I think I do but until one of them taps me on the shoulder and says hello I can't say for sure. Over the years I've gone out of my way to put myself in the path of random ghosts but so far to no avail. Haunted inns, ghost walks up in Maine, hanging around old houses that are supposedly riddled with ectoplasmic activity. You name it, I tried it without so much as a cold chill or a tiny whisper in my ear.
I open myself up to the possibility. I clear my mind. (Not that hard to do . . . ) I try to project the image of a congenial hostess, eager to show the spirits that, horror movies notwithstanding, we really can all get along just fine. But nothing happens. Nobody appears. No wraithlike woman in flowing white garments. No angry guy with a machete. Just me and my belief that sooner or later somebody from the other world is going to take pity on me and drop by to say hello.
Now before you think I'm totally crazy, let me give you a little background information: my mother was psychic. Not foretell-the-end-of-the-world psychic or 1-888-I'LL-MAKE-MONEY-OFF-THIS psychic. Just the everyday, scare-the-pants-off-her-daughter kind. She knew things she shouldn't have known, saw things nobody could have seen, predicted family deaths that were so random and unexpected as to be downright shocking. Maybe because I grew up with it, I never gave it much thought but lately I've been thinking a lot about something that happened to her and to her father before her not long before they died.
My grandfather lived 100 years, the last eight of them blind. About ten days before he died, he told us that a woman had come by the hospital to visit him. A plump, happy woman in a bright blue dress who talked with him, and laughed, and had a dimple in her right cheek. She said she'd be with him through it all. Which was just great except Grandpa shouldn't have been able to see that bright blue dress or that dimple. My grandfather was sharp right up until the end and when we asked, "How is that possible?" he shrugged and replied, "I don't know, but it happened." And, to be honest, I believe it did.
Three years later my mother dreamed that a big, round woman in a bright blue dress came into the bedroom she shared with my father, sat down in the rocking chair near the window, and started to knit. She had a sweet face, a happy laugh, and a dimple in her right cheek. The dream didn't unnerve me until my mother told me about the time her dead paternal grandmother came to visit her. She wore a bright blue dress and (you guessed it) liked to knit.
None of which is all that scary except for the fact that my mother died three months after that second visit, less than forty-five days after a cancer diagnosis we never saw coming.
Ghostly visits? Precognitive dreams? I don't have any answers. I wish I did. All I can say is beware knitters in blue dresses.
Have you ever seen a ghost? Do you believe they're out there? I'd love to know.
Barbara Bretton
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