Tag: ghosts

Posted on

Screamer

“I ain’t afraid of no ghost!” Hmm, well, no howling, ethereal walker through walls anyway. I don’t get those. But the screaming young man in the basement of a building I used to live in? Yeah. He was always there, silently screaming at me. The first time I met him was quite the experience—just wide-mouthed, silent screaming, eyes behind glasses, expressing great anger. No one else noticed him, so he might have been angry that people ignored him. An extrovert by nature, it must have been hard on him only to be seen by me. I was more interested in working on my model railroad than solving his issues – it must have made him madder.
Did he appear only at night? No, he was daylight, nighttime, anytime specter.
But come to think of it, my old grey cat. Clancy saw him also. Clancy, AKA – the Grey Menace, was unused to anything not being scared of him. He took violent displeasure in meeting the screamer. The screamer screamed at Clancy, and Clancy yowled back. Eventually, I had to yell at both of them to shut up. This caused my wife to shout down the stairs for all of us to shut up because the baby was screaming.

It was much more peaceful at the next place we lived. Just neighbors screaming at each other.

Daily writing prompt
Are you superstitious?
View all responses
Posted on

Scream

A neighbor is off to the Carolina’s for a week. Nothing eldritch or spooky about that. He asked me to bring his trash barrels into the backyard so they wouldn’t be out front all week: yup, nothing weirdly supernatural there except for the dog.

I know of the dog. My neighbor had the dog as a young man, a shepherd collie mix interested in playing with neighborhood kids and protecting the house. Unfortunately, the dog was dead years before I ever moved into this neighborhood. Yet the dog was growling and sniffing at me. So I put the barrels in place, said goodbye to the dog, and left the yard.

I’m not surprised when things like this happen to me. They’ve been happening all my life. But it’s not like I walk through a world populated by echoes of former pets, and it is mostly that. Just every once in a while, I’d see the other cat the Gray Menace was playing with, realize that there were no cats of that description in the neighborhood, and have the kitty disappear when I paid attention.

Like most kids, I learned early not to mention what I saw to my parents. I wouldn’t say anything when the family pets started playing with cats and dogs my parents couldn’t see. There was no sense in inviting trouble from my easy to anger father; it was easy to give him a pretext for a slap. I learned that he also saw some of this stuff many years later.

My cat, the Grey Menace, would lead a chase through the house with invisible playmates. He never liked my first wife and would deliberately lead the chase across her lap. When this happened, she’d sit up straight and exclaim with a shiver, ” Oh…someone just walked across my grave!”
One night listening to jazz, he jumped into her lap, curled up, and seconds later, a second cat joined him; she fled the house to visit her parents and didn’t come home that evening.

So the pets and I are alright with each other. They just go about whatever business they have, and that’s it. It’s the rare person that upsets me.

There was the house that we moved into just after our marriage. There was a furious young man in the basement who’d start screaming at you when you came down the stairs. After a while, I found reasons to avoid the cellar. The only time he stopped yelling at me was when I tripped and fell down the stairs. He stood there and looked at me with expectation on his face. We moved several weeks afterward.

Yeah. The animals I can take.