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?