Holy Ghosts

by Gary Jansen

  There was more to his story. Supposedly, the man who killed himself still walks around the halls with the noose around his neck. He moans and knocks things down. That was why the owner wanted to sell the house. To get away from the guy with rope.

  “And you know what?” he had asked me.

  “What?”

  “They say he has another piece of rope in his hands looking to hang his next victim. And you know what else?”

  “What?”

  “He’s been looking for you.” And on the very last word, he reached out, hollered, and grabbed me by the neck.

  I remember screaming. His hand was pinching my skin and I wasn’t able to breathe. I pushed him off, called him an asshole, and ran. I could hear him laughing as I took off. I didn’t want him to know it—I’m a bit ashamed to admit it even now—but he almost made me pee my pants. I held it in, though. When you’re seven years old, one of the last things you want to do in school is wet yourself. I, for one, never wanted to be known as Gary “Piss His Pants” Jansen.

  His story rattled me. All day long I waited for dismissal, my leg bouncing up and down in my gray uniform pants, just so I could go home and tell my mom about the incident at school and ask her if ghosts were real and if they could kill you.

  I was kind of an innocent and credulous kid at the time and I was still getting used to being in school. My mom had never sent me to kindergarten, opting instead to keep me home during that oh-so-important first year of primary education. Even though my mom worked most days, she hadn’t been ready to give up her firstborn son to people (teachers) she didn’t know, so my sisters and I would hang out in my grandparents’ house. Trust, when it came to people outside of the family, was in very short supply.

  But staying home was fine by me. Like most kids, I didn’t want to go to school anyway. I much preferred watching The Young and the Restless with my grandmother and getting into bits of juvenile tomfoolery with my younger sisters (which always seemed to involve kitty litter, brown paper bags, and Barbie dolls). So, instead of sitting in a boring classroom, learning about Jesus, reciting my ABCs, learning how to cut with safety scissors, and how not to eat paste and not jam sharpened pencils in my ears, I learned how to read and write—and I learned about life—from watching Sesame Street and The Electric Company in the mornings, soap operas during lunch (after The Young and the Restless aired at 12:30 p.m. came Guiding Light), The Magic Garden, a half-hour educational show that took place around a large tree and featured hippie chicks Carole and Paula and their orangey-pink giant squirrel, Sherlock, at 2:30 and then Casper the Friendly Ghost at three o’clock every weekday.

  Television. My friend, my classroom.

  Of all the shows at the time, Casper the Friendly Ghost had the greatest impact on me. It still makes my heart race. Why? Did it scare me, you ask? Au contraire, mon frère; I adored that show. Casper was a delightful cartoon about a cute little ghost who was always trying to do the right thing, even though his uncles, the Ghostly Trio, tried their damnedest to wreck the poor dead kid’s quest to make friends. To this day it brings back memories of sitting in my grandfather’s musty old La-Z-Boy chair, drinking RC Cola, eating pretzels and potato chips. Watching with me would be my purple-haired grandmother (she dyed her hair every month and, for reasons unknown to me, her attempts at staying brunette always ended up with her looking like an eggplant) or, sometimes, my mom, if she was home in time from work.

  That show resonated for me in a way that no other show did at the time. Maybe it was because I was a lonely little kid in search of friends, despite the fact that I loved being home. Maybe I just liked the idea that ghosts could be friendly little cherubs with cute laughs and transparent hearts of gold. And that they couldn’t hurt you.

  Whatever the reason, that show was my first introduction to ghosts and to the idea that there could be an unseen world in our midst.

  WHEN WE WERE DISMISSED at 2:40, I raced to my grandmother’s house right across the street from the school, switched on The Magic Garden, and waited for my mom to arrive from work and take my sisters, Julie and Suzie, who were four and two years old at the time, home. We lived nearby, just a short walk across the school parking lot. I went back and forth between watching Paula and Carole reenacting the story Caps for Sale on TV to glancing at the wooden cuckoo clock that never cuckooed above the living room couch. Minutes seemed to last for hours as I kept thinking of the man with the snapped neck walking around that old house calling my name. While I was pretty sure that my schoolmate was full of shit, I still had my doubts.

  I kept thinking back to the day my family and I had been there. Had the ghost been there as well, hiding in a dark corner, waiting for me, ready to throw the noose over my head and hang me from a doorway?

  Eventually my mom arrived, harried and rushing to get us home so she could cook dinner for my dad. As we were walking to our house, I told her what the kid had said.

  “Don’t listen to him,” she said. “I didn’t feel anything when we were there.” This made me feel much better, so I asked, “Are there such things as ghosts?”

  She didn’t answer. I asked again and all she said was, “Let’s get going. Your father will be home soon.” This was not the first time I had asked her this question. I had done so pretty much from the time we’d moved from my grandmother’s into our own house across the way. Why? Because our new residence was always making noise.

  Built in 1904, the old Colonial was prone to drafts and creaky floors. The rooms were usually cold. These things were true for as long as I lived there. We moved in in 1976. I was six years old at the time and had no idea that the place had a notorious reputation. It was known as a hippie commune, a place where local kids in tie-dye and bell-bottoms came to party and do drugs on a regular basis. The previous owners had rented the house to their son, a college student, and there was a sort of “Don’t ask, don’t tell” agreement between them. Parties occurred frequently, and many times my grandmother would see police lights flashing outside her window at all hours of the night.

  My mom and dad had married in 1968 and had been living with my mother’s parents for nearly eight years, and by 1976 they were ready to move. Earlier that year, my mom was coming home from work when she found a piece of crumpled newspaper in the backyard. She opened it and circled in red was the classified listing for the house across the parking lot. She saw this as a sign from God and she soon convinced my father to go and have a look.

  The house was a mess. The rooms, many of them with garbage and stained mattresses on the floor, were painted fluorescent orange and pink and red. There were flower and star decals stuck to the walls. The place smelled terrible and in the front room of the house was a hundred-gallon aquarium tank that, my parents had been told, housed a fifteen-foot boa constrictor. My father, an upholsterer, was a working-class Joe and a big anti-hippie and would sometimes walk by the house at night and see “college boys” sitting on the lawn, smoking and playing guitar while the giant snake rested calmly on the laps of their girlfriends.

  My dad hated the place. My mom, however, saw past the disaster inside, past the crumbling plaster and loose flooring. She saw a place she could make a home. Eventually, she was able to convince my dad that the house was a good idea. My father wasn’t too excited to be living next door to his in-laws, especially after having lived so many years in their house, but a deal with the owners was eventually struck. My parents would rent the house for at least one year with an option to buy at a later date. My mom was over the moon and, though my two sisters and I were spooked about the inside, we were ecstatic about the huge backyard. There was ample space to play and three giant-size elm trees, so, for us, it wasn’t just a private park—it was our very own forest.

  My parents spent months cleaning the place, throwing out old furniture, broken bongs, and moldy magazines. Though I wouldn’t learn this until years later, my mom also found a box filled with tarot cards, a Ouija board, and strange books that creeped her out and were quickly disca
rded. They spent their nights painting the kitchen and bedrooms, laying carpeting and nailing dark wood paneling to the living room and dining room walls. (That was the style back then, but really, what were they thinking?) By the time we officially moved in, my parents had transformed the old place into a rather cozy little home for a young family.

  But the house was always cold and, like Rice Krispies, would snap, crackle, and pop on a daily basis. At night you would hear what sounded like tapping behind some of the walls. We were told not to worry, that it was just the plumbing. At other times we would hear creaking on the hallway stairs as if someone were walking up and down. Again, we were told not to fret, that the wood was just expanding and contracting because of problems with the heating system.

  My dad had a practical explanation for everything. Like Grace’s father, he was a jack-of-all-trades and the master of the Rube Goldberg repair. He could fix anything and prided himself on mending cracked car mufflers with a tin can and a wire coat hanger, and leaky water pipes with Silly Putty and rubber bands. My parents eventually bought the house. I think my dad had come to see it as one giant challenge to his wits and creativity. And though he had many successes, including installing new sinks, new toilets, and new kitchen cabinets, he never seemed to have much luck with the damn heat. This went on for years. Every fall as I got older, he and I would bleed the cast-iron radiators that sat like giant accordions in the corners of each room. For a couple of weeks, the house would feel warm and comfortable. But as soon as the days and nights turned really cold in December, usually right before Christmas, the furnace would inevitably break down. On any given morning, you could find my mom and my sisters and me huddled around an open oven trying to stay warm, with my father cursing away in the basement.

  On one occasion, my mother had put water up for tea. I was warming my back while she was in the other room getting my sisters ready for school. I must have moved too close to the lit burner because my undershirt caught fire, the flames riding up my back. I had no idea anything was wrong until I saw my mother run in from the other room, her arms flailing. She knocked me to the ground and started smacking my back with her hands. I tried pushing her off me but she was too strong. I smelled something like burning paper and yelled out. She yelled too and I still wasn’t sure what was going on. When it was all over, my charred shirt fell off around me. Its entire back had been fried. I was fine and so was my mother. She told me the flames had reached to the ceiling and when we looked up there was a black mark above where I had been standing. Not one part of me was burned, not my neck, not my hair. My mother called it a miracle and when I thanked her for what she had done, she told me to thank the angels who had protected me.

  After that, the stove, as a means for heat, was off-limits.

  FOR A SHORT TIME, the tapping behind the walls went away, but new noises seemed to take its place. On a regular basis we’d hear what sounded like footsteps walking across the attic when no one was there. Occasionally, a loud bang would ring through the house for no apparent reason, as if a small army had slammed into one of the rooms. The noise never sounded like it was coming from outside, always inside. And the staircase would continue to creak throughout the night. “It’s an old house,” my father would tell us. “It’s going to make noise.” Then with a touch of disgust in his voice he would add, “Plus, you got all that going on out there.” All that referred to the daily traffic that was then, and still is, a part of life in our little section of town.

  Businesses have come and gone, and the façades of store-fronts have changed repeatedly over the years; even the green wooden “Monster” fence at Hickey Field, where I hit my first and only home run as a Little Leaguer, has been replaced with cold impersonal chain link, and most of the kids I played with are all grown up and living lives in new places far away from here. Still, Rockville Centre hasn’t changed much in the last thirty years. A suburb on the south shore of Long Island, twenty miles east of Manhattan, the town is a mostly quiet, mostly picturesque, family-friendly neighborhood with big houses, tree-lined streets, and manicured lawns. Our house, however, resides in a commercially zoned area of the village, where grease pits, delis, bars, and a variety of small businesses—from barbershops to printers to a locksmith to a hobby store that still sells model airplanes—are part of the local landscape. On weekends and during summer vacation, the area is a magnet for teenagers with limited imagination and not much to do. You don’t find much graffiti in Rockville Centre, except near us.

  Our block was also what some people called an “artery to Catholic town.” Across the street from our house sat St. Agnes Elementary School, where my sisters and I attended class for eight years. Next to that was the family-owned Macken Mortuary, the place for Catholics to be laid out when they kicked the bucket. Adjacent to the funeral home was St. Agnes High School, separated by an asphalt walkway from the grand cathedral, which became the seat of the Catholic diocese of Long Island in 1957, seven years after the train crash a few blocks away.

  If you lived on the east side of town and had to get to one of those places, you most certainly used our block to get there. It was not uncommon to hear commotion outside: students making noise during the day, churchgoers gossiping on weekends, drunks moaning and throwing up near the telephone poles, or the sounds of strange voices arguing in the middle of the night. Nor was it uncommon to catch kids smoking pot or a couple screwing in a car.

  During the day my father labored in the workshop at Tri-Art Breakfast Nooks, a kitchen furniture store on Sunrise Highway, less than a mile from home. In the evenings he would deliver the chairs and tables he created and assembled all year round to customers on Long Island and in the five boroughs. He would sometimes work as late as nine o’clock making deliveries, and when he would lose daylight he would shine a heavy-duty spotlight on customers’ homes in order to locate the exact address.

  “Rich people always have the tiniest numbers and they almost never turn on their outside lights,” he would complain. “How the hell am I supposed to deliver this shit if I don’t know which house is theirs?” Little did I know at the time that my father’s rants were my first foray into the world of American class differences.

  When I was young I would occasionally accompany him in the evenings. When we’d arrive home after these jaunts, there would often be unsuspecting lovers tucked away in sweaty little Subarus and cramped Volkswagen bugs, hidden in the shadows of the parking lot near our house. My father would pull out the old spotlight, lean over the fence, and shine it on the couple. When I say spotlight, let me be more specific: it was 10,000 candlepower. In fact, he’d always warned me never to beam it into anyone’s eyes, though I did it to myself on numerous occasions. Anyway, thanks to Dad, I got to see my first naked ass.

  “What are you doing?” he’d half yell, half laugh to them. Then we would see sudden movements behind the windshield. Seconds later, the headlights would flick on and the humiliated couple, blue-balled and half dressed, would peel out of the lot, never to be seen again. My father, while quite the comedian, wasn’t what you would call a romantic.

  My mother, on the other hand, was a romantic—the polar opposite of my dad. The only thing that they seemed to have in common was their youth. They were married when they were sixteen and seventeen, respectively. He was Lutheran, pragmatic, and a realist. She was Catholic, idealistic, and a dreamer. Mom was a bit of a suburban mystic. She saw and knew things that other people didn’t. As a little girl she had a vision of Jesus standing in a doorway moments before she learned of the death of her beloved grandfather. “He looked kind,” she said. She took that vision as a sign that she should give her life to God. Two nights later she had another vision, but this time it wasn’t of Jesus. She was stirred from sleep by the feel of someone sitting on her bed. When she opened her eyes, her grandfather was there smiling at her. She stared at him for a few moments and then reached out to touch him and he faded away.

  Visions weren’t anything new in her family. Her mother, Julia M
cGreevy Powell, who worked for more than twenty years as a butcher in various A&P supermarkets on Long Island, had visions of Jesus on five separate occasions throughout her life. Like my mother, she saw these occurrences as signs that she was being called to live her life in a convent. My grandmother, a feisty Brooklyn native who loved to tell stories about Coney Island and Ebbets Field and reminded everyone, practically on a daily basis, that she thought Frank Sinatra was a snake, would have none of that. She married, some would say, just for the sake of getting married. Her husband, my grandfather, had served under Pierre Salinger in the United States Navy during World War II and tumbled from job to job until finally settling in as a grave digger, where the work was relatively quiet and solitary. My grandmother liked to talk. My grandfather didn’t and they never really got along. Still, they had three children together and the unhappiness that followed was never blamed on my grandmother’s decision to pick an incompatible spouse, but on her refusal to become a nun. “God,” she would say, “ain’t nothing but hard luck.”

  My mother never believed that. She loved God and would pray every day, sometimes seated in empty churches, staring at the stained glass and the crucifix that always hung above the altar. For a while she dreamed of becoming a nun, of devoting her life to God, whom she loved more than anyone in her life. Yet when she was fifteen she met the young man who would become my father (he was sixteen) and a year later the two of them were married before either was old enough to vote. Both sets of parents were against the decision at first. But while my father’s side grew colder and colder, my mother’s parents quickly learned to embrace the tall, wiry boy, eventually taking him into their tiny, barnlike house. Their wedding ceremony was small. Only my mother’s parents showed up. But it was, as my mother said throughout the years, all part of God’s plan. What that plan was (and she would allude to it many times while I was growing up), she never really told me. I was born a year later and my sister a year and a half after that. Three more sisters followed over the next ten years.