megandy.com | Nancy's Ghost in the Attic

As promised - here's a brand spankin'
new Blathering from Nancy!

It’s a funny thing when you have children, while you think you are pretty in touch with your childhood and you can tell your friends amusing stories about growing up, it’s not until you have children that these stories actually bring back the feelings that go along with them. You start with a little memory that is suddenly triggered by something that your child asks or she has just experienced. Then the floodgates open, you suddenly can remember minor details about experiences you had forgotten all about. Experiences that you thought held little meaning or significance.

This is what has happened to me countless times over the course of the last, say six years. Something my daughter, Kiana will ask me will generate a trickle of visual images and then emotions and what didn’t seem so funny, is now freaking hysterical as we laugh and generally make fun of me and my foibles. It has become especially apparent after the birth of her sister, Malia. Now, not only do I have vivid and funny memories of my own childhood but now I can also recall in great detail, my life as it related to my own sibling, Andy. My daughter never tires of hearing these wonderful if somewhat humiliating experiences (or torments, depending on your perspective). Perhaps you, my dear reader, shall care to partake in some of these amusing or at least laughable memories.

GHOST IN THE ATTIC

Foreward: I have read somewhere that a woman did an informal survey and asked this question: while growing up was there somewhere that you, for unknown reasons, felt particularly spooked and attempted to avoid at all costs? Her responses were a resounding, yes! For some, it was the basement or cellar, for others a corner or closet or crawlspace, still others sited the garage or (gasp!) the parent’s bedroom. Well, for me, dear people, it was the attic of our house at 118 Pine Street in Elmhurst where I lived from the age five to twelve.

Now it was particularly hard for me to avoid this attic as my bedroom, which I shared with my sister, Tracy, was on the third floor and shared half its space with the attic. There was a door with a window between the bedroom and this evil attic. And also, because it was an attic, the sides of the room sloped down and there were two crawl spaces along the sides of the room. These crawlspaces, while they started in my bedroom, extended all the way to and through the attic.

I am not sure when my “uncomfortableness” with the attic began. But I do know that I never played in bedroom for very long and not much by myself. I always felt “watched”. My parents had this wonderful idea, however, to turn one of the crawlspaces into my “playroom”, where I could leave my toys, color on the walls and be alone (and, of course, quiet and out of everyone’s hair). The door was only about 2-3 feet high, so even I had to crawl in there to play. There was a bare light bulb that shone light maybe six feet in. I would NEVER go in farther than that. Now, sometimes, I would go in there to play and be in the middle of a very involved imaginary performance, happy, content and oblivious and would suddenly get a very creepy and “watched” feeling from the attic. I would try to ignore it but within a short time I would have to get out of there. I was so sure that there was an old woman ghost at the far end just watching me and waiting. On several occasions, in my attempts to flee, the door to the crawlspace would stick and I would kick madly at the door in a desperate stab to get the hell out.

Now I could avoid going in the attic, there was nothing of mine in there but, alas, my parents always saw to it that there was something that HAD to be retrieved from the attic. I would grill my mom as to the EXACT location of the said box and then proceed upstairs. I would approach the door to the attic like the doomed heading to execution. I would get so insanely scared yet I just knew I was being foolish. There are no such things as ghosts! (right?). I would open the door and turn on the light. Standing in the doorway, I would try to spot the requested box and psyche myself up for several minutes, like an Olympiad preparing for the big race. I would calculate how long it would take me to get there, grab what I needed and GET THE HELL OUT! And then I would make that mad dash. Occasionally I would look back over my shoulder just in time to see the door slowly closing. I would literally run like a maniac to get to that door before it closed and locked me in forever.

Other times, I would get halfway there and chicken out and run back and give my mom some excuse. She or my dad would come with me and take me right to the box while berating me for not being able to find it myself. I didn’t care, at least I wasn’t alone in the attic.

I was so convinced that there was a ghost in the attic, I knew what she looked like, and had a whole list of “attributes” for her. She had lived in the house a long time ago and had committed suicide (or was it? my imagination sometimes had her murdered by her husband, he hung her and made it look like suicide) in the attic. Her tormented soul was forever confined to the attic. She was not bent on killing me, just a mischievous prankster, who just wanted to lock me in and watch me panic for awhile. She was content on staying in the attic but she did not like being disturbed. She was going to make sure that darn kid and her family left her alone! I would sometimes think (or was it dream) that I saw her body hanging from the beams of the ceiling. Her eyes open and her body gently swaying.

My obsession with her and the evilness of the house came to a head the night my parents went out and left me in the care of my brother and sister. I was probably about 10 and I don’t remember where Andy was at the time. Well, Marc and Tracy had another agenda: go out with their friends and, ahem, party. So they decided that I was old enough to be left alone and scared of them enough that I wouldn’t tell on them (or couldn’t, because my parents had their own problems, but that’s another story) and they left. I was okay for awhile. At first, I couldn’t go upstairs to my room, then I went to the basement to watch TV but I still felt “watched”. I went to the kitchen but the pantry now spooked me. I went to the porch but then the rest of the house terrified me (I felt like I was in the Poltergeist movie). The whole house was now evil, laughing and grinning at me, watching me and waiting to “lock” me in. So I felt the only place I was safe was outside. So I went to the front stairs and literally waited hours for Marc and Tracy to come home. Of course, Marc and Tracy had a good ol’ time laughing and making fun of me when I told them I had been outside for three or four hours because the house was haunted and the old lady ghost wanted to trap me. haunted

All of this would be locked in my memories as a ridiculous hallucination but years later, when talking to Marc, Tracy and my mom, we found that the attic disturbed all of us. Marc (possibly in an attempt to placate me) said he swears he saw the curtain on the attic side of the door get pulled back and let go, as if someone were looking through the window in the door! And now my mom tells me, she was afraid to go up there and couldn’t stay in the attic either. Great, just send your defenseless child to fend off the ghost! Part of me as always wanted to research the history of that house because I’m telling you, that nasty ghost was so damn real.