by Gary Jansen
“Oh, you hit them!” she exclaimed.
“Hit them?”
“Oh, you must have walked right up on them. The stick usually extinguishes when you find out where they are hiding. Didn’t you read my book?”
“Yes, of course.” But I didn’t remember that part.
“At the end of the book I talked about the smudging and what might happen if you run into an earthbound spirit. I think maybe you ran into the man’s spirit because he’s not there right now.”
“You mean he left the house? For good?”
“Well, I don’t know. I don’t think so. I’m just not picking up on him now. You know they come and they go sometimes. We just want to make sure that when they go, they really go, if you know what I mean.” Mary Ann then asked me, “Are you upstairs on the second floor in the back of the house?”
“Yes,” I had said. How the heck did she know that?
“Oh, that’s a strange room.”
“Huh?”
“It has four doorways, doesn’t it?”
“How could you possibly know that? Yes, it has four doors. One for the closet, one for the back stairs that lead to the kitchen, one to the hallway, and one into my son Eddie’s room.”
“Oh, it’s a gift, honey,” she laughed. “And you’re sitting on a couch, right?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, interesting,” she said, her voice trailing long at the end of the word.
“Okay, you scare me, Mary Ann, when you talk like that.”
“I’m sorry, honey. It’s just that man is back and the woman is around, too, and they are standing in the doorway that leads to your son’s room.”
“What?”
“Yep, they’re standing right there.”
“Why?”
“Well, they’re a bit weak from the smudging. You know they don’t like that sort of thing.”
“So what, what do they want?”
“I don’t know, they are just standing there.”
“I know you said not to talk to them, but can I talk to them?”
“Well, you can if you want to.”
“You’ll interpret?”
“I’ll try, honey.”
“So what do I do, do I ask questions and then you’ll be able to hear them?”
“If they answer, I will. The man is a still a bit upset with you but not as much as he was when you first called. The woman isn’t upset at all. She just looks tired.”
“So, wait, Mary Ann, I think I know his name.”
“He says it’s Peter.”
I was flabbergasted. I told Mary Ann how my friend did a Google search and she found someone fitting the description of the guy. Merrick wasn’t his name, it was the town he was from.
I felt the wave of electricity flow through me again, and Mary Ann replied, “He just left.”
“Is he okay?”
“He’s upset. I think he’s getting ready to cross over. The lady kind of likes you, though. She’s been around you for a very long time.”
“Well, what’s her name?”
“She’s not saying. Wait, you said you were sitting on a couch, right?”
“Yes.”
“There should be a box next to your couch. A cardboard box. What’s in it?”
“Seriously, how do you do that? I have one of those Staples storage boxes on the side of the couch.”
“She’s playing charades. She’s having fun with you.”
“Well, it’s nice to know she likes to play games.”
“Hmmmm, she keeps pointing to the box. What’s inside the box?”
“Nothing. It’s empty.”
“Are you sure?”
I picked it up and turned it over. “Yep, nothing in it. Not even dust. Did I tell you what a clean house my wife keeps?”
“I’m sure she does.” I could hear Mary Ann thinking. Slowly and softly, she repeated “box” over and over again. “Box, box, box. Wait! Her name is Box.”
“Her name is Box? Like jack-in-the-box, Box?”
“Yes, Box.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, she’s nodding. It’s Box!”
“I’ve never heard anyone with the name Box before. Is it her first name or her last name?”
“Last name.”
“What’s her first name?”
“She’s smiling. She’s enjoying this.”
“Can she just tell me?”
“Nope. She wants you to find out.”
“And how am I supposed to do that?”
“Keep playing, I guess. Oh, she’s pointing to your couch now.”
“So her name is Couch Box? She sounds like one of those hippies who used to live in this house. I thought you said she died around the turn of the century.”
“No, her name isn’t Couch. Wait, she wants you to guess a color. That’s why she’s pointing to the couch.”
“Blue.”
“Nope, that’s not it.”
“Yes, it is. It’s a blue couch.”
“She wants you to name another color.”
“Another one? Really? I don’t know, green?”
“Yes! Green. That’s it. She’s saying Green is it.”
“So her name is Green Box?”
“No, no, no. Green is something else. Green is the place she’s buried. She wants you to know where she’s buried. It’s someplace green.”
“A cemetery.”
“No. I mean, yes, a cemetery but one that has ‘green’ in its name.”
“I don’t know,” I said. I tried to think. I was pretty familiar with most cemeteries on Long Island and Queens. My mom was the daughter of a grave digger, after all, and her idea of a good time was taking us to visit cemeteries on weekends. Sometimes we’d picnic there, but mostly, it was just afternoons spent wandering around the grounds looking for the spookiest tombstone we could find.
“Greenlawn?” I asked.
“No, that’s not it?”
“Pinelawn? Pine is green.”
“No, it’s not Pinelawn.”
“Wait, is she even buried around here?”
“She’s saying yes. She’s saying she didn’t live around here. She lived some towns away from you, but she’s buried not far from your house.”
“I don’t know, Mary Ann. I’m pretty sure there aren’t any cemeteries around here with ‘green’ in the name except Greenlawn and I’m not even sure if it’s on Long Island.”
“No, she’s pretty adamant. ‘Green’ is definitely in the name.”
“I just don’t know.”
“Field,” Mary Ann said.
“Field green?”
“No, a green field.”
“Wait. Is she not buried in a cemetery? Was she murdered? Is she in some green field somewhere?”
“A green field, a green field,” Mary Ann kept repeating to herself. “Wait,” she had called out. “Greenfield is the name of the cemetery.”
“Greenfield?”
“Yes, Greenfield.”
“Are you sure? And it’s around here?”
“That’s what she’s saying.”
“I don’t know, Mary Ann. I’ve lived around here most of my life and my grandfather was a grave digger and I never, ever heard of Greenfield Cemetery.”
“Well, she’s saying it exists and it’s close to your house.”
“What else is she saying?”
“I don’t know, she just left.”
Mary Ann and I talked for a few minutes about what the next steps were. Smudge one more time in the next couple of days and then call her back for further instructions.
I went downstairs and walked into the toy room and turned on the computer. I waited a moment for it to boot and wondered where the ghosts had gone. Could they just teleport to another place in the blink of an eye? Or did they walk through the door and go outside for fresh air? Where does a ghost go, anyway, when it’s not haunting a house?
I did a Google search for Greenfield Cemetery and New York, convinced that
there would be no match.
“Oh my God,” I said out loud. There it was—Greenfield Cemetery. I clicked on the link and it was only five miles away from my house.
“Grace,” I called out, “you’re not going to believe this.”
Chapter 12
Greenfield Cemetery is located on Nassau Road in Uniondale, New York, only seven miles from Curtiss Field, the runway where Charles Lindbergh began his legendary first solo transatlantic flight on May 20, 1927. At the time, people thought Lindbergh possessed superhuman strength and will-power to endure the thirty-seven-hour flight alone in the darkness and the frigid cold. Yet, his time in the plane may not have been as solitary as many believed. It would be twenty-five years before he told of the spirits that helped him along the way in his book The Spirit of St. Louis:
These phantoms speak with human voices—friendly, vapor-like shapes, without substance, able to vanish or appear at will, to pass in and out through the walls of the fuselage as though no walls were there. Now, many are crowded behind me. Now, only a few remain. First one and then another presses forward to my shoulder to speak above the engine’s noise, and then draws back among the group behind. At times, voices come out of the air itself, clear yet far away, traveling through distances that can’t be measured by the scale of human miles, familiar voices, conversing and advising on my flight, discussing problems of my navigation, reassuring me, giving me messages of importance unattainable in ordinary life.
Curtiss Field is now home to the Roosevelt Field shopping mall. Nearby Uniondale is a middle-class neighborhood, made up primarily of African-American and Latino families. The cemetery is on the south side of the town and runs the length of several blocks. As I turned into the driveway I could see statues of saints and angels and wondered if Lindbergh’s phantoms looked anything like these.
After I told Grace last night about my conversation with Mary Ann, I was feeling a lot like Freddie Jones from Scooby-Doo . Eventually I convinced her to be my Daphne and come with me on an investigation.
“What do we do with the kids?”
“Bring them along.”
And just as my family did to me, I did to my family, a weekend outing to a local cemetery.
I pulled into the parking lot next to the administrative building. Grace said she wanted to wait outside with the boys, and I left the car and walked to the office.
Inside, the place was decorated in old wood paneling from the 1960s and ’70s and a faded industrial rug. The place was clean and quiet and a man with white hair and a white beard asked if he could help me.
“Yes, I’m trying to find some information about someone buried here. Do you have any Boxes buried here?” Before I finished my sentence I knew what I had said.
“Oh, we have plenty of boxes,” the man said, rolling his eyes. A laugh broke out from the corner of the office, where a woman in glasses was typing at the computer.
“That’s good, really. No, I mean, do you have anyone named Box here. Last name Box. It’s an unusual name and I never ever heard anyone with a name like that.”
“Oh, there are a lot of Boxes buried here,” the woman in the corner called out. She was in her late forties, with long, straight blond hair, small eyes, and glasses. “It used to be a popular name.”
The man pulled out a pencil and a piece of paper and asked, “Okay, so when did he die?”
“It’s a she.”
“When did she die,” the man said, rolling his eyes.
“I don’t know. Turn of the century, maybe.”
“What, like 2000?”
“No, no. Sorry. Like 1900. Sometime around there.”
He walked over to a floor-to-ceiling revolving file cabinet. He pressed a button and a huge medieval-looking contraption started to spin like a Ferris wheel and then stopped. I wondered if they had a Cold War bomb shelter in another room.
“First name?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know the first name?” He put his hand on his hip and cocked his head. If he had been packing heat, I’m sure he would have said, “Reach for the sky, smart-ass.” Instead, he asked, “What’s going on here?”
I didn’t know what he meant by that. Did he think I was part of some satanic cult or looking for a name to create a phony American Express card?
Shaking my head, I said, “Look, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you. Can you just tell me if there have been any women named Box buried here in the late 1800s, early 1900s?”
He started riffling through index cards, stopping at times to peer at a name and a date. After a minute or two, he looked up and said, “So you want a woman, right?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“All right then you don’t want this one, I just came across a little girl, a one-year-old named Clara Box. Died on March 7, 1927.”
Gooseflesh covered my body and I felt for a brief moment like I was going to pass out. “Come again?” I said.
“Clara Box. One year old. Died on March 7, 1927.” And he put the card back in the file.
“Wait. Can you put that one aside?”
“Why? You said you were looking for a woman.”
“Well, yeah, but, let’s just put that one aside and we’ll come back to it,” I said to him and asked him to keep looking.
I felt like I was under a spell. Another minute passed. I felt my palms starting to sweat and I looked around the room feeling nervous and anxious. Is this all some crazy coincidence or is there something else going on? Is this little girl somehow related to the woman who passed away?
Then I heard words that brought me back to earth. “I think I found what you’re looking for. Here it is. Hannah Box. Died 1899.”
THE MAN WROTE DOWN all the information for me. I thanked him, and as I was about to leave, he asked me, “Can you tell me what you’re doing?” I walked back and began to tell him the story and realized by the time I was done, almost a half-hour had passed.
“That March 7 thing is pretty strange,” he said.
“I just don’t know what it means.”
Then the blond-haired woman, who had been listening to the story, called out from across the room, “You’re not going to believe this, but I got married on March 7. And you don’t want to know how that turned out.”
Chapter 13
Aguardian angel is “a celestial spirit assigned by God to watch over each individual during life,” John Hardon says. Its role is “both to guide and guard; to guide as a messenger of God’s will to our minds, and to guard as an instrument of God’s goodness in protecting us from evil.” But what happens when someone dies? Does that protector follow them into eternal life?
There was a statue of a guardian angel holding a flower in its right hand about thirty feet from the Box gravesite. With its wings outstretched, this androgynous stone sentinel overlooked Nassau Road. Its eyes were turned down so it couldn’t see Marco’s Auto Body Shop, the day care center next door, or the thousands of cars that drive down the busy street every day. Angels, being pure spirit, probably have no need for eyes, but standing below the statue you can feel its gaze, watching, observing, and praying for the living and the dead.
I stood there in the cemetery next to Grace. She was holding Charlie in her arms and I was holding Eddie’s hand. We walked over to where Hannah’s tombstone should have been, but only found a small obelisk engraved with the names of a number of Box family members. There was George and Maria Box, and there was Jennie, who had died in 1899. She seemed to be the first wife of George. No trace of a Hannah anywhere.
We drove to another part of the cemetery and spent a half-hour looking at old weathered tombstones in search of Clara Box, who had died on March 7, eighty years earlier. She, too, couldn’t be found. On our way home, I stopped back at the administrative office and the man behind the counter apologized for not telling me that the little girl never had a marker. He did reassure us that Hannah did, but by that point my kids were getting restless and Grace was tired, so we left and
I took them all to her mother’s.
I went back home, thinking about all the people at Greenfield Cemetery and how the dead are soon forgotten by subsequent generations. I would think about my grandfather often and visit him throughout the year at his resting place in Calverton National Cemetery, but I rarely, if ever, thought of his father or his father’s father. They weren’t even memories to me.
I smudged the house one more time, as Mary Ann suggested, and nothing strange happened. Later that afternoon I called her to give an update and to let her know that I had found a woman named Hannah Box but couldn’t find her tombstone.
“She’s right here now, honey,” Mary Ann said. “She says you’re right and wrong.”
“What does that mean?”
“She’s saying her name is Hannah Jane, but people always called her Jennie.”
MARY ANN AND I TALKED for a little while longer. I told her about the little girl, Clara Box, and the strange correlation with March 7, but she couldn’t offer an explanation. “I just see ghosts, honey. I’m not a numerologist.”
“Could we ask Hannah if they’re related?”
“We could, but she’s not here anymore.”
“You mean for good?”
“No, but I think she’s getting ready to go.”
“And the man?”
“He’s not there, either. They don’t like the smudging and I think he’s ready to go, too.”
The house seemed quieter than it had in a very long time and as we talked on the phone, I walked back and forth between the rooms upstairs. I knew that this was all drawing to a close and even though I was happy, there was a part of me that couldn’t help feeling melancholy about it all as well.