"May I come in?"

In honor of the holiday I am going to share with you a story I just heard tonight.

Last year or so my friend was standing on some scenic cliff near Santa Monica taking pictures. This woman appeared while he was photographing the scenery and stood in his view. Shot after shot she insisted on being in. Finally she comes right up close to him and says "Listen, I've really been having a rough day. Can I come home with you?"
My friend looks at her and says "I've got four guys living back at my place. I'd love to invite you over but there's no room." and he leaves. Couple days later he's going through his film of that day. All the shots of rocky scenery are there but no shots of that lady existed.
So tonight my friend tells me this story, then he says "So you see, I was taking pictures of Jesus."
Without even thinking I said "That wasn't Jesus." The room went cold. My friend stiffened slightly. "Jesus would never have to ask to be invited in," I said. "Jesus is always here. He is everywhere. What you saw was something else."
Notice: only servants of Satan need to be invited in. You can invite them in directly, where they appear harmless and ask you straight out, or it can be something as simple as believing in a Ouija board and providing the spirits in your house a doorway into your reality. Even believing in the ghost of my dead cat come back to protect my family from evil spirits allows the spirits room to exist in my reality. Damn. I'm screwed...

Is it called a tourniquet if it's used for torture?

There are two ways to tell this story. One is considerably more exciting than the other.
I almost died this week. First I slammed my head into a shelf while playing around on an exercise ball, then I woke up and slammed my forehead into my sturdy orange bedside table, and finally, twenty-four hours later, I fainted at the 116th Cathedral Parkway number one train station and landed on my face.
I feel like an idiot. More than that, I feel like I have the worst headache and my nose won't stop running. If I die in the next few days, blame the United States health insurance system for making me afraid of hospitals.
Or blame something way more exciting.
The exercise ball was my fault. I wasn't thinking clearly that day. It was nearly impossible to think clearly after that though. Making me prime for possession. Dostoevsky includes a character in Crime and Punishment who rambles and raves about the ghosts he has seen. He says you can only see the other side when you are close to death yourself, because why would you need to see it were you not in need of hope.
After the first head injury I was weak. When that female presence who frequently appears at dawn to yell at me showed up she found me thus weakened and was empowered to force my head to collide with the bedside table. I woke up due to the force of movement and then passed out again with my new concussion. That Lady, feeling triumphant, vanished for the night.
The next evening at choir practice something drew my attention to the balcony that sits above the front door. Earlier in the evening two men had been walking around up there but they had packed up and gone. For a second there was a woman standing there. She was garbed all in black with a black veil, holding the banister. I blinked and she was never there. 
When she appeared later I was out--sleuthing around Columbia with a friend. A little after 3 am we bid good night to each other and I went down into the one train station. 116th Street Cathedral Parkway. I had just missed a train. Fourteen minutes until the next South Ferry bound one. There was an odd number of construction workers and a man sitting on the opposite platform.
"The next South Ferry bound one train will arrive in seven minutes," the automated message reported after what felt like twenty.
I was beginning to get warm. There was no ventilation in that tunnel like platform. Tomb. She showed up and waited. Watched.
I looked at my phone. It was half passed three. Sent a text to my friend saying "14 minute wait b" because I couldn't correct the b to a period as the world swam and I pocketed my phone.

I was sitting in a tall backed wooden chair in a dimly lit chamber. They had a thick leather strap around my head and it felt like they were tightening it.

"Ow, You're hurting my head," I said and the sound make me come to.
"Miss! Miss! Are you all right?" people were screaming at me from fifty feet away.
"Oh shit," said to myself then "I'm sorry!" to everybody else.
"Did you fall asleep or do we need to call for help?" the man from across the platform yelled.
"Fell asleep! Sitting down now," I called back. "I'm fine," to the construction workers down the platform. I wasn't fine, though.
The subway rattled into the station and I scrambled onto it. The doors closed on my shadow and we rumbled off. I removed my hat and scarf and sat sweating. My head felt like something had bashed it into the wall and the floor. Half the route later I was home. Tired and weakened for another attack but on guard. Today I will burn sage and drink lots of water and tomorrow I will go to church.

Out.
V.

#13 W. Crack-In-The-Universe Street, New York.

Big Moose Lake

I don't know how haunted the lake is. It tops the list of most haunted places in the state, but I think that's just because it's in the Adirondacks, which starts with A. My father used to take me and my brother up there every summer to stay at the last great American lodge.

My father and I were always friendly with the waitresses. One of them, Emily, lived across the lake and commuted to work in her own motorboat. When the dining hall was closed she would sit on the docks and draw the loons. One time she took my family out for a ride in her boat. She took us to the gas station dock where we got Sugar Daddy's and then she drove us all the way to the other end where there appeared to be a creepy lagoon. I remember there was always a fog over the lake and it seemed to originate in that part. Emily drove us into the very middle and shut down the motor.

Then she told us a story. In 1906 this scumbag, Chester Gillette, was two-timing a lot of chicks when one of them, the poor one, Grace Brown, got pregnant. So, being the scumbag he was, Chester took his pregnant girlfriend for a peaceful boat ride on Big Moose Lake one day. She never returned. In one account he hit her over the head with a tennis racket and pushed her over the edge, in another it was an oar, in one story the boat capsized by accident and Grace couldn't swim. Sources say her body washed up on shore the next day. Emily told us she was never found-- still in the lake, she said. The story has been made into at least two novels, one movie (staring the late Elizabeth Taylor with her huge doe eyes and Montgomery Cliff as the troubled Gillette) and an episode of Unsolved Mysteries. 

I looked out at the fog as she was talking. And then down at the murky green water and tried to see Grace down at the bottom. 

That night I had a dream. I was sleeping in my bed at the lodge when a fog started rolling in. The lamps along the sidewalk that ran along side that part of the lake started going out, one by one as the fog hit them. The scene turned eerie, cold, dark, cast in blue. At the far end of the sidewalk from our house a woman appeared. She was in a long light dress, made pale green from the lake. She started walking slowly. The fog proceeding her with each step. Lamps flickering off as she approached them. Until the whole lake was dark, silent, and her face was in my window. 

That is the only nightmare I ever had at that lake. 

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.

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. 

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.