My ghost story continues … click here to read part one.

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So I did my hippie magic and all was quiet for probably more than a year.

One day I tried to quickly shut the bathroom door and it didn’t close all the way. It popped back open, as if the wood was swollen and preventing the door from fitting properly into the door frame. Not in a supernatural way, just in a regular old door way. So maybe that whole door thing was really nothing after all, I thought.

In fact, it was so uneventful that it was almost like nothing had ever happened at all.

After a while, I brought up the name calling episode in Megan’s room again just to see if she remembered it. I half expected her to look at me and go, “What are you talking about?”

Instead she said, “Please don’t talk about that, mommy! I almost forgot about it and I don’t even want to think about it! It scares me!”

Unclaiming my space

 

From what I understand about “claiming your space” is that you really have to mean it. In other words, you can’t be all, “Get out of here!” while secretly thinking how cool it is to have a ghost and wondering when the next strange thing is going to occur.

Apparently, ghosts know when you’re bluffing.

Around the holidays or maybe after that, I started watching a new ghost show on the Travel Channel. The Dead Files (which, if you’re a geek like me, you should be watching) features a psychic who goes to haunted locations and communes with the dead. Then her findings are compared to those of a retired New York City Police Detective’s to see if they match.

Anyway, I was thinking that Amy Allan, the psychic, was really interesting. I was thinking it would be really cool (maybe) to have her abilities.

I got to wondering about the so-called ghost in my house.

But I didn’t try to contact it. I didn’t talk to it. I didn’t do anything except wonder.

Then one day I was bathing Benjamin and had the bathroom door open. I saw, out of the corner of my eye, someone whiz by the door. Someone about kid-height. The floor thumped like someone had gone by.

Then I called Megan and she didn’t answer — which seemed really ignorant because I thought she was in her room a few feet away. A few minutes later I went downstairs and saw that she hadn’t moved from the couch where I’d seen her before I went upstairs. “Were you just upstairs?” I asked.

“No. Why?” she said.

“No reason. Just thought I heard you.”

The kitchen help

 

A few weeks after that I was in the living room by myself. The kids were asleep. The house was pretty quiet.

Suddenly, there was a loud crash in the kitchen. It sounded like a pile of dishes and pots and pans toppled over.

The Single Momma Townhouse isn’t big. The crash came from right behind my head — from the other side of the wall that separates the kitchen and living room.

The sound wasn’t muffled in any way. There was no way it came from the neighbor’s house.

I took a deep breath. Yep, I thought. Here we go. Time to go into the kitchen. 

So I walked into the kitchen to find … nothing. Nothing out of place. Anywhere. I even opened the cabinets to see if something crashed inside of one. Nope.

My birthday pal

 

I turned 40 in January. The Irishman took me away to the mountains for my birthday. We were staying at his friend’s house which was down the road from a tavern.

What do you do when you’re at a tavern in the mountains with an Irishman? Why, you drink your head off, you silly gooses.

Fast-forward to later that night. My head was pounding. I was stumbling down the hall on the way to hunt down some Tylenol when I could’ve sworn I heard whispered voices. But then I said to myself, “Girl, you are still drunk. Shaddap and go to bed.”

So I went back to bed. Around 4 in the morning, clear as day, I heard two male voices. Loud. I couldn’t make out what they were saying but it was a snippet of a conversation that lasted only a few seconds. I rolled over and went back to sleep.

Around 7 AM I was still dead asleep. I was on my side, facing the door, the way I often sleep in my own bed.

Then, right in front of my face, I heard a loud whisper.

“Mom!”

I opened my eyes, expecting to be in my own bed with Megan standing in front of me.

No.

No one there.

Well, I miss the kids. Must’ve had a vivid dream, I thought. I tried to go back to sleep.

Over breakfast, I told the Irishman I’d heard a lot of weird stuff the night before. “I think this place might be haunted,” I said.

“I don’t know,” he answered. “I thought I heard some weird things, too.” Keep in mind that the Irishman, while very brave and manly in regard to many things, is a total pussy when it comes to the paranormal.

“Did you hear those guys talking?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “But the house across the street is really close to the road. It might have been some kids coming home. That’s a real party house.” (Later, we would test this out and find out that, yes, voices carry extremely well across the road there.)

I told him about the hallway incident but said that I couldn’t be sure if I really heard things or not, considering I was still probably half out of my head at that point.

“There’s one more thing,” I said. “Although this is probably nothing because I probably just dreamed it. This morning, around 7, I was in bed asleep and I thought I heard someone whisper ‘Mom!’ right in front of my face.”

The Irishman’s eyes got big.

“I heard that, too,” he said.

“What? You HEARD that? You’re kidding me!”

“In fact, it was so loud that I actually looked up,” he said.

The rest of the weekend I couldn’t stop thinking about a sad kid ghost who had mistaken me for his or her momma …

But nothing else happened while we were in the mountains. However, it didn’t take long for things to start up once I got home.

To be continued … (bitches).

Read the next post here.