My First Ghost
An intimidating friend gave me a prompt to start me writing. It's short and sweet. And if you've been following me for a while, you'll find some familiar facts.
I have a friend where I live that has been an editor for the fun, the fancy and the fascinating. We ran into each other in Provincetown, Ma in September—far from the rural town we live in New York. I mentioned that I had been writing a book forever. FOREVER. He mentioned that he was taking a narrative writing class. And so we said “Hey! Let’s swap!” He told me to send him some stories and he’d so the same.
I did not do it.
If this was a toxic Hallmark movie, you’d see us run into each other at the literary themed holiday market that he produced. Which we did. While he was stirring the fragrant mulled cider and I was being annoyingly self depricating about my writing, he would say joyfully in an english accent “I’ll give you a prompt! ‘Your first ghost’!” Which did happen.
Thing is, I love a prompt. It was one of the most enjoyable exercises I used to indulge in when I had a writing partner a few years back.
And so I went home and in a not very Hallmark movie moment, I turned on some very loud music, shook out my very unwashed hair and quickly wrote the story of my first ghost. I did it before it went by the wayside next to the calls that had to be made to the accountant or the items I needed to launder.
And here it is:
My First Ghost
When I was 9 years old my parents moved us from lower middle class housing projects to an English tudor style mansion—the kind you see in movies where people speak in British accents only found on public television. To this day, that house sits in my personal history as one of the most haunted residential buildings I’ve ever entered.
The tenants before us were the Rheinharts—an affluent child-free German couple who each died of old age. And as Satan as my witness, there was an original Titian hanging in the living room.
Yes, Titian. The Renaissance artist.
The estate lawyers didn’t know how to navigate what to do with the painting so it stayed on the wall for the first year of our time there.
As an overly sensitive kid with, as we know now, the skills of mediumship it was a very crowded and loud place to live. The style of the house was purely medieval and my parents didn’t change much except to move their mid-century furniture in and purchase some of the Rheinhart’s bigger pieces to avoid more hastle.
I could hear the wife’s name, Theodora, being said down the hallway to my bedroom and the coat closet by the front door scared any visiting children without much explanation.
I had a game I would play with a small red foam ball that once belonged to some yard game whenever I couldn’t find something in my room.
I would say the item I needed to find and throw the ball in the air. Without fail, when the ball hit the floor it would roll in the direction of whatever I spoke of. Each morning I could see an image of someone just leaving my room and disappearing in the doorway.
All this said, my very first ghost was in the apartment we moved from before the culture shock of the Rheinhart house. The neighborhood/projects were called Parkchester.
Since made into condos, Parkchester was in the 70s a middle class housing project and at that time the largest projects ever built. It was smack in the middle of the Bronx. Dark industrial hallways, hopefully functioning elevators, each apartment exactly as you make it. For my parents it was red carpeting, zebra hides and teak wood furniture of the time.
The apartment was busy with family comings and goings. My grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles all lived there or within a 20 minute drive.
When I was 5 years old I met Foggy. He was a small boy that I could only see at first if I was standing in the doorway of the kitchen. He had black hair, parted on the side. He wore a black turtleneck sweater and jeans. I spoke to him, played with him, consulted with him.
Later in our relationship I would imagine him with me when we travelled or when I was bored.
I didn’t ask him his name as I would have now. I believe I always knew it.
I wasn’t shy about knowing this boy but the explanation of who he was and how I saw him morphed according to how the adults around me understood what I was talking about.
My mother was just accepting and taking her lead, my father was as well.
But one day my aunt who lacked any sense of whimsy asked a lot of questions.
She thought I called him Froggy and insisted that I was talking about Kermit the Frog. There was no explaining anything to Aunt Ginny. Ever. So I told her that his NAME WAS FOGGY but that if it pleased her, sure, he looked like Kermit the Frog.
We did a lot together, Foggy and I. Danced to Barry White, sang to Fiddler On The Roof and hid when my parents argued.
He took on the legacy of the imaginary friend of the only child but as I learn more about my work I know him not to be a product of need but an existing entity.
Foggy was not alone in that apartment.
One night while my father and I were asleep my mother was awoken by a presence. She said it was so intrusive and present it caused her to get up, run into the living room and yell at it to leave. The intuition she had to protect us was overwhelming, she’s said.
It was a tumultuous time in our lives and that kind of energy mirrored much of it.
One afternoon, I asked my mother if I could play with a piece of her jewelry. I chose a large gem-cut topaz ring. I loved that ring. It was a huge stone the color of butterscotch. I was allowed to play with it as long as I sat in the middle of the bed. After a few minutes of looking at it on my small fingers and trying to fit it on my toes, I couldn’t find it.
We looked everywhere. I never left the bedroom, not even the bed. Trash can, under the bed, in drawers. There weren’t a lot of options of where it could be.
It was just gone.
We would be moving out of that apartment and into the bigger, fancier digs within the year.
During my more powerful meditations I’ve heard Foggy took the ring.
With the knowing that we were to leave apartment 7H, he held on to what charmed me the most.
Note: Upon writing this I sent it to Joey, the aforementioned writing partner. He gave his thumbs us with a note that included my next prompt:
What happens if you write about Foggy in the present tense? You are five. You're writing in the first person. Why are you in the kitchen? What's it like the first time you see Foggy? What do you say/do? What does he say/do? I want to be in the room with y'all in the moment
More to come.
Below, me looking ghost-y. Photo credit: Brian Moss
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