8: The Shop
1996–1998
After a year of owning our own business, finances necessitated I return to work outside of our company for a while. Since Wes’s schedule was now more flexible than mine was, he was the one in charge of watching the children after school. Being the ages of ten and eight, they didn’t need a lot of supervision and by this time, they had a good setup at the shop. If the TV room and the “skating rink” failed to entertain them, they still had the attic that we’d converted into the playroom. The attic was where I usually found them when I got off work and picked them up. Of all of their choices, that seemed to be their favorite place to play. I never understood their attraction to the attic until a few years later.
After we had rented the building for a couple of years, we decided to build a shop of our own next to the house. After moving into the new building, I overheard the children talking one day about how they missed the old shop. This came as a surprise to me, but now having some experience at being a mother I’d learned the best way to find out what was going on with the kids was to listen to them as they talked to each other.
“I liked the old shop better,” Troy said as he and Keshia came in to set the table for dinner. “I kind of miss it.”
“Yeah, me too, the new shop isn’t any fun. Dad won’t even let us skate in there.”
Troy slammed the plate down on the table. “I know. It stinks!”
I thought I must’ve heard something wrong when Troy said he wondered what the spool was doing and that they should have asked their dad if they could bring it to the new shop.
I knew what he meant by “spool,” but I didn’t know why he would want it. Two empty utility spools had been left behind by whomever had used the building prior to us renting it. We’d turned one of them up on its end and converted it into a table for the kids to use. Instead of trying to haul the other one down the stairs, we’d left it lying in the corner of the attic.
My ears really perked up when I heard them talking about how the spool would chase them. I turned off the stove, went into the dining room, and asked them what they were talking about.
Putting the silverware down beside the plates, Troy told me one of the spools used to chase them around the attic.
I laughed and said something about that being
impossible.
Keshia, now being a little older, contemplated the absurdity of it all. She told me she didn’t know how the spool was able to chase them, but that it really had.
I sat down at the table and tried to remember where the spool was the last time I’d paid attention to it. I commented on how it must have been on an incline or something.
Keshia shook her head as she told me that couldn’t have been the reason because the spool had chased them back and forth throughout the attic. She shrugged. “I think the ghost just liked playing with us.”
Troy rolled his eyes and voiced his complaints about Keshia believing in ghosts. He agreed that there was something “weird” about that spool, but it had nothing to do with ghosts.
Even though dinner was getting cold, I knew I wanted to hear more of this story. After talking with the kids for awhile, I too had my suspicions that this activity was brought on by the ghost that haunted the old shop. They told me that sometimes when they were in the attic playing, the spool would slowly start moving towards them. They would get in front of it and run to the wall. The spool would then stop, let them walk around it, and then chase them to the other end.
Wes came into the house and saw all of us sitting around the foodless table. “Isn’t it time to eat?” he asked.
I waved him to a chair and told him we’d eat in a little while, but I wanted him to hear some things the kids were telling me about the old shop.
After getting him caught up with the conversation, he shook his head and replied that there was no possible way the spool could move on its own—at least not back and forth.
When Keshia commented on how she thought it was the ghost, Wes sighed. “And here we go again.”
Keshia asked him that if the shop wasn’t haunted, how would he explain why she and Troy were locked in the attic all of the time.
Wes exhaled as if someone had just hit him in the stomach. He sat back hard in his chair and mumbled something about how he’d forgotten about that.
Now I was confused. I had no idea what they were talking about. Wes sat quietly and listened as both of the kids filled me in.
Apparently, when the kids were in the attic playing, it wasn’t unusual for them to find that they were locked in. They would have to go over to the window that looked out into the shop and yell until they could get their dad’s attention. Wes confirmed that when he’d get to the attic door, he’d find that it had been locked—from the outside.
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. The door that led to the attic was a hatch door that had to be pushed open from the stairs. The lock was only accessible from the stairs. If the kids were in the attic and Wes was in the shop … Who could have locked the door?
Trying to process all of this was giving me a headache. I was having trouble understanding how this could happen and why no one ever stopped to think about how the door got locked. “Wes,” I said, looking at him in disbelief.
He put his hands up in the air, “I don’t know.” He went on to say that those were hard times and he honestly hadn’t given it much thought. He said he’d open the door and tell them to quit bothering him.
I was stunned and couldn’t believe he’d never thought about it. As I voiced my dissatisfaction in the care he’d given the kids, I could see that Troy was enjoying seeing his dad get “in trouble.” Wanting to see a little more, he started mimicking Wes’s response. He poked at the air with his index finger. “I’m busy, you two quit fooling around or I’m going to make it to where you can’t play up there anymore.”
After laughing at Troy’s performance, Wes said, “I don’t know how that door kept getting locked all the time, but it sure did.”
I’d always known that old building was haunted, but I had no idea of the amount of activity that had gone on there. Once I started working outside the shop, I rarely went there other than to pick up the kids. Now I was beginning to wonder what I’d missed.
Pulling me back from my thoughts, Keshia relayed another “game” to me that she used to play in the attic. She said she’d take a handful of crayons and drop them on the table. She’d pick a color and ask her invisible playmate to move it. After she’d gone through each color, she’d start over, but this time asking the ghost to drop them to the floor. Keshia would watch as the crayon she’d specified would roll across the table and land on the floor.
When Keshia and Troy were young, and trying to learn their colors, I played this game with them. Why Keshia decided to play this game with a ghost could be anyone’s guess. But growing up with a ghost in her own home somehow made the ghost’s response seem normal—it was, after all, a two-person game and she needed a partner.