Since this is the Saturday before Halloween, I thought I'd tell you a couple of personal ghost stories.
My father was a great believer in ghosts and the paranormal and he told me of a number of ghostly experiences he had as a boy and young man. By the time I was in high school I believed too, simply because Dad was not a man given to flights of fancy. He was solid as a rock, practical and a sound pragmatist.
My first encounter with a ghost came when I was staying with Uncle Dougie in Brighton, England, but that's much too long a story to tell here and I had only one encounter, so I'll move on to my life with Louise.
In 1979 my friend/manager and I and our two kids rented a house together in Camarillo. It was a one-of-a-kind place, built in the late 50s or early 60s and situated on the corner of East Loop Drive and Las Posas Road at the edge of an avocado orchard. (It has since been torn down and replaced with a Habitat For Humanity house.)
There was no discernible activity until about 1983, although the kids sometimes talked about
"the lady who checks in on us at night." I felt a presence sometimes late at night when I was settling in to sleep, but I didn't give it much thought. It wasn't until things really began to happen that I acknowledged the presence of this lady, whom we lovingly dubbed "Louise". We only felt her at night as we were falling asleep, but once or twice I was wakened to see a woman standing at the foot of my bed. She was in her 40s, tall, and she wore an old-fashioned apron. The first time I saw her I thought it was my mother but then quickly realized she wasn't. Then she disappeared.
When I finally addressed her, telling her that she was welcome and that we appreciated her keeping an eye on us, things really began to happen. Once, when I was asleep and not feeling well, I felt someone lean over me to feel my forehead. What was distinctly clear about this was the feeling of the bed sinking beside me as if someone had used their knee on the mattress to reach over to me. Once, I felt someone get into bed with me and I woke up, freaked out until I saw that no one was really there.
When we moved out of the house, I had to go to the Edison office 15 miles away in Oxnard to cancel my electricity account and get my deposit returned to me. The clerk who helped me took one look at my closing bill and said,
"7 East Loop! That's the house my grandfather built for my grandmother!" I was astonished. What are the chances? I asked her about her grandmother; what was she like? The girl told me she was kind of old-fashioned, very maternal and dedicated to her children and grandchildren. She asked me if I noticed that the kitchen and bathroom counters were kind of high and I said I did. She told me it's because her grandmother was tall and had asked that the counters accommodate her height. I asked her what her grandmother's name was and she replied,
"Louise." I didn't tell her that her grandmother was still doing what she loved best.
The story of Ruthie is a bit more complicated, but is more along the lines of a "real" ghost story.
In 1997 my then girlfriend and I moved into a 1914 Mediterranean apartment building at 847 Poli Street, in historic downtown Ventura, California. I can't tell you how many times throughout the years I'd passed this building -- both in a car and on foot -- and had never even noticed it. On a May afternoon, however, I saw it as we drove past and I excitedly told my girlfriend to pull over. I had to look at it! Before the car even stopped, I was out the door and on the sidewalk, looking up at the right-hand penthouse apartment. We weren't really looking for a new place to live, but
I had to live there. I just felt it. While she waited in the car, I went up the broad steps, into the courtyard, and up the interior stairs leading to apartment #1. A sign on the door said that it was for rent. As soon as we got home I called the property management company and told them that I wanted that apartment.
When I met the caretaker inside the apartment the following day, she showed me around the place and I knew it had my name on it. It was almost as if
it wanted
me. Standing in the kitchen, preparing to sign the rental agreement, the caretaker and I talked and she suddenly said,
"Did you know that the building is haunted?" I replied that I didn't, but that that fact made it all the more attractive to me. She went on to tell me that the entire riviera was haunted because it used to be the sacred burial grounds of the Hopis before Fr. Junipero Serra built Mission San Buenaventura in 1782 and the ensuing urban sprawl began. She said that sometimes Indians walked through the rooms, but that they seemed to be oblivious to the building and the tenants.
"There's another ghost that's kind of a protector of the building," she added. I asked her to tell me more, but she said that was all she knew, except that the ghost seemed to be active only when someone moved in or out. She left then, asking me to put the keys in the mailbox when I left. As I walked through the apartment I at first didn't feel anything, but then I walked down the hall to the bedroom and I felt a cold spot. In the bedroom, I sat on the floor and meditated on the presence, telling it out loud that I respected its attachment to the building and that I was more than happy to share the space with her. Her? I felt that it was female.
Virtually every person who came to see our new place would, after coming out of the hall where the bathroom was located, say that they
felt something. We purposely hadn't mentioned it to them beforehand.
Funny things began happening. One morning when I got up to get ready for work I found a perfect "kiss" print on the bathroom mirror. It was greyish-white and when I tried to wipe it off I couldn't. It was dried on, chalky, kind of like spackle. On another occasion, as I sat working at my computer, my girlfriend came into the office/guest room to talk to me. I turned in the desk chair to face her and as we talked I kept feeling something tickling my the top of my head. I thought it was the plant hanging above my desk, but when I turned to look at it I saw that it was hanging far too high and back in the corner to reach me. To touch it I would have had to stand up and lean over the desk. Sometimes I felt someone pass behind me, placing their hand lightly on my waist and, thinking it was my girlfriend, I'd turn to find no one else in the room. I began calling her "Ruthie" and she seemed to like me. She followed me through the apartment (when she was in an active phase) and all but ignored my girlfriend, although she felt her and was afraid of her. I don't think Ruthie liked my girlfriend.
I talked to Ruthie aloud as normally as I would anyone "living" and when we moved a studio grand piano into the apartment, we sometimes heard it playing in the middle of the night. One day I saw her standing in the little front window when I was outside watering the plants. She was a girl in her 20s, with a dark bob. An authentic Flapper from the 1920s. I blinked, and when I looked again, she was gone.
One day the girl who moved in below us came up and asked us if we could keep the baby quiet at night.
"What baby?" we said.
"We don't have a baby." She asked if anyone else in the building had one and we said no. I never heard a baby while living there, but I began to wonder if that wasn't the key to Ruthie's presence. Maybe she had an illegitimate baby and they both died during birth. Or maybe she'd had a visit from an abortionist... The possibilities intrigued me so I called Ventura's local ghost hunter, Richard Senate, and we spoke on the phone. He said he would come by, but he never did. All the same, my story was printed in the local paper.
We had a party one night and the next day I washed and towel-dried all of the stemware, placing it upside-down in the dining room's built-in hutch. The next evening when I came home from work I decided to have a glass of wine. When I opened the hutch I found one glass right-side up, with the dregs of some red wine in the bottom of the glass. There were also grey lipstick marks on the glass. Not only was I positive that I had washed each and every glass the day before, no one had been home all day and we didn't even have in red wine in the house. I just told Ruthie that if she was going to be drinking wine during the day, she had to to share.
The night before I moved out I felt that Ruthie was sad, and I told her how much I'd enjoyed knowing her and sharing her space.
Happy Halloween!
I grew up in the country, in a little house on a cattle ranch in the Santa Ynez Valley, surrounded by pastures and hills that are dotted with Live Oak trees. In the background, the Refugio mountains rise, creating a truly beautiful landscape. It was a wonderful place to spend one's childhood because there was always something to do, someplace to explore. I followed cattle trails, played in the creek, slid down the hills on cardboard and spent long, leisurely afternoons lying in the tall grass, making pictures in the clouds.
Now that I've lived in Stillwater for seven years, I realize that small town life -- or even country life -- is not for me. Where I once saw myself sitting in a porch swing playing my guitar in the summer dusk, I now see myself on a balcony overlooking a city street, my favorite cafe just a short walk away. I love the idea of going to the street market for our produce and walking our dog in the park.
