Beats me. She just appears out of nowhere, running, yelling, screaming, and just as quickly disappears. Once she caught me by surprise and ran right through me.
Freaked me out that did.
Anyway here’s my theory: What if some people on the Other Side, you know, wherever it is people go when they die; what if they sometimes dream about stuff that happened when they were alive? And then what if sometimes in those dreams they show up here in our world acting out whatever it was they were dreaming? They’d be stalking deer, or running for their lives or whatever and they wouldn’t even know that they were here in our world.
Like I said, it’s just a theory.