25 September 2011

The Raised House, Catskills, NY


The Catskill Mountain region in upstate New York is the oldest, creepiest, most magnificent part of the state. All you can see as you drive around in the daytime are gnarled trees and a thick layer of mossy sediment with the occasional waterfall or whisper of a brook. There have been more devil sightings in the Catskill Mountains than in any other part of the country, a fact which once got a red-faced man on a flight from Memphis to Tulsa to stop talking to me.
Next to the sign welcoming you to the town of Neversink, a town which had to be relocated when they built the reservoir because the old settlement was flooded, there is a large swampy pond and a 5 ft tall stone wall with a house on top. It's a little house. Two stories, white paint job, long front porch, little glass windows and a stream running down right next to it. The house looks like it's been empty for years. The front door stands open and some of the window panes are shattered. The white paint has big dirty cracks. 
The house looks down on you as you drive up past it. Perhaps it's the open door, but something sweet calls you home every time you see it. 
Last August my dad, filled with the spirit of adventure or hearing that call swerved to the side of the swampy pond and parked the truck when we were driving past on our way home from Woodstock. It was a bleak day. All dark and rainy. I wrapped a shall around my head to keep the damp out and followed my dad across the road and up the muddy embankment to the old  house. 
We climbed onto the porch from the right side. The porch creaked as I crossed it to the front door. There was a window on my right. Classic four-paned. Something slanted about it though. I tried to look into the front room through the warped glass but it was too dusty. I took a step closer and put my hand up to the glass to cut the glare from the sun, trying vainly to reach me through all those clouds. There was just furniture inside. A small plump couch and two chairs, and a desk. The place looked untouched, encased in a thick layer of dust and mildew.
A chill took me and I pulled back from the window just as the sun darkened, momentarily. I continued to the front door. My dad was already inside. There were newspapers all over the floor of the kitchen and all the drawers were missing. Then my eyes adjusted to the dim light and I saw the drawers were shattered and strewn with all their contents over the linoleum floor. The walls and ceiling were white, the ceiling low.
My dad picked up one of the newspapers on the floor. It was pinkish and old. 1973, he said, and dropped the paper.

The picture above is of the kitchen, taken from the staircase opposite from the front door. As you can see the place is a mess. I was too scared to leave the stairs after I climbed them. The next picture is of the room at the top of the stairs. Taken with flash.

There were two rooms leading off this main one on the second floor. One had an old spring bed in it. The other had the ceiling caved in.
I closed my eyes and saw a woman in black come out from behind the wall on the right of the picture and stride into the front bedroom, the one with an intact ceiling.
Let's get out of here, I told my dad. He had to check out the collapsed room first. I waited on the stairs, trying not to look at the little boy watching me from the bottom. His blonde hair dirty with mud. Finally dad was back and he let me grab his hand and pull him from the premises. We noticed a collapsed shed as we crawled back down the embankment; it was covered in moss but you could still see the springs of a mattress inside.
I was happy to see the truck again. We clambered in and drove off. The sun had come out for a minute and the damp earth shone a most brilliant green.

14 September 2011

Haunted Loft: The beginning.

I've known our loft was haunted since kindergarten. My parents divorced before I started grade school and   they both lied in haunted apartments. I've had dark circles under  my eyes for as long as I can remember.
My dad lived in the Chelsea Hotel on 23rd street. We would play hide and seek in all the stairwells, hallways, and garbage shoots, order take out, and then he would tell me ghost stories and I would go to sleep. The next day my mom, a haggard single mom/student/writer would get grief from my teachers."Why are there always dark circles under V's eyes?" they'd ask her. She bitched at dad and he stopped telling me ghost stories but the dark circles didn't recede.
I couldn't sleep in the loft. It wasn't safe.When I lay face down in bed I could hear Hannibal and his army of elephants marching up my stairs, faster the more scared I became, until I would sit up. Instead I would stay up  playing with my stuffed animals in the warm glow of the nightlight until I saw my mother's lamp extinguish and I knew she was asleep.
My mother slept on a full bed that took up most of the alcove at the South end of the loft, behind the elevator, boarding the window Sugar fell from. We had no cat at the time, just a huge, empty, dark apartment filled with odd sounds and phantom glowing red eyes. I would walk the harrowing length of it almost every night with my pink blanket and Bubbles the teddy bear. My mother would always assume I had had a nightmare if I showed up after her light went out (before and she'd try to fix the problem and send me back to my own bed) and let me sleep with her. It was safe there. Only two nightmares ever reached me after I reached the safety of mom's bed. 

One night, ten years later and five months before Sugar met her untimely demise, I took a nap before getting ready for a slumber party. When I woke up it was dark outside. I was laying on my stomach facing the window. The lamp behind me was off but if I turned around to get to it surely, I thought, I would see her, the beautiful blue angry woman from The Grudge. Or worse, floating above me the Tooth-Fairy from Darkness Falls, waiting for me to open my eyes so she could kill me. These are just faces and names I put to the fear, but something was not right. It took me 30 minutes to summon the courage to turn on the light. Then I sat for three hours reading children's poetry while the darkness pressed like a tangible force through the door of my room. Finally I had enough courage to advance to the old kitchen, less than ten feet away from my door. I went out with my back against the wall. I had my eyes closed againgst all that I was sure was ghouling around in my apartment. Where was Sugar when you needed her? For starters, I did not want to even begin to imagine how much terror I would feel if I opened my eyes and actually SAW that young girl floating in an old white dress right in front of me. Her long blonde hair and the tattters of her dress danced over the skin of my arms and legs, barely touching me. Would the spell break if I set eyes on her? Would she suddenly be able to touch me? Her hair and tatters reaching out like tentacles to strangle me, bind me, frighten me into cardiac arrest. 
Three more sideways shuffles and I could feel the kitchen light switch with the fingers of my right hand. I flipped it. Light spilled into the loft from the doorway and the elevator door opened. Mom came home. Sugar came out of her napping place to say hi. I tore through the loft screaming "MOMMY!!!" even though I was fifteen. With everything better I had to rush to get ready for my party and, of course, was late.

Six months after Sugar died we adopted Dorian Gray. He was as different a cat from Sugar as ever there was. Soft, sweet, terrible at stealth, and monotone gray to her beautiful white and calico. He lived in the loft until I went to college but he was always my cat. He probably passed away in 2009; but we don't really know. My brother let him out in the Catskill mountains and Dorian never came home. I have never had a cat who lived to see its sixth birthday, human years.
In December 2008 Sugar was dead and Dorian was alive; but living at my brother's place in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I was home visiting from college and sleeping on my bed which had been moved from my room (now storage) and placed in the alcove. I drempt one night that my mother was sitting on the couch in the middle of the loft with Dorian Gray licking himself on a table behind her. Suddenly Sugar jumped up and settled herself on the back of the couch, right next to my mother's head.
"Mom!" I excalimed, "Don't you see Sugar?"
"Of course I do," she said."She's always here." Dorian continued licking himself like nothing was wrong when there was a ghost sitting right in front of him!
Sugar looked at me, her bright green eyes meeting mine. I never left, she said without talking, I mean you no harm. I woke up. There was an oval indent on the bottom right side of my bed as if a cat had been curled up there. I heard a small thump and saw a small black shadow walk past my bed and out of my line-of-vision with her nose and fluffy tail held proudly in the air. 
We didn't start seeing Sugar regularly around the apartment until this spring, 2011. Now she's everywhere I glance-for-a-minute and then gone. 

11 September 2011

Double Footsteps and an Opened Door

The upstairs bathroom where I was house sitting last week is a bright affair. Full of mirrors and plush towels and bath rugs. Nice tiling. It was renovated recently and I think a closet got put in around an air shaft. I left the closet door open for a few days. I do that kind of thing. Leave a closet door open and then freak out a few days later when it's still open. (Surely it must be ghosts.) As I was brushing my teeth, the last night I was there I noticed the closet door open and felt a sort of chill creep up my spine at it's ominous, gaping maw.
Naturally, I went over and closed it.
As I did the thought occurred to me, "How horrible would it be if I came in here tomorrow morning and the door's open again? Why did I have to draw my attention to it?" So I made sure it was firmly shut. My mind will do that. Take a simple, ordinary action and then go "How could this turn into a nightmare?" Dreams turn very quickly into nightmares..
When I left the bathroom I made sure the bathroom door was firmly closed behind me as well. Then I walked the four or so paces down the small hall to the bed. Onions the Cat [who's house it was] came over and settled on an overstuffed black throw pillow and rolled around turning it white. I was reading Women by Charles Bukowski and it was engaging, I was staying up later than I intended. Suddenly there was a breeze and the muffled sound of two hurried footsteps in that mini hall. Onions stood up and stared and the hall. He could see more than I could from his higher vantage point. I stayed laying down on my side, but I too was staring at the hallway I was right next to. I could only see a sliver because of my angle but there was nothing. Eventually I resume the book and Onions resumed his seat; but for the rest of the evening he would cast furtive looking glances at that little hallway and then quickly look away.

The next morning Sun was good. It showed (when I stood up finally) that there was nothing in that little hallway but two closed closets, a bolted stairwell door, and the bathroom door. The full door in one view. Seemingly closed but open just an inch.
I went in the bathroom. It was the same deal with the closet door in the bathroom. Just an inch. I brushed my teeth and got out of there. Brother Sam was downstairs and willing to clean before Onion's owner came home. The first time I stayed at this apartment I slept downstairs on the couch and heard people walking around all night. I imagine things, but I really do think something's following me. I feel it now, in this room, pressing on my chest like carbon monoxide. I'm just sleep deprived, stoned. I'm going to think about happy thought now and leave all my ghouls and goblins with you.

Fear and Evidence

Mom doesn't want to talk about it. Mom never wants to talk about it. But she told me about it. About it. She was sitting on the couch with Andy tonight, drinking margaritas, when they heard a cat over on the other side of the apartment.
"And then what?" I asked. Mom was talking about the Ghost Cat. She usually pretends it doesn't exist.
"I told Andy about the Ghost Cat," she said.
"And?"
"And what? That was the end of the conversation," Mom said.
"Well, what'd she say?"I asked.
"She didn't say anything. That was the end of the conversation."
"Well, whud her face look like??" I asked. To no avail. That was the end of the conversation, Mom said.
She knows something. This is her house. How can she not know how haunted it is?

Coincidentally, my mother acts a lot like my first college roommate, Cherisa. I spent one lovely Saturday in February sitting in our pie-shaped University of Hawai'i dorm room with the curtains drawn on the day so I could watch the OC for six hours straight. It was horrible. It was wonderful. I couldn't look away from Peter Gallegar's Eyebrow. Cherisa had gone to Wal-Mart with her cusins and left me with half a season of the OC to catch up on so I could watch with all the girls Later that week and not bother anyone with questions. God damn questions during shows.
Cherisa didn't come home for a long time.
Periodically I would see a light reflected in my glasses and feel the rush of fresh air that meant the door was open. Then I'd wait. Stillness. I'd turn and look at the door. Closed. Never opened. That happened six times during those hours of mindless California drama and countless other times when I was alone in the room.
When Cherisa came home that evening she had a lot of bags. I was relieved to see her, the stillness had been so tense, so I went out to the elevator to help with the bags.
"Our room is haunted," I said.
"I know," she said. Really?? I attempted to proceed telling her about the strange events with the door. "I don't want to hear about it, V!" she snapped. From then on she would purse her lips every time something spooky happened. She knew but to acknowledge it might be too scary.
I suppose my mother has a point. This loft is a scary place. If there really were a Ghost Cat, why is she here? Why has she started acting up to much recently? Here's the big question: are my theories right, that she could only have been called forward in such a manner because there's something worse here. Something bad. Something a cat would be able to protect her family from.
Every member of this family loved her. My mother, father and brother. When she slipped out the front window in May 2005 and fell five stories she survived the fall and lived just long enough to die of shock in the hospital. Unaware where she was and that she was dying. Or maybe, Brother Sam says, she was dying to protect our family from something.
I'll post a picture of her sometime. She was a beautiful cat.

My mom and her friend heard a meow coming from the North end of the loft. I'm hoping it was the neighbor's cat; but Mom seemed spooked.