Spooky Little Girl

It's that time of year - I knew it when I heard the ghost tour outside my house through the open window on Saturday night. I've never been on the tour, but I could tell the guests were getting the extended All-Hallows version of whatever haunted tale accompanies my house.

And turning on the TV, there's the deluge of scary movie marathons and ghost documentaries and VH1's new show that sends five B-listers on a similar journey as the old MTV show Fear. For a girl like me, this time of year is scary. Because at every turn there's something to scare me out of my wits.

I scare easily. I admit it. I find being scared both delicious and agonizing, and my imagination knows no bounds when it comes to whipping me into a frenzied terror. I slept with my brother for almost a year when I was nine after watching an Unsolved Mysteries episode on aliens. In fourth grade, Flowers in the Attic scared me so badly, I threw up six or seven times from sheer anxiety. My brother was forbidden to let me watch a full movie trailer for Nightmare on Elm Street because my terror of Freddy Krueger had me unnerved day and night.

As I got older, I learned to tolerate the scary movies - even like them. At a high school sleepover, we watched The Changling, which is to this day, the scariest movie I've ever seen. But it was a delicious, hilarious kind of scared with half a dozen girls laughing and screaming. And then when I went to college, I had my own set of paranormal expereinces between the old dorm where I lived and the old house where I worked.

I guess every college comes with its set of stories. Ours involved a girl who hung herself in an upper floor study room - students swore they could hear her feet scuffling about in the closet. Or the hall in one of the dorms that supposedly had a pentagram on the wall that appeared through innumerable coats of paint. A tall shadowy figure was said to lurk in same-said dorm's parking lot. A pair of lovers biking up the mountain road were supposedly struck and killed one foggy night. Legend says if you pull up on the bridge where they were killed, turn off the engine and the lights and honk three times, you can see a ghastly face in your rearview mirror. The town itself boasted a road where you could supposedly take seven people, leave them each at a bridge, and on the way back, you would only encounter six friends, one lost in some alternate time warp until you retraced your initial route.

I always believed in ghosts until then in the sense that I feared them. But it wasn't until college that I had real experiences - not a one involving the standard fare. My freshman year, I had my first strange experience in an all women's dorm. I woke up several nights in a row hearing heavy footsteps above me - even though the attic above me was only accessible by a key held by one student in the building. Until one night, I sat in my room, up late studying, my roommate out and about. And I heard the footsteps and then the indescribable feeling - and you doubters will call it an improbable feeling - that I was not alone. "Please go away," I whispered. And then it did - whether I was sending away my own feeling or a ghost.

The second dorm I lived in came with a forceful banging under the floor. Furnace? Radiator? Hot water heater? Likely. But one night, I stood brushing my teeth, trying to ignore the persistent banging. Until I not only heard it, I felt it. Directly under me. The floor feeling like something was going to come up through - so insistently that I jumped back out of the bathroom.

At the founder's house, I gave tours, starting with the second semester of my freshman year. The origin of the house is unknown, only traced back into the early 1800s when the founder's family acquired it. Over the years, I experienced all sorts of strange feelings, unexplained noises, closing doors and eerie presences. I admit I never saw anything manifest. But at times, it was so palpable - that feeling of not being alone. A shift in the energy or temperature or pressure or smells.

We played hide-and-seek from time to time in the winter months. I once hid in a closet - the closet that housed the founder's old trunk with its travel decal from a ship that sailed shortly after Titanic. The musty smell of the closet somehow became heavier with each passing moment. I was so overcome with fear that I started to cry.

Once while vacuuming the mother's room - the room in which she died - I could tell I wasn't alone. Not only that, but I could tell whatever was with me was disturbed, angered by my presence. I dropped the vacuum and ran. Another student I knew who worked in the summer once lay on the bed in that room for a nap due to a headache. She came down later to thank a fellow worker for checking on her - which her coworker had never done.

I heard the sound of the upstairs doors closing like dominos, only to find them wide open upon inspection. One weekend when working by myself, I heard the front door open, stepped into the hall to see who had arrived, to see the door closing again as though someone had left from inside the house. Jenny Ray and I once sat on the second floor landing, the only people in the house, and listened to the unmistakable sound of tinkling crystal and clinking silverware as though the maid was setting the dining room table.

I arrived at work one day to relieve my friend Laura who had been working alone. She launched into how she was washing dishes, felt she was being watched and turned to see...and I interjected, "The little boy in red." She had never heard the story and was astonished that I could guess such a thing. A woman with a "sensitive" little girl told us one day that her daughter talked to the little boy upstairs.

Other students heard 1930s radio...heard footsteps...saw the doors open and shut. I was always uneasy when I was alone in the house. And never, ever went certain places by myself like the servants staircase that began just outside the kitchen and wound in tight, narrow flights up to the attic. Another off limits space - the attic was eerie and musty and fairly begged to be considered for a horror movie set.

In the house on Grace, I've felt scared a few times. Thunderstorms in this apartment can make the back of my neck prickle with fear. But I don't have a distinct sense of anything like I did at the house in college. Nonetheless, this time of year, I try to be careful about how much TV I watch - limit my intake of horror flicks and scary movie moment countdowns and Most Haunted and Ghostly Travels. Otherwise, I'd just be so paralyzed with fear I couldn't hardly breathe. And I've already got a black cat crossing my path at every turn, so I best not chance getting spooked.