The Nocturnal Antics of My Ephemeral Roommate. (Patreon)

I don’t believe in ghosts. I never have, even when I was a little girl. But, as far as my imperfect memory can recall, I always wanted to.

I used to work in an old building that, at one point in its history, had been used as a county jail. Legend goes, there was a fella named Hosea, who was the last person to be hanged there before it was decommissioned. It’s a theater now; superstition has it, that whenever Hosea hates a play that is performed there, he locks the doors to the dressing rooms, makes a fresh 300-watt bulb flicker out from one of the fresnels, makes the HVAC click on and off for no reason, or (as has been attested by sources who, despite their eccentricities, are logical, critically minded people) manifests himself as a visible humanoid form, in the periphery, standing in an otherwise-unoccupied stage-left, in the wings, during a performance.

Never saw anything myself, but I was locked in a dressing room for a couple of hours at one point until some friendly fella came along with a power drill to bust out the latch. Ugh. Everyone’s a critic — Guess Hoesa was not a fan of Arthur Miller.

In Atlanta, I rented a house that was built in the years after the Civil War. Some tiny shotgun (look it up) in a mini-town that used to house a multitude of low-wage Appalachian folks. I had passed out on the couch one night, and whether I actually opened my eyes or not, I can’t say. But, come morning, there was a man in overalls, standing over me, looking down. Some vision of a dude from a Steinbeck novel. The snippet of vision turned to black for two seconds (or maybe an hour), and I woke up, for real, in the same place. No man there. Another night, I was actually sleeping in bed, still awake. Heard a loud clattering. Went out to the kitchen to inspect, scared shitless from the possibility of a home invader, to find my chef’s knife on the floor (doors and windows still locked from the inside).

A dream in the first case? In the second case… shit… a rat who had been munching just a little too heavily on a random chunk of food on the countertop, and whose fat little butt kicked the knife onto the ground? I mean, that explains it. Yeah?

Later, I lived, alone, in a particularly old house. Something that was built just a hair before the Thirty Years’ War. It was a small house, at first: started as a single room with a rough fireplace, a hearth separated just enough to not cause everyone to die from CO poisoning. Later, it upgraded. They added another room to keep the livestock in during the cold months. Sr. Fancypants moved in when some shit started going down in Turkey. By the time the Declaration of Independence was signed, it would have been a mini-mansion by the local, rural standards — though nothing very similar to the relative Versailles it had become by the time I found it. (This place didn’t have a toilet until the [19]’90s. La-dee-dah.)

I did experience some stuff there. With as many families who had called that property home — not to mention the idea that the house was located only a few kilometers from what they call a Ley line — I suppose I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a few ghouls trapsing about. Good a place as any.

Through the thin wooden layer that served as a roof to the lower quarters, and the floor to the upper quarters, I heard some solid-ass footsteps *just overhead,* from that bedroom, while tapping on my computer. Or, another time, when I walked out the front door from a dark room; I felt something behind me and turned around, only to see a green glow through the window. A dog who I was sitting, barking at a closet door in the corner, just moments before it slowly shut all on its own (the kind of door that, if left ajar, usually opens outward quite easily). Things like that.

Respectively: Ghosts, ghosts, ghosts. Or… acoustics, perhaps one of those huge birds had landed on the roof to get a lay of the land, shambling around, and it just sounded like it was 5 feet above me; a trick of a nearby fluorescent light, reflecting just-so off the coating on the glass; an old home, with old wood and unreliable humidity, resulting in a doorframe that changed orientation just enough for an errant footstep to loose an aged hinge.

The ancients, it’s rumored, used to cower in fear when they saw a lunar eclipse. Some of them, it’s said, died from the terror of something so unexplainable. That’s too far back for any written record, and whatever oral history remains has likely evolved too much to be reliable. Still, it doesn’t seem too far-fetched. When people experience something they can’t explain, there are usually two options: to become fearful, or to become curious.

1054, that supernova that created the Crab Nebula. For a few weeks, it was visible in the daytime; at night, you could see it for about two years. Records of it exist in China and the Middle East; Europe probably thought of it as some divine way of approving of some new king; present-day New Mexico has a few references preserved in stone by the folks who lived out there. One hears tell, from the locals, that the Chileans were just fascinated by this wacky new star in the sky. The Mayans probably had an (pun intended) astronomical field day. The one unifying thing is that these disconnected facets of society probably reacted differently, though probably on the fear-to-curiosity spectrum.

In the cases of my Mulder-meets-Scully hopeful incredulity, I’ve never really been scared by any of my experiences. And, I will admit that — to this day, in those periods in the middle of the night when I find my leg hanging off the bed after a particularly tumultuous dream — I do have those primal vestiges of nonsensical belief that there is some golem under my bed, waiting to strike. (But never in the closet — that’s where I keep my dirty underwear, and unless he’s a total pervert, I can only imagine that an inanimate beast of folklore would be the only one to tolerate such an atmosphere). But otherwise, I stay more on the side of curiosity.

Curiosity leads to better things. And, the universe is very, very, very huge. For instance, I like this pair of pictures. On the left, M87*, the supermassive black hole we got the photo of a few years ago. On the right, Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole we got a few days ago (the one at the center of our own Milky Way Galaxy). Trippy, right? Take a moment to check those size comparisons.

And, if you wanna feel particularly insignificant on this lovely day, pull up a YouTube video of Black Hole TON 618. Like… Just fuck.

Anyway. Suffice it to say. The universe is huge. And there’s just a shit-TON (har-har) we don’t know.

The trap we often fall into is this self-convincing knowledge that we already know everything… Every generation has this mentality. But, that’s what science is all about. In a sheerly rational sense, the more answers we find, the more questions we come up with; in a Clark-ian sense, “any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic;” in a purely curious sense, we’re humans. We take the sum of our knowledge to construct a version that works for us.

When I have a spooky encounter, I do remind myself to be curious. I’m reminded of the Split Electron Experiment, the concept of the multiverse, and of the utterly confusing notion of quantum entanglement. Why is it, that something personality-less, like an electron, can change behavior simply because a human being observes it? How com-zit, that we have enough evidence to figure out that an electron right here can change the behavior of an electron a billion lightyears away, instantly, even though relativity says that nothing — including information — can travel faster than the speed of light?

There are, again, simply things we don’t know. Maybe the most closely believed ghostly apparition is nothing more than some… projection from a closely paralleled multiverse; a cluster of electrons on one side of the universe that haven’t had a reason to have fun, and get all riled up, since the Big Bang, until juuuuust until now. Maybe it’s a simulation after all, and it’s a glitch in the Matrix. Maybe some galaxy-traversing Eternal Tortoise got bored and decided to fuck with us. Maybe, as Dickens would say, “a slight disorder of the stomach… an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato… More gravy than of grave.” Maybe it’s Matthew McConaughey, shoving books off of shelves. (McConaughey, spying on me from the fourth dimension?! A little creepy, but… alright, alright, alriiiight.)

Or, maybe I’m just friendly to ghosts. Maybe Manuel (that’s the cute petname I had for whatever the hell it was or wasn’t in that old-old house) didn’t wanna scare me off because I was an easy-going roommate, he was a little lonely, and which such entity wouldn’t want the company of an easygoing drunken bookworm with huge tits?

I wanted to finish this essay and post it on Friday the 13th, our societal micro-Halloween. But, alas, I got caught up with horror movies, and needed to come back and polish it. In case you’re wondering, I got cliché (for me), and ended up with The Shining. Did a little binging on that Haunting of Hill House series, too. Pretty awesome. 25% horror; 75% August, Osage County.

Well, anyway. Stay curious, friends. As a wise person once said, “Fear leads to anger; anger leads to hate; hate leads to suffering.” I think it what Gandhi.

Maybe Yoda.

Curiosity is the opposite. It leads to understanding, then appreciation, and then, peace. I suppose it does. Not a lot of proof of that, these days.

Unless you’re Manuel. Because “I swear to God, I’ve got a deadline to hit you Iberian Specter, and if you don’t cut out that racket for just a few more minutes, I will come up there with a frigging Proton Pack! Mark my words!”

I would say that out loud. And then, the footsteps would stop. Maybe I scared away the giant white stork. Or maybe, Miguel was just being nice.