The Little Book of True Ghost Stories

The Little Book of True Ghost Stories

It was wintertime, 1969. I was twenty-one years old and still living at home. We’d had a lot of spirit activity in our house since getting on this path, but until then I hadn’t actually seen any spirits.
The first time I ever went to someone’s house intentionally looking for a ghost, I had no idea what I was doing. I was pretty scared and still believed that ghosts were scary monsters who looked all whitish and weird—like they had no form and were just blobs of scary stuff!
What made this fun was that it was a friend of my mom’s who suspected she had a ghost, so Mom and I went on the “job” together. The drive over to Carol’s that night felt a lot like that drive over to Mrs. Olson’s; we didn’t know what to expect, and our imaginations were running wild. Carol had told us that there were strange sounds coming from the attic and she felt as if someone were watching her family. She said that her son was a recovering alcoholic and was having a terrible time staying sober. She wondered if there was some kind of negative influence in the house preventing her son from maintaining his sobriety. She also said they could hear a choir singing church music, which was interesting because their home had at one time been a church.
On the drive over, I was full of questions for my mom. What were we looking for? Did Carol really think she might have a ghost? What did a ghost look like? What were we going to do if we found one? I thought we should probably turn around and go home. Finding ghosts was not something I wanted to do.
When we pulled up to Carol’s house, I imagined seeing scary things in all the windows. I was sure the ghosts were all watching me, ready to pounce on me as soon as I walked in the door. As usual, Mom was pretty calm, which always helped me feel more grounded. We kidded around with Carol for a while, trying to lighten things up. Looking back, we were probably just stalling; I don’t think any of us really wanted to go to the attic and deal with whatever was there. The analytical part of me thought that it was probably just noisy pipes and there was nothing to make a fuss about.
Our chitchat ended, and it was time to see what was up in the attic. Slowly we made our way up the stairs. I’m sure I had one eye open and the other one closed as we reached the top of the staircase. I had myself scared silly.
At first glance everything seemed normal. The usual boxes and stored furniture were piled here and there. Then, slowly, images began coming into focus. At first all I saw was a very faint image of a family of four standing across the room from us. It was quite strange to look at this almost invisible family. They looked so strained and old, so frightened. My rational mind immediately tried to explain it all away. I told myself I was making it up, that ghosts weren’t people. Ghosts didn’t look like that.
From THE LITTLE BOOK OF TRUE GHOST STORIES by Echo Bodine.  Copyright © 2011 by Echo Bodine. Hampton Roads Publishing Company, Inc.