Are There Clocks in the Afterlife?

We frequently think of there being no time, once we've passed from the physical world. Ghosts sometimes seem blissfully unaware of the passage of time, walking through walls where there once was a door, or strolling two feet below the earth because the paths they once knew have been covered over by years of change. 

And yet, I also know there are such things as "timed" hauntings. By that, I mean the kind of haunting that occurs at the same time, whether the it be on a regular date, a regular day, or even a regular hour of the clock. We had one at our house.

During my younger years I started keeping the erratic hours of the teen student: late nights, late mornings if possible (usually not), with naps whenever I could grab them. Staying up that late taught me that the house I lived in had a sort of "haunted routine." It would start at ten-thirty every night. I could have set my watch to it. The activities usually announced themselves with the sound of furniture shifting in whatever room I was NOT in. When I was in the sun porch, I would hear a chair move in the kitchen. If I was in the kitchen, something would scrape or knock in the dining room or the sun porch. But it was always at that same time.

Afterwards, there would be a literal string of noises, sometimes in the same room as I was, but just as often in a different room. I would be treated to what sounded like a number of people passing through and around the rooms on the first floor, including the one where I was seated and trying desperately to ignore the noise. There was also a sense of not being alone; it was like being present at a small dinner party and also being ignored. Sometimes those dinner party guests could get downright rowdy: the occasional loud bang that shook the windows in the sun porch but somehow failed to disturb the rest of my family sleeping upstairs were a shock to the system and always left me wide-eyed with my heart pounding.

And then,also like clock-work, everything stopped at one in the morning. Without fail. And without further disturbance. Well-trained dinner guests, I suppose.

But I'm not the only one to talk about that sort of thing. I knew a fellow once who lived in a slightly haunted apartment in Chicago. I say "slightly" because the haunting consisted of one thing only. Every night at ten PM his bedroom door would close itself. He noticed this happening night after night at the same time, so one night he decided to experiment, and made sure that his bedroom door was already closed at the appointed time. He wasn't disappointed. At ten o-clock sharp, the door opened itself, and then shut again. Apparently, his nightly door-closer was not to be deterred.

There are ghosts that turn up on anniversaries: battles, murders, suicides. Ghost story books are filled with tales of clock-work ghosts.

So if eternity is outside of time, and the afterlife is expanded beyond calendars, minutes, and hours, how do these revenants know when to show up for their appointed hauntings?

The Tactile Ghost

In past posts, I have largely written about ghosts that can be seen. The apparition beside the bed. The extra face looking back at you in the mirror. The filmy mass at the bottom of the stairs, ready to ascend.

 I have also written at least once about ghosts that can be heard. Clairaudient is the description of the person who hears the dead without necessarily seeing them. Skeptics might suggest that such a person is mentally ill and is hearing voices that are only rooted in illness, but I think we all know the difference between hearing a voice outside of ourselves and hearing one within. Barring actual mental illness, that is.

Some spirits announce themselves with a particular odor or smell. The scent of a flower like lavender or lilac is commonly associated with the ghosts of fine ladies. Places that have witnessed disasters sometimes will haunt a person with the smell of smoke if there has been a fire, or the smell of the sea, if items in a room have been involved in a shipwreck. And of course, smelling sulfur or something rotting and nasty is NEVER a good thing.

But there is also the sense of touch. And that's one that seems to connect with me from time to time. 

I always tell people that I grew up in a haunted house. Heck, it's in every author's bio I have ever included at the back of my books. My sister and I frequently heard things. Jim actually saw something. But I have felt things, and the first time was back in the haunted house of my childhood.

When I was nine years old, I shared a bedroom with my sister. (Thank God. Sleeping alone in that house? No, thank you.) She was a lighter sleeper than I was at the time, and so anything restless in the house was probably going to disturb her before it bothered me. However, one night I remember waking up when it was still full dark. The entire house was still so I knew that everyone was in bed. I would guess it was about two or three in the morning, or thereabouts.

Going back to sleep -simply going to sleep- was never a problem for me when I was younger. I could shut down like C3P0: now you see me awake, now you don't. So when I woke up I didn't anticipate having any problem falling asleep again. I remember that I yawned and stretched and I also remember that I put one hand on top of the headboard of my twin bed. And was surprised to find what felt like a finger beneath my own hand.

I remember scrabbling around with that hand, trying to figure out what I had touched, and just one more time I felt that other finger beneath my own. It was across the top of my headboard, the end of it curled around to follow the angles of the wood. By then I was literally flailing around with my hand, looking for whatever was attached to that finger. I have no idea why I did that: I sure as heck wouldn't do that today! At any event, whatever I felt was gone. I never turned around to see if anything was there. I was young, but I wasn't stupid. I had touched something -or someone- that was behind my bed one moment and then gone the next.

That was just one more thing in the list of "things that happened" in that house. Fast forward to two years ago. Married, with children and grandchildren, and writing ghost stories as a job. I woke up in the middle of the night, a common occurrence at my current age, and lay there for a little while. I laced my fingers behind my head on the pillow and a moment later felt something touch and glide, finger-like, along the underside of my arm. YIKES! I was no longer nine years old, and lots of weird things have happened to me since I was a child. I yanked my arms back down and got farther under the covers. And managed to find a way to fall asleep again.

I don't give much thought to either of those incidents. Except that last night, yes, last night, also in bed and awake in the darkness, I felt something again stroking along my arm. (Why doesn't she sleep with her arms under the covers at all times? you're probably thinking. Good question.) Yes, I got back under the blankets. No, I didn't open my eyes to see what could have been there. I may be post-menopausal, but I'm not stupid. 

I am not the sort of person who likes being touched by someone I don't know. Being touched by someone I don't know and who is probably also dead goes far beyond simple dislike. More like get away from me. But there it is. When I least expect it, something decides to reach out and and touch...me.

The house I live in now isn't haunted. I would never call it that. On the other hand, I do feel that sometimes -well, okay, frequently- visitors pass through our home. I hear the noises: the rustlings, the knockings, the shufflings, sometimes the footsteps. That's okay. That lends itself well to what I write. On the other hand, I would really appreciate it if all our guests would keep their hands to themselves at all times.

Neighborhood Haunts

 When I was a kid and easily as ghost-obsessed as I am now, I used to walk home from school everyday and look over the houses and buildings in my neighborhood, trying to find one that looked like a haunted house. I was always disappointed, and - personifying in true childlike fashion the definition of insanity - I never stopped looking, even though the houses, the apartment buildings, and the storefronts never changed. I take that back. One of the houses down the block from me burned down and that looked pretty ghastly, a ruin of charred brick and wood and not much else. But it never looked ghostly. And it didn't last long anyway. Someone came in and razed the sad remains of the foundation and built a new ultra-modern house where the old one used to be. That shook up the neighborhood appearance a bit, but it still didn't look haunted.

I was so dense as a child that it never occurred to me to stop looking at appearances. I LIVED in a haunted house, for petesake, and it didn't look like one. My parents and my aunt and uncle turned themselves upside down to upgrade our house -a bit of a fixer upper- and by the time they were done, the bricks were all nicely tuck-pointed, the trim around the windows was all newly painted, and the yard was edged in flower gardens that my mother slaved over for hours. My dad grew rosebushes, but they were in the back and not visible from the street. For all appearances, our house was trim and well-kept and actually quite inviting. Except that it was fricking haunted.

As an adult, I sometimes look out my office window, gazing westward down our street, and wonder if any of the houses I see have a particular problem going on behind those immaculate front doors and so-much-cleaner-than-our windows. Houses are self-contained and closed off to the world at large: for all I know there could be a poltergeist intrusion happening right across the street and I would never know. Ideas like that are like catnip to a ghost-story writer.

Now that I no longer look at appearances, and don't go trying to find stereotypical haunted houses, I find myself wondering what could be behind a lot of the closed doors I see. Years ago, my daughter was in school with a girl who lived in a haunted house right on the main street (literally, Main Street) of our little town. The ghost was that of a little boy who had died there and his spirit was playful and mischievous. I don't know if the kids were afraid of him, but none of them doubted that he was around. That house was a big old mansion, beautiful and well-kept and, I think, included on the historical homes tour in our village. And it was haunted.

I guess, looking back to childhood, that there were one or two places on a street perpendicular to ours that might have qualified as looking haunted. One of them was eventually bought by the parents of a classmate, and if that place had ever been haunted, I would have believed that my classmate's family would have chased away anything that was there. My friend was one of nine kids, and the family was a rowdy Irish one, so any spirits hanging about would either have moved on or learned to adapt. On the other hand, they were Irish, so anything is possible.

There was, however, the dark mansion that was next door to my classmate's house. It was a rectory, but not one connected to a church since the priests that lived there were not parish priests. Teachers, maybe. Or scholars paid and provided for by Mother Church. When I was growing up, the house had a reputation as giving away some of the best Halloween treats EVER: little bags of bakery-type butter cookies. Yowsa! But there came a day that the priests moved away from the building, and years later, I heard a rumor that they had left in such haste that the altar stone in their chapel had been left behind (supposedly a big no-no, I'm told), and that the house itself became quite disturbed, full of shadows and a strong sense of evil. It was deserted for quite some time before anyone new moved in. (I heard another rumor that the new owners were part of the Chicago mob; if that's the case, scary is as scary does, eh?)

But I often wonder about that old rectory because the rumors I heard about it, about the forgotten altar stone and the evil that stole into the shadows of the deserted rooms, came not from someone in my own neighborhood but from a woman I met by chance in a college class, who lived in an entirely different part of Chicago but was active with her church. She had heard all about this place, and while she was relating the stories to me, we realized she was talking about the rectory in my neighborhood. Small paranormal world.

I never did learn any more about the goings-on there. I got married and we eventually moved out of Chicago altogether. But I do remember trick-or-treating there on Halloween and gloating over that bag of cookies. The priest who answered the door was always really kind to all the kids who rang that bell. But I wonder, now, if those priests were just teachers or scholars. What if they lived there specifically, for a reason, to keep something born of shadow safely within that shadow? What if they were there to protect and to guard?

And if that were the case, what on earth would have driven them out?

Just Passing Through

I grew up in a haunted house, so I know what that feels like. I knew what places in the house were always disturbed or disturbing, I knew what time the "nightly haunt" would start and stop, I knew when that one particular thing entered the room and it was time to leave. In other words, at my old house, despite being unknown, the haunting was a known quantity. (Love those paranormal oxymorons!)

The house I live in now is another matter. It's not haunted. It's more like Grand Central Station. Let me backtrack. Some years ago, a woman I know who is a very talented card reader, mentioned the fact that sometimes, spirits or entities may just "pass through" one's house. It's a concept that has always stuck with me, and it goes a long way in explaining some of the things around here. Some people may say it's all in my head anyhow, but I don't think so. And I'm not the only one who feels these things.

Sometimes our doorbell rings, for no reason. Sometimes our dog would go to the front door and bark his deepest, hackles raised, ears at full-mast, full-throated bark at something we never saw. Sometimes I hear someone walking down my hall even though I know I'm home alone. One time, our home-alone younger daughter came home to find the place ablaze with lights, including the garage, at one o'clock in the morning, even though she was the only one in residence at the time. And I'm not even going to detail what my four-year old grandson comes up with around here. As I type this, I just heard something shift out there in the living room, which is around the corner and down the hall from my office. Love that, when I'm home alone.

In my most recent manuscript, the one I'm about to revise, I have a character who observes that reading about ghosts, or talking about them, tends to attract them. "Like it or not," she says, "they'll all come to you."

Maybe it's not such a surprise I wrote that particular scenario in this house. Maybe I should have that character add that even though spirits might be attracted, maybe they're also just passing through.

Fingers crossed.

Do I Really Want to Know?

So what's your ultimate haunted house? Could it be Hill House as dreamed up by Shirley Jackson? How about Hell House from the movie of the same name, or maybe even the Overlook Hotel?

Here's mine: it's the house I grew up in on the north side of Chicago. If you had looked at it while my family lived there, you'd never have guessed it was haunted. My parents had terrific taste in decorating and the interior of the house was warmly furnished and inviting, with the deep blue carpeting and the furniture arranged to encourage conversation, whether from the depths of the sofas in the living room, or around the huge family table in the dining room. There was light, there was laughter, and there were lots of friendly people.

Unfortunately, there was also SOMETHING ELSE in that house and if I ever get the nerve up, I plan to research the history of the place and find out what went on there before we ever moved in. What could have happened there, to leave the echoes of a baby crying, of furniture moving in distant rooms, or the cold disturbances that swept past us all at will, caressing with chilly fingers and leaving goosebumps and an uneasy shudder or two in its wake? I have already made a couple of tentative forays into finding out who lived there and when and what happened to them. Given some time and some energy, I hope to unearth the entire story. After all, there's got to be some kind of reason for that bricked-up room in the garage...

Any how, let's you and me swap stories! You tell me about your haunted house, and I'll tell you a little bit about mine. But just a little. I know there's a huge, huge story in there someplace, and when I learn it, well, y'all will learn about it, too.

Be sure to order my new story "Hunting Spirits" at Quake! http://quakeme.com/