all my ghosts
sight unseen
Before I had ever seen a ghost for myself, I was a believer. As a teen, I used to watch ghost sighting videos on YouTube and read about people’s experiences with them. I looked up different theories about what ghosts could be as well as scientific explanations for supernatural experiences. There are so many ways to explain away the sight or feeling of a presence: fluctuations in the electromagnetic field around you, low frequency noise that you can feel but not hear, a trick of the light, a spot in your vision, or you just wanted to see something and so you did. So many things people will tell you that happened to you aside from something supernatural.
I want to know what explanations there are for ghost encounters from people who do believe. What are ghosts, how do they behave, are there different types, what do they think of us. Do they even think about us at all. I thought about them, but I only experienced disappointment in my ghost-seeking until my early twenties. I had been in a number of haunted places before that — places where people I knew had credible experiences, and places that had a long history of hauntings. A couple of them were family homes.
In the house I grew up in, my sister said she and her friend saw a headless figure walk through her room one night. She told me it came through the wall and walked straight across the room, then right out through the closed door. Even though I kept an eye out, stopping and waiting in the hallway some nights, I never witnessed anything there or anywhere else in the house.
My mom told me about experiences she and one of her sisters had in the house they grew up in: unexplainable voices, tugs on the bed sheets, and feelings of something in the room with them. She and my aunt had these same experiences separately from each other, which made them both believe even more. Whenever we went to stay with my grandparents there, I would stay awake late looking around me in the dark then close my eyes after a while and act like I wasn’t still listening intently, in case the ghosts wouldn’t come out while I was trying to look for them. I always fell asleep before seeing or hearing anything like I hoped.
One high school summer, I spent a week at a college for a writing workshop and learned the eerie, rural campus is famous for its hauntings. This girl and I went to a few of the hotspots one night and sat for a while, waiting and watching. We got impatient with the stillness and quiet we found in each of those spots though, so we snuck into an empty dorm building — not one of the haunted ones — to hook up instead.
The first actual encounter I had with something supernatural was in the two-bedroom townhouse I lived in when I first moved to the city I live in now. I’m not the one who noticed whatever it was though — my cat was. I was sitting on the couch in the living room one night with him on my lap when he perked up, looking up at the ceiling over towards the front door. I looked too but there wasn’t anything there. He leapt down and moved slowly across the room, his eyes on a blank section of ceiling. I watched as his gaze followed something that seemed to be floating towards me. He came back and climbed over me to get up on the arm of the couch, where he stood and swiped at the air with his paw a few times, trying to get something just out of reach. He stayed upright, staring intently at nothing as it moved around the room.
This happened many times over the course of a few months. He would suddenly wake up or come out from where he was hiding to track curiously something only he could see as it drifted around, for minutes at a time. The friends who I told said he probably just saw a bug or maybe there was some noise upstairs, but when one of my friends saw my cat following nothing around and standing on the table to paw at the empty air, she believed me when I said there was a spirit of some kind in my apartment. After I left for a week at the end of that year though, it didn’t happen again.
Another encounter happened years later, when I was walking through a cemetery with the roommate I had then. I saw a thick patch of floating haze appear a little ways ahead of us out of the corner of my eye. It was about five feet up in the air and two feet tall and wide. The thought that crossed my mind was That’s a ghost. When I blinked and turned to look directly, I saw as my roommate walked through where it had been and it dissipated. I stopped us with a “Whoa” and checked my glasses to see they were perfectly clean — there wasn’t just a smudge on the left side of either of the lenses. My roommate hadn’t seen anything but said she had just felt a random chill. It was a warm and windless October afternoon.
I just saw another ghost a few weeks ago outside of my apartment. I was walking out to my car in the morning, in a bit of a hurry because I was running late to work. I put my bag in the back seat then turned back towards the apartment building as I opened the driver-side door. I jumped because there was a figure in the side of my vision, standing about twenty feet away in a place I had just walked past. I turned and only saw an empty parking lot. I did a full circle and there was no one else in the lot with me and nothing else I could’ve been startled by. The figure seemed to have been between five and six feet tall, wearing something dark, and it was looking right at me before it disappeared. Its gaze felt neutral though, like I was being observed dispassionately in my morning rush. I told my roommate and my hot neighbor about the encounter and they’ve both been a little spooked being in and around the building since.
The only scary ghost encounter I’ve had was with the first one I actually saw for myself, in that haunted two-bedroom townhouse. I lived there with my partner at the time and we almost always slept in the bedroom that was mine. A few months into the second year of living there, I started having the feeling that I was being watched when I walked past their bedroom. That feeling had a malicious quality to it, like something hostile was watching me. I didn’t notice it every time I passed by, but it was often and it was worse at night. I didn’t like getting up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night because I had to walk past that pitch dark room. My partner didn’t feel anything but they didn’t like the possibility that their room was haunted. It was only a bad feeling though for months and months, and I could look back and attribute it to an intuitive message about the relationship I was in, if I hadn’t seen something on the last day I was there.
We were moving together to a different part of town and we had gotten everything out of that bedroom. They were napping on the couch out in the living room, taking a break from the last push of the move, so I took care of finishing up cleaning their bedroom. As I swept, it felt like something was right behind me the whole time. It was such an unsettling feeling and I tried to get the cleaning done as fast as I could. After sweeping the last little pile into the dustpan, I turned quickly to leave. As I did, I saw a woman with long, wild hair walk past me. She was smirking and she looked me right in the eyes with a look that had the same meanness I’d been feeling from that bedroom. I ran out of there and when I looked back, all that was in the room was the dustpan I had dropped.
If you haven’t seen a ghost before, it might be that you’re not paying enough attention. My encounters and those of people I know have been more subtle and more fleeting than those you’d see in a paranormal experiences show or a horror movie. The next time you switch off the lights, look a little harder into the darkness around you. Someone — or something — might be looking back.
