I Know A Good Ghost Story

Once there were two girls that lived in a house. A pretty little townhouse on a lake. It had marigolds they'd planted near the front door, which opened to the house, into a stair landing, six stairs down to the living room and fourteen steps up to the wide hallway that led to their bedrooms. There was a rather ornate chandelier that hung over the doorway landing, with switches at the top and bottom.

Jen always laughed at Sam because at night Sam would turn on the stair light, walk upstairs, cross the wide hall and turn on her bedroom light before she'd cross back across the hall to turn off the stair light. Jen teased Sam that she was afraid of the dark. Sam hated to admit that her childhood fear, the one that hadn't bothered her in years, was rearing it's head again.

Sam hated to say that she didn't feel at all at ease in the house late at night, much as she loved it during the day. She and Jen loved the view from the living room, the small high fence yard between the garage and the front door where you could safetly sunbathe nude, the secret door behind the hall cupboard shelves that led to a tiny room where you couldn't even stand up straight. Little things like that door made Sam suspect that the townhouses were older than they appeared, and it was the oldness that somewho bothered her. It didn't feel old like your great grandmother's house kind of old, more like an old hotel Sam had briefly lived in, where the noises of people seeped in from every angle, like the house was utterly soaked in the presence of people.

Sam hated to say it because she suspected Jen, despite her bravado, knew what she meant, and it felt so silly. Plus Jen had been spending more and more time in her room, and Sam knew she was feeling depressed. Sam didn't want to introduce or reinforce morbid ideas she herself was fending off.

So while it was Sam that sometimes a cold chill of irrational fear on the stairs and felt more aware of what she could only describe as 'something that doesnt like me' upstairs, it was Jen who really broached the subject, two days after she took a nasty fall down the stairs. Jen confessed, in the subdued tone of someone expecting to be called crazy because they were calling themselves crazy, that she'd felt two hands flat on her back right before she fell. Hands that pushed.

Jen and Sam had always always described themselves as somewhere between apathetic and skeptical on the subject of ghosts and had decided that they weren't about to let their imaginations run away with them. They wrote their fear off as what can happen when two imaginative girls live alone, in a city far from home, in an older house with normal old creaks and groans. "If we look for something, we're bound to find it." Then they drank another bottle of wine and decided "for no particular reason" to sleep on the living room couches.

Jen later said, "I can't SEE her, but she's a woman." Sam didn't say anything. She didn't disagree, but she just couldn't admit that she felt aware of her as well.

A week later Sam was stayed up to watch the first half of Leno (no good guests on that night) and as she walked up the stairs, she chided herself for thinking the cold draft was anything but just that, a cold draft. As she got to the top, she looked across the hallway. If she put one hand on the stair light switch, and stretched her other hand out, there was only another four feet between her outstretched hand and her bedroom doorframe. "I'm not a child," she thought as she flicked off the stair light switch, and shared the dark that bathed the whole house. Keeping her arm out high and outstretched, knowing she had four goodsized steps before she hit the wall, with nothing in the hallway but her and a picture on the wall, she took one step, then started to take a second, when her hand touched hair. Long hair.

She recoiled but not before rolling a few strands between her fingers. She threw the light switch back on. Nothing. No one. Jen's creaky bedroom door was still shut. There was no way she'd misjudged the distance between the walls, and nothing about wall that could have felt like hair. Nothing was even remotely in her path, nothing fell down from the ceiling, no pets in the house to have jumped up. Her own hair was cut right below her ears, and it wasn't her unraveling sleeve as she was wearing a tank top.

Sam went to bed that night with the hall light and her own bedroom light still on.

Jen was retreating farther and farther into herself. Within a few weeks, Sam realized that Jen needed help, help she was refusing to get. She began lashing out at Sam, and her paranoid delusions showed how far her active, sane mind had fallen. Sam felt helpless and not feeling very sane herself, after her experience in the hallway. Besides confiding her concerns with Jen's family, Sam didn't know what to do. She decided to leave.

On the day she left, she stood in the doorway and paused for just a moment. She wanted to go back upstairs to where she knew Jen was sleeping. She knew Jen wasn't speaking to her, for some imagined injury, but she wanted to say goodbye. She wondered if Jen would be able to hear her, to see her, to accept her well wishes, but she knew it was hopeless.

There wasn't a breath of wind in the early fall morning, but suddenly the front door swung with force, pushing her roughly forward out of the house.

Sam got in her car and drove away, for three days without stopping. Jen's family had promised to watch out for her, but Sam never saw Jen again.








I have no idea what really happened in that house, but I know it's a true story.


I was Sam.