Previous: At the Buffy Musical Sing-A-Long | Next: A Free Car with Purchase

The Ghost Story

⊕ Click Image to Enlarge

Let me tell you a ghost story that is absolutely NOT true.

In 1985, my mother saw a ghost. We were living in Lenexa, Kansas, out in the suburbs. She still tells the story today and swears by her accounting of it. If she were writing on this blog, this is how she would tell it:

"I woke up early in the morning about 3 a.m. Something just didn't seem right in the house. I lay there awake for a while and then decided to go downstairs to the kitchen to get a glass of milk and maybe a cookie or two."

"It had been raining the night before and I could see outside through our sliding glass door that looks out onto the back deck that it was a little misty or even foggy out. I poured myself a glass of milk from the refrigerator and then sat down at the kitchen table. I was looking outside at the deck through the sliding glass doors. I could see our big maple tree next to the deck, but the swimming pool just beyond it was barely visible through the fog. That's when I saw it. That's when I saw the ghost."

"I could tell that it was a human figure. It was so white that it seemed to glow. It was kind of billowing, too, like seeing a person who was swimming underwater. You can see them, but you can't really make out the edges. It didn't have legs - it's body just sort of dissolved away toward the ground. It floated there for a moment or two and then I guess it must have sensed that I was looking at it because it turned a little toward me and then... and then... it just ascended straight up into the sky. Whoosh!" (mom makes an appropriate hand gesture here simulating the whooshing up into the air)

"I stood there for what seemed like an hour, just waiting for it to come back. I didn't even realize that I had been standing. I must have stood up when I saw it fly up into the air. I waited, but it never came back. I never saw it again."

A few hours later when my sister came downstairs for breakfast she saw mom sitting there at the kitchen table drinking a whole pot of coffee. She hadn’t gone back to bed. Mom proceeded to tell my sister in her most serious tone of voice that last night she saw a real ghost. Ghosts were real. My sister heard the whole story from beginning to end. When my step-father came downstairs a little while later, mom told the story again. And when I came downstairs a little after that, I got to hear the whole story, too.

My sister told me later on that with each telling of mom’s ghost story that it got a little bit more dramatic. The ghost became not just white, but a glowing white. Over the years of hearing it told again and again the ghost becomes a chilling figure that stared at her and she could feel its unearthly presence. Mom’s not the kind of person to make things like this up, so it just added to the story’s credibility.

The thing is, though, I know the ghost wasn’t real.

I had snuck out of the house around midnight to meet up with some friends. I left the usual way. I opened my bedroom window, which was on the third floor, and I climbed out carefully until I could reach a branch of the big maple tree by the deck. Then I’d sort of hike myself onto the branch and crawl over to the deck and then climb down the side of it.

It was drizzling outside so I wore my rain poncho, which I got at a Kansas City Royals fan appreciation night. It was white and it had a blue Royals logo on the front of it. I found my friends and we goofed around at a local park until we were too drenched from the fog and decided to go home.

Getting back into the house was a little tougher. I quietly entered the backyard through our squeeky gate. While standing next to the pool I had to make a running jump using an overturned lawn chair. This allowed me to catch my foot on the railing of the deck about 6 feet off the ground. To continue my vertical momentum, I used the deck railing as another springboard to vault upward. That’s how I could catch the tree branch that led back to my bedroom window. It wasn’t easy and I only did this maybe five or six times that summer until I started losing my nerve. I almost slipped once and could have broken many bones, or even worse, my neck.

So what my mother had seen - a billowing white figure that ascended into the sky - was actually me.

I guess that due to the angle and the poor visibility that she couldn’t see the Royals logo or my face under the hood or even my feet. From her perspective she couldn’t tell that I had to take a 15 foot run toward her before climbing upward. She just saw a white figure and then it went up.

I came downstairs the next morning and mom told me that she had seen something amazing last night. I thought I was busted. This was it. I was caught and would probably be grounded for a year. Even after she finished telling her ghost story I thought she was pulling my leg, trying to get me to admit that it was me in my Royals poncho. But there was something in her voice that was different; something that led me to believe that *she* believed that she had seen a ghost. So I never told her the true story—my version of it, anyway.

I learned from this experience that people do see ghosts. And UFOs. And Big Foot. And any of a thousand other paranormal phenomena. Ghosts may be real or they may not, but that doesn’t matter. Someone saw something and now they have a story to tell. And that’s why even if I don’t believe in ghosts, I do believe in ghost stories.

Comments

Commenting is not available in this major section entry.