An essay about the ghosts I’ve encountered in my homes, including a family member who keeps stopping by.
I live in a haunted house, but not in a bad way. My ghost tends toward the friendly side but is much more personal than Casper. The ghost had not been active for a while but made quite the appearance last week.
This was not my first encounter with a ghost. I can trace that back to high school. I was hanging out in my bedroom with my best friend. My parents had cleared out for the evening, leaving us free to blast heavy metal vinyl albums and relish our freedom. I went to the kitchen, grabbed a drink, and went back to my room. When I returned to the kitchen several minutes later, a trash can sat in the middle of the kitchen floor. This can normally resided in the pantry behind a closed door.
How it got out and moved to another location in the few minutes I was absent from the room proved to be a Scooby-Doo mystery. I checked the garage for my parent’s car to see if they had returned. I looked in each room of the house, but my friend and I remained alone. This event unnerved me, especially when I told my parents later what had happened and they responded with bemused smiles and assurances that some plausible explanation existed.
Over the years, as I moved to different homes and apartments, the ghost followed me. I chose Kelly for my apparition’s name, believing a gender-neutral nomenclature covered all bases. Other than the initial trash can shenanigan, I can’t say I felt afraid of Kelly’s appearances.
Kelly didn’t seem to be a frightening poltergeist but rather an impish spirit that enjoyed moving things around. I would find one of my possessions had moved from one room to another. An unexplained noise would come from inside my home. I got used to the occasional visits that were often spaced out with years between them. I came to think of Kelly as a protector from the next world and forgave the harmless pranks.
The last big Kelly visit before I moved into my current house also took place in a kitchen. At home alone, I put a dozen refrigerated cookie dough pieces in the oven. When they finished baking, I set the cookie sheet on top of the stove to cool off and went to my bedroom.
I heard what sounded like the cookie sheet being moved, but assumed it had just slid off the burner a bit. After about ten minutes, I went to retrieve some cookies. Someone had beaten me to it. One of the cookies had gone missing.
At first, I told myself I had miscounted how many I baked. But the space formerly occupied by the cookie had a round, steamy pattern on the aluminum foil. The kind that appears when someone removes a warm cookie from a piece of Reynolds Wrap.
I laughed and figured Kelly must have been in the mood for a little chocolate chip action. After that, I don’t remember any more visits from my ethereal protector. I felt sad to think Kelly had moved on, but maybe they had served their purpose. After enough time passed, I didn’t even think about them.
A Family Affair
Shortly after I moved to my new house three years ago, Kelly chose me as their roommate again. Although to be fair, I think this ghost is new. I believe they come from my family tree.
Shortly after moving into my home, spooky things started happening here and there. My garage seemed to be the focus for the newest round of parlor tricks. More than once, I went to bed with the door from my house to the garage closed and locked but woke up to it ajar several inches.
A blanket that was on the washing machine in the garage managed to grow legs, move several feet away, and land on a cardboard box. A miscellaneous item I don’t even remember that had been left on the floor traveled to a tabletop.
I suspected my mom might be afoot. She had very recently passed away, and if anyone would want to explore my garage, she makes the top of my list of suspects. I had packed up her house when she went to the nursing home. My mom had become a packrat and had held onto every item of clothing and every knickknack she ever bought. She filled drawers and boxes with what I believe to be every piece of personal mail she ever received, including 99 love letters from a flyboy during World War II.
As I cleaned out my mom’s house, each time I threw something out or dropped it in the donation box, I imagined her fussing at me. “Now, Eve, those are my things. I want to look at everything before you do anything with it,” she would’ve said. So it made sense to me that my mother would show up shortly after passing over, discover a new garage filled with storage tubs and boxes with which she was not familiar, and start rummaging through things. Mom would want to see what I kept and what was missing.
I planned to do a sage ceremony to try to excise my house from old, negative energy, but ultimately canceled the plan. I feared I might say the incantation wrong and end up accidentally banishing my mom. Whether it was her or Kelly, I wanted them both to feel welcome.
Ludwig and My Mom
Last week, my friend Stormy came over and was busy in my kitchen while I worked at my computer in another room. I heard her call out, “Is that you?”
“Is what me?” I responded.
“Playing that music for me in the kitchen.”
“Uh, what music?” I said. I could hear nothing.
Stormy explained that she could hear a little bit of some familiar instrumental tune playing but could not identify the source. “Never mind, it stopped.”
I continued to write my umpteenth article for work when Stormy called out in a serious tone, “Are you fucking with me?” She sounded annoyed. She said the music had started playing again. Before I could get to the kitchen, it stopped. I had no explanation but she clearly suspected me of playing a practical joke on her.
Stormy hummed the song to me and I recognized it as a famous classical music piece but couldn’t recall the title or composer. I recorded myself humming it and texted that to a friend who is an accomplished piano player and classical music aficionado.
“‘Fur Elise’ by Beethoven”, he replied. This particular song always gave me the creeps. It sounds like the tune that would play over a scene in which a serial killer separates the head of the buxom cheerleader from the rest of her body.
My friend further explained that Beethoven wrote the song for a romantic interest who had rejected him. “He made the beginning easy for her since she wasn’t a very good pianist, and then made the end more difficult so she wouldn’t be able to play it. Beethoven be petty, yo,” he explained. I wondered if this signified that an ex of mine had died and wanted to communicate with me.
Stormy left shortly afterward, mumbling something about not coming back until I got my ghost under control. Not long after her exit, I visited the hallway bathroom and heard the eerie strains of the song coming from the kitchen. It proved to be a good thing I was already sitting down.
I charged down the hall and isolated the sound to the trash can. What the hell is it about me and haunted kitchen garbage receptacles? As I stared into the can at the white H.E.B. trash bag, tied closed and ready to be taken outside, I decided to just let it be. The music could play in short bursts for another day or two. Who am I to harsh a ghost’s mellow, man?
Besides, for all I knew, Beethoven and my mom had developed a friendship on the other side and he had taught her how to tickle the ivories.
Stormy came by again a couple of days later. I told her I had come to believe the source of the music must be a microchip in a Christmas card I had disposed of during a purging session. I had bagged up a large amount of old mail on the morning of the day the music first started playing. The bag sat in the kitchen trash can.
When my Christmas card idea occurred to me, I texted my friend who sent the card to ask if it had a microchip but she said she didn’t recall one. I figured her memory might be faulty, and my theory made sense. Case solved. Stormy breathed a sigh of relief at the news and even ran the trash bag out to the curb to await pick-up.
When she came back inside, the song started playing again.
“Fuck!” she yelled.
“Great, now I have to move,” I said, only half-joking.
The Meddling Kids Solve the Mystery
Like the phone calls from the 1979 scary film When a Stranger Calls, the song was coming from inside the house. I didn’t know what to make of it. I texted my Beethoven-loving friend and informed him that if anything happened to me, to tell the police that a dead composer and my mom were persons of interest.
A short while later, Stormy ran to me waving something in her hand. “This is it! This is what keeps making that fucking sound!” She pushed a coffee cup in my face.
“Fur Elise” poured from the underside of the mug, the result of a microchip placed in it. When I set the mug down, the song stopped. When I picked it up, it became musical again. The mug was made so that whenever you lifted it to take a drink, you’d get a short blast of classical music.
I had used the mug the other day and left it upside down in the dish drainer, which is inches away from the trash can, after hand washing it. I often give my dishes a few days to dry out of efficiency. I mean laziness. The bottom of the mug being exposed for a long period of time had confused the microchip and caused it to go off at sporadic intervals. Mystery solved.
Except… when I drank out of the mug the other day, it didn’t make a peep. Not a note came out of it. But at least I had to admit the whole situation had nothing to do with my mom.
Unless you count the fact that my mother bought the mug when she visited the Hollywood Bowl in California and gave it to me as a souvenir.
River Writer Eve 