We have all been there, all alone with the sense that someone or something might reach out and pull us into oblivion. Our blood runs cold. We pick up the pace to get into the light. We run, knowing that as soon as we get within a few feet of being visible to people who know us, that we must get it together, lest they discover our silliness. We sleep with nightlights. We run fans while we sleep to drown out the eerie sounds that the house makes while we sleep. The darkness is not our friend. This is the story of the ghost that used to live in my upstairs hallway. I was the only one that ever felt the ghost, and my family thought I was nuts. It turns out that there were reasons for that.
I never saw the ghost in my hallway. I simply sensed that she was there. I knew it, and I made a habit of turning the hallway light on simply to walk to the other end (more like power walking) where I would make sure to turn the bedroom light on, and stepping safely inside before reaching a hand around the corner into the hall to find the 2nd switch to the hallway light, and rushing my hand back to my side, glancing over my shoulder to be sure the ghost wasn’t reaching for me. I just knew she was reaching out to grab me.
The ghost in my house was a girl, about 6-7 years old in a long white nightie. She was tortured and sad and crying. Mind you, I never saw her, and I never even heard her, but I knew these things about her. I wasn’t sure how I knew, but I did know it. Several weeks after moving into the house and after I already knew the ghost existed, I heard a story about a murder that had taken place in the area. A young girl’s body had been found in the bushes at the school yard, not 300 yards from my home. Police had come to the conclusion that the girl had been dumped there, but killed elsewhere. They had never found the murder weapon, or the original crime scene. My house had not been built yet when the little girl was murdered, but I wondered often whether the geographic location of my hallway had been the location where the little girl from our town had been murdered.
Several months after moving in, a friend of mine from childhood came to visit. When he came into the hallway, he remarked “This place reminds me of your house on 33rd Street.” When I was young, my family lived in a house on 33rd Street in San Diego. Some of my best and worst memories in life took place in that house. It had never occurred to me that my new home in B.C. was reminiscent of a home I had not seen in 25 years. That remark though got me to thinking through some events in the home on 33rd Street that had been hurtful to me as a child, some things I had never addressed. Within a few weeks I was sitting in a counselor’s office relaying stories to her from my life on 33rd Street, and finding closure to some dramatic events.
One night, sitting in my living room, it occurred to me that I knew how to get rid of the ghost in my hallway. I now knew that the ghost was not the little girl long since murdered in my neighborhood. At least I was sure enough to venture into the hallway in the dark. I turned off the television and headed for the stairs. It was time to confront this ghost that had made me scared to walk through a portion of my own home. When I got to the hallway, for the first time in months, I decided not to turn the light on. I stepped down the hallway gingerly, still a bit scared, but I sensed I knew who the little ghost was and why she kept reaching her hands out to grab me. I was relatively certain she was not about to pull me into hell.
Suddenly, I felt her presence. I knew she was there with me. I couldn’t see her, but I knew she was there; once again, hands outstretched trying to grab me. Instead of running, for the first time, in decades, I reached out and, in my mind’s eye, I pulled the little girl towards me and held her close and sobbed with her about a deep pain long since passed, but never forgotten or grieved. The little girl hadn’t been trying to grab me. She’d been looking for comfort. The little child that was hurt, that had scared me for so long, turned out to be nothing more, and nothing less than me. As I sat in that dark hallway comforting the little girl inside of me that had never been allowed to grieve, I knew instinctively that my house would be forever ghost free…and I was right.
I don’t know if every ghost we see or feel in life has something to do with our subconscious or not. I am not about to dispel the opinions of everyone who has ever seen a ghost, but I know what was true in my own experience. I share this story though to give you hope that possibly the ghosts you see and feel and hear might not be looking to hurt you but to help you. It’s possible they are there to make you more whole and more complete. The subconscious is an amazing thing that whispers to us ever so slightly. It takes time and patience to listen to it, but when we do, it’s amazing what can happen. May you find a place of healing if you find, as I did, that the ghosts that haunt us are really unresolved pain for which we all need closure.
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"The subconscious is an amazing thing that whispers to us ever so slightly."
Intro to my life's story and work, I hope you enjoyed it, if so please up-vote, follow, comment, share, or promote.
