by Gary Jansen
At some point, I realized I was dreaming. It had to be a dream. I just wanted to wake up and tried willing myself to snap out of it even as I felt myself being pressed deeper and deeper into the bed. I felt like I was being buried alive. I struggled and tried to move my hands but nothing. I could feel my torso contorting as I tried to lift myself up and felt like I was being wrapped up in a sheet. I freaked and called out to God to help me, and it was then that I woke up, and not just woke up, but woke up to the sound of my son’s toy racetrack car revving on the floor.
I lay there panting, petrified. There was no figure in the room, no shadow, just the almost metallic sound of a child’s plaything. I was sweating and thought for a moment that I was still dreaming. But this part wasn’t a dream. I listened to the whirling and wanted it to stop, but I was afraid to get out of the bed. In a few moments though, fear turned to frustration and impatience turned to anger and I yelled out, “Cut the shit.”
The toy stopped and I lay there in silence. After a few moments, I sat up in bed, looked around, and could still feel my heart pounding in my ears. In recent months, I had taken up reciting the Jesus Prayer, a simple seven-word mantra—Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me—that I would repeat throughout the day. It was a simple way of filling the seconds and minutes of daily life with God and I would repeat it, for example, when I was walking to work, stopped at a red light, or waiting on the checkout line at the supermarket as the cashiers changed shifts (which happens to me every single time). Instead of focusing on the impatience I might be feeling during those in-between times when I was moving from one place to another, I would shift my focus to the Divine. I had first heard about this prayer years ago when I was reading J. D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, but in the last few months I had been reading the original text it was drawn from, The Way of the Pilgrim, written by an anonymous nineteenth-century Russian monk.
I must have recited it a hundred times before I got out of bed, walked to the hallway, and peeked in on Grace and Eddie, who were sleeping soundly. I went to the bathroom, and as I turned around to leave, I thought I saw a shadow out of the corner of my eye and then the laundry basket, which was sitting up against the hamper, moved ever so slightly. I stood for a moment, looked around the room, and took a deep breath. I shook my head, and decided I needed to start using that prayer before I went to sleep every night. I turned the light off to the bathroom, walked back to the room, got into bed, and eventually fell asleep.
LES HALLES IS A RAMBUNCTIOUS, loud, and fast-paced French restaurant located on Park Avenue South, a couple blocks east of New York’s Madison Square Park. With its dark wood interior, porcelain white tablecloths, dim gas-lamp-like lighting, attractive maître d’s, no-nonsense waitstaff, and delicious onion soup (one of the best I’ve ever tasted), it is a culinary landmark in the legendary Flatiron District of the city, a famous restaurant made even more famous in recent years by bad-boy chef and author Anthony Bourdain. It is also one of my favorite places in the world.
In late summer 2007, I was at Les Halles having lunch with my friend Peggy, a publishing colleague and someone I’d known and trusted for some time. It had been months since I’d last seen her, and we had a lot to catch up on. We talked about work and gossiped about the publishing business, about who was doing what to whom and what the big books were for the fall. She had asked about married life and about my son. I told her Grace was pregnant but I didn’t mention the miscarriage, which we had pretty much kept to ourselves. Then, I don’t know why I brought it up, and I didn’t go into great detail at all, but I mentioned to her briefly the strange occurrences that were happening in my house—the feelings of being watched, the bad dreams, and the odd sensations I was experiencing. I still hadn’t told Grace about all this weirdness. Even though I would occasionally feel unsettled by some of the experiences, I was ultimately convinced that it was just my imagination playing tricks on me, that it was some form of cognitive dissonance where my brain was building bridges and connecting unrelated events, albeit sometimes in a very frightening way. “Nonsense linking sense,” I would tell myself. But it felt good to tell another person, and after my half-minute confession, Peggy’s eyes widened and she said, almost gleefully, “You have a ghost in your house.”
“No, I don’t,” I half replied, half laughed.
“You do, you do. Those are telltale signs of genuine ghost activity.”
Peggy and I had never talked like this before. Our conversations in the past had always been pleasant and interesting and ranged from politics to religion to great books we loved to read. But we never ventured into this type of territory. I shook my head and playfully told her I didn’t believe her, but my curiosity was piqued and I asked her how she was so certain.
She told me about an upcoming book that was publishing in the fall called When Ghosts Speak by Mary Ann Winkowski, who was the real-life inspiration for the TV drama Ghost Whisperer. Mary Ann could see and speak to ghosts or, as she called them, earthbound spirits, the souls of the departed that had, for one reason or another, not crossed over to the other side.
I listened to Peggy as she told me more about this woman and how Mary Ann could tell if you had a ghost in your house by just talking to you on the phone.
“Wait, she can do this over the phone?” I interrupted.
“Yes,” she said, “she comes to people’s houses to clean them of ghosts, but she lives in Cleveland and can do what she does over the phone for people out of state. I don’t know how she does it, but she does it and she’s amazingly accurate.”
“So she’s like a psychic?” I was mildly intrigued. Though I didn’t say this out loud, I had always wanted to talk to a psychic, more as an experiment than to see what my future was. Some years before, I had read a book on cold reading, a way of asking general questions that leads a person to think that you know more than you do, and I was curious to see if a psychic would use those techniques. But something freaked me out about them and while I would never pass judgment, I was trying really hard to be a good Catholic at the time, and as far as I knew psychics were taboo and off-limits.
“Don’t call her a psychic!” Peggy laughed. “She’s very particular about what she does. She talks to earthbound spirits and that’s it.”
Peggy, who had spoken to Mary Ann on the phone once before concerning the marketing for her book, called her the real deal and asked if I would be interested in talking to her. I said I would be, but after the words left my mouth I wished I could have taken them back. I don’t know why, but something just made me nervous about the whole thing. Peggy must have sensed my apprehension because she said, “Mary Ann is one of the nicest people I’ve ever talked to. You would never think she was someone who could speak to ghosts. I’ll get you her number and you should call her.” She told me Mary Ann had a waiting list, but I should leave her a message and as soon as she could she would get back to me.
Our food arrived and shortly thereafter the conversation switched back to the publishing industry. After lunch Peggy reassured me that she would get me Mary Ann’s number. I smiled but this time didn’t answer, and we hugged and said good-bye.
As I walked back to work, I went over Peggy’s words in my head. I started thinking about everything that had happened over the last few months and how uneasy I had been about all of it. Was it all just coincidences stacked upon coincidences? Was it stress? Could I really have a ghost in my house? And if I did, what did that mean? How could I get rid of it? I thought about my mom and some of the things she had said over the years about the ghost woman who lived in our house. I thought about the night the church light went out. I thought about the creaks and whispers and the times the doorbell would ring in the middle of the night when I was a kid and how no one was ever there and how it terrified me. Was it just pranks, or had something been trying to scare us or get our attention? I felt myself drawing connections between events that I was sure were not related in any way. Or were they? Grace had fallen down the stairs earlier in the year an
d felt like something had been behind her when she fell. Did she just slip or did something push her? I was constantly losing my keys and wallet—was I just being absentminded or had something hidden them? Lightbulbs were constantly going out, and the closet door downstairs in the dining room always seemed to be opened when we walked back into a room. Bad lamps and senior moments? All of a sudden, I wasn’t so sure.
As I neared my office building on Twenty-sixth Street, I caught hold of my mind and gave it a shake. Relax. It’s all in your imagination, I thought. And silly as it may seem, the Scooby-Doo catchphrases started running through my head: “There’re no such things as ghosts” and “There’s always a logical explanation for everything.”
Still, I felt like I wanted to go to church, to sit and pray and talk to God about all this, but there were no churches nearby, so when I got back to my office, I closed the door, made the sign of the cross, shut my eyes, and started to quietly pray.
THE CLOUD OF UNKNOWING is a fourteenth-century text written by an anonymous English Catholic mystic. In it, the author attempts to demonstrate how one can find God in the fog of any situation, whether it be something joyful or disturbing. One way he suggests doing this is to find a quiet place and choose a word, like hope or love and repeat it to yourself, allowing your body and mind to be drawn closer to God, who is ever present inside you. Essentially, it’s a mantra, like the Jesus Prayer, and the more you repeat it to yourself the closer you move toward an awareness of God. All prayer, essentially, is a chiropractic tool for the soul, a way of popping things into alignment.
I was feeling out of whack, so as I sat in my office I began to repeat the word answer over and over in my head. All I wanted was an answer from God. What was going on in my house? While I wasn’t convinced that it was anything supernatural, I still felt a certain uneasiness about it all. Maybe I was nervous about becoming a father again or I was overtired from getting up early every day to pray and do research. So I repeated the word over and over and over again, and within a few minutes I felt a great peace move over me. I hadn’t received any answer while I was praying, but as I found out over the last ten years, answers almost never come during prayer. For me, they always came afterward, and as I opened my door and resumed work, I was certain that the answer would eventually reveal itself.
For the rest of the afternoon, I answered e-mails, reviewed a couple of submissions, and wrote some copy, then went home. I was feeling better than I had after lunch and, though I still didn’t have my answer and I still wasn’t sure how I felt about the circus of thoughts that had gone through my head earlier in the day, I tried to forget about everything as best I could.
I didn’t hear from Peggy again until a couple of weeks later. She gave me the number. I wrote it down and put it in my wallet and, while I was still uncertain about what had been going on over the last few months, I was sure about one thing.
There was no way in hell I was going to make that phone call.
SHORTLY AFTER MY MEETING with Peggy, the electric surges over my body returned in full force and I began to see unexplained shadows out of the corners of my eyes on a regular basis. I tried to ignore these things as much as possible. My uncertainty had turned into annoyance, and instead of feeling fear I was finding it a bit comical. If I was in Eddie’s room with him or Grace or the two of them together, I felt nothing. If I was in there alone, then I felt like Yogi Bear covered in a huge glob of honey that would be attacked by a swarm of flies. At times I would stand outside the room and place one foot inside, as if I were dipping a toe into a cold stream, just to see if I would feel anything in my leg. I never did.
One night in late August, Grace and I were giving Eddie a bath. I ran into his room to get another washcloth and as I crossed over the threshold I expected something to happen. But nothing did. It was the first time in weeks that I didn’t feel the surge move up and down my spine. I actually stood there in the middle of the room for a few seconds waiting for it until Grace called out and asked what was taking me so long. I left the room, traded places with her, and started washing Eddie’s hair with the washcloth. I finished the bath, wrapped him in a towel, and carried him through the hallway to his room.
As we neared his door, Eddie started to squirm in my arms so much that I had to put him down. He slid from my hands and with wet feet he nearly slipped on the floor. I bent down to pick him up and he screamed that he didn’t want to go into his room. I couldn’t get a hold of him. He flopped around like a fish, then his body tightened. He arched his back and neck and he felt like he weighed a hundred pounds. I grabbed him by the arms and I could feel him slipping out of my hands. I was afraid I was going to drop him. I lowered him to the floor and yelled, “You’re going to hurt yourself!” He pushed me and repeated that he didn’t want to go into his room and he broke away from me and ran into Grace, wrapping himself around her legs as she walked out of our bedroom. She picked him up.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
I didn’t know how to answer. Eddie was shaking in her arms and I didn’t know if it was because he’d just come out of the bath or something else. I walked into his room and felt the electricity crawl all over me. I tried to shake it off as I walked across the room. I turned off the light, stood in the darkness for a moment, and looked around, half expecting something to jump out of the corner or grab my leg from under the bed. Nothing happened. I walked back across the room and closed the door. Grace was standing in the hallway hugging Eddie, who had wrapped himself around her like a blanket.
“Eddie is going to sleep with us tonight,” I said.
“Oh my God,” Grace said. There was fear in her face.
“What?”
“Is there a mouse in the room?”
“No, it’s not a mouse.”
“Is it a rat? I’ve been hearing strange things in the attic.”
“Nope, not a rat.”
“Then what is it?”
“Grace, there’s something we should talk about.”
Chapter 4
After we put Eddie to sleep in our room, Grace and I went downstairs and sat by the picture window. I looked out and could see the light on the church steeple and the iron cross above it. I told her everything that had been happening to me over the last few months: the strange sensations in Eddie’s room, the odd shadows, the frightening dreams, the toys coming to life in the middle of the night. I told her about my conversation with Peggy. I admitted it all sounded insane, that I was probably just drawing connections between totally unrelated incidents, but that it was strange nonetheless. And now with Eddie’s outburst . . .
She sat quietly and patiently as I rambled on, but as I continued talking I watched her face tighten and her eyes narrow. When I was done, we just sat there in silence. I thought, “Well, this is it, she’s thinks I’m crazy. She’s going to take Eddie and I’ll never see them again.”
Grace shook her head and looked me in the eyes. “Strange things have been happening to me, too.”
She went on to tell me how she had felt like she was being watched when she was home with Eddie during the day. Not by someone outside the house, but by someone inside the house. But there was never anybody there. She heard sounds on the stairs and others in the attic, but wrote it off as nothing. The house, she said, always made noise. It just happened to be louder than usual. And she had seen dark shadows out of the corners of her eyes too, but thought they were just floaters crossing her field of vision. Though, she had to admit, there was one incident that startled her a few weeks ago.
There is a small room adjacent to the kitchen with a washer and dryer and a door that leads to the backyard. It serves as a temporary dumping ground for anything that might need to be put away in the attic, in closets, or on shelves, kind of a purgatory for household items. It’s not uncommon to find stacks of books, sports equipment, or toys stacked in piles waiting to be returned to their proper home. Except for near the stairs, we had stopped using safety gates after Eddie turned three. Even though
we didn’t block the way, Eddie knew that the washroom was off-limits. Occasionally, however, he would peek in there and see something that stirred his interest, like a dirty sock or a box that needed to be recycled.
One afternoon, Grace was washing dishes in the kitchen while our son played with his toys in the living room. The TV set was on low, and at some point she heard Eddie move behind her. Turning, she saw him dart into the washroom. Annoyed, she turned off the sink and, with wet hands, went after him, afraid that he would get hurt. When she walked into the room, he wasn’t there. She looked around, walked back into the kitchen, and stepped into the living room. There was Eddie on the floor playing quietly with a dinosaur as if he had been there all day. She was sure she had seen something but wrote it off as just her eyes playing tricks on her.