Now, I’m not a believer, as you know, but…
Who’s to say there are no ghosts?
When I was pregnant with M’hijito, his father and I lived in beautiful high-ceilinged old house in an elegant midtown historic neighborhood. Being centrally located and full of pretty 1920s and 30s homes, the area was very hot with the young professional set…and it was a playground for the homeless mentally ill, had the highest per-capita rate of drug use in the city, and was served by an unsafe and unusable public school. With a baby on the way, we considered moving.
But we loved the house—loved it to the point of distraction—and really didn’t want to leave. So instead we decided to add on to create a little more room for the new family member and then hunker down and learn to live with the facts of life in the big city. We hired my best friend’s father-in-law, an underemployed architect, to design the addition.
Bob came out of retirement (it’s hard to be “retired” when you’ve never worked, to speak of) and created exactly what we wanted: two large rooms added to the back of the house, one a spacious nursery and bedroom for the pending baby, and one a custom-designed office for me, appointed with a vast built-in desk, matching cabinetry, ceiling-to-floor bookcases covering an entire wall. What we didn’t know—no one knew—was that during this project Bob was suffering from terminal cancer. He seemed perfectly well as he supervised our contractor and ran interference with the city inspectors. But within a few weeks after the addition was completed, Bob died.
By the time we moved into the rooms, my son was born and six months old. Because I was finishing my dissertation, M’hijito was farmed out to a wonderful, grandmotherly neighbor for several hours a day, so I could write uninterrupted. I had a big old German shepherd, Greta, the only dog I’ve ever known that truly rose to the level of greatness. Greta saved my son’s life once…but that’s another story.
So on this quiet autumn day, I was working in my office, writing, frantically writing, with Greta dozing in her usual spot near my chair.
Suddenly, Greta sat up, her ears at attention and her gaze fixed at a point in space near the door to the room. She seemed to be watching something. But nothing was there. Not that I could see, anyway.
Her eyes tracked across the room, as though she were watching someone or something enter and walk across the floor.
She rose to her feet. And I rose to my feet. She didn’t appear to be alarmed. She made no sound. She didn’t lift her hackles. Strangely, I didn’t feel alarmed, either, even though this was very odd behavior. She started to walk around, in the same way she always followed me around. She moved back and forth in the room and then walked out through the door and into the baby’s room, where she paused, walked around a bit, paused.
I knew it was Bob. He’d come back to look at the rooms. He hadn’t seen them after we moved in—he’d died soon after the project’s completion. He came back to see what the place looked like with people living in it.
So convinced was I of this conceit that I actually spoke his name aloud. Greta again moved across the room as though she were following at someone’s side. At that point I said something like “Thanks, Bob. You did a beautiful job. We love the new rooms.” A few seconds later, just as abruptly as she’d gone on the alert Greta lost interest, came back to me, and sat at my side. Whatever it was that had happened was over.
We walked back into the office. I sat down and went back to work. Greta went back to sleep.
Who knows? Maybe she was having some sort of waking doggy dream, a canine hallucination. But the sense that someone was there—and the sense that it was Bob—was inescapable.
Still: if humans can have dreams and visions of the dead, why can’t a dog? It’s easy to understand how people living in less skeptical times believed the dead could return to visit in dreams. Dreams like that can be extremely vivid.
The other night, I experienced such a dream. For me to dream at all is unusual: as you get older, you dream less and less, and in my dotage I hardly ever dream, and almost never in color. But here was this dream: not only in color but with imagery so tangible it felt three-dimensional—not at all like the usual movie reel.
In the dream, I had gone to Texas to attend a professional conference, which took place in the hotel where I was staying. I hate going to conferences. Few things bore me more intensely than sitting through endless presentations at conferences. So I was less than thrilled to be in this old-fashioned, historic-looking hotel, though it was a handsome old place, its walls painted a creamy color with deeply polished walnut trim complemented by thick, rich carpeting.
Morning having dawned on what I expected would be a tedious day, I got up, showered, dressed, and walked down the stairs that led from the upstairs rooms to go to breakfast. Already pre-bored, as it were, I dawdled on the steps, playing like a little kid with the wooden banister. When I reached the bottom, where the staircase curved out into the lobby, I looked up and there was my father.
My father, a Texan fond of saying the best thing about being from Texas is being as far from it as you can get, has been gone for so long that I can barely remember what he looked like. In a waking moment, I couldn’t conjure his face to save my life. But there he stood, clear as day, in full color and three dimensions, absolutely recognizable.
He looked just as surprised to see me as I was to see him.
“What are you doing here?” I asked. I didn’t give voice to the words in my mind: What are you doing here? You’re dead!
He said he was in town to see his mother, who was ill and needed someone to visit her.
My grandmother died long before I was born.
Shortly, I awoke. The image of my father’s face and the sound of his voice were as clear and sharp as if I had just seen him alive. And who knows? Maybe I did.
Have you ever had an experience where you thought, seriously, that you were visited by the dead?
Last night, in fact. One of my daughter’s “sitters” who died unexpectedly and too young a couple years ago. I awoke this morning with the dream still vivid. A troubling dream in which the sitter asked for my assistance. I don’t remember what she wanted, but the sense of need stays with me today. Interesting that you had a “visitor” during the night as well. An October 31 experience? Dunno, but I feel like I’m supposed to do something. Contact her daughter? Remember her? Forgive her for some resentment I still feel over the way she treated my daughter?
Yes, several times in the months right after my husband’s death, I woke up convinced that I’d dreamed his passing. “Thank God, it’s just a nightmare”. And I’d reach for him and realize that the nightmare was true. Eventually, I accepted his death, even subconciously, and the dreams tapered off
About a year ago – five years after his death, I had another patch of these dreams, several nights running. I felt an urge to visit the columbarium where his ashes are (and mine will be). The plaque on his niche was missing (as were several others). When I asked – someone had vandalized the area – scrounging for brass to sell. The columbarium switched to different plaques and the dreams stopped. Weird, eh?
My family has a colorful history of “visitation” stories. Back in the old country, when my grandfather died, his last wishes were as bare bones as you could get. He’d already built his own coffin, picked his plot, and instructed the family to bury him simply without ceremony. HE didn’t believe in all that other mumbo-jumbo. They didn’t do as he’d asked because the entire village turned out to see him buried, and the family didn’t have a choice: they couldn’t very well shoo people home and say we weren’t honoring his passing!
That meant there was a village’s worth of witnesses to see his dead son honoring HIS last promise to my grandfather. My uncle had died early in the war, his last words to my grandfather were “no matter what happens, I’ll be back with my troops to deliver you home (to your final resting place).” Uncle was KIA, and during those days, it took weeks to send word to the family. During the intervening time, my dad was confronted by a yellow butterfly every morning. The butterfly would buzz him several times, and then die in front of him. It stopped after they received official notice of Uncle’s death. The morning of granddad’s funeral, the coffin was set up in the backyard (they lived on a rural farm), and a single yellow butterfly was on the coffin and the yard, as far as the eye could see, was covered by yellow butterflies. Uncle, it seemed, was back with his men, and they accompanied the funeral cortege to the burial site. They left after the services.
As if that wasn’t enough, my grandparents’ housekeeper/caretaker was haunted by him in her dreams for weeks; he sat on the unwanted gravestone with his arms crossed, glaring at her without speaking every night. She apologized endlessly but it took him at least a few weeks to relent.
Years later, on a rare visit to the farm, a yellow butterfly would light on my grandfather’s portrait in the evenings. We took a photo, but there’s only a blur where the butterfly was, while grandpa’s portrait smiles quite clearly.
I’ve only had a few dreams of the dead, most of them feature my dogs who died 2 and 7 years ago. Once, I dreamed that I was trying to talk to my friend who died in a car accident 3 years ago, he kept saying that he couldn’t stay long and had to leave soon, but I was so relieved to have him “back” that it didn’t register that he shouldn’t be there at all.
Belief’s just much stronger in the old country, I suppose.