If you don’t have any friends, I recommend you get a ghost.
There’s a ghost in my house. He wears a trench coat and carries what looks like a machine gun from World War II. He may have returned to my house after the war and had a hard time or maybe he was killed on duty, but either way he lives with me now.
And I have a photo of him for proof.
That’s right. It’s on my phone right now and it’s clear as day. This isn’t one of those smudges that may or may not be something. This is absolutely something. My security camera snapped a picture of him walking in my office. This was on the very first day that I had installed it and the ghost and I were both caught off guard.
The camera is a simple device that you plug in and aim into the room or out your window or wherever you think there’s foul play or something interesting to catch. My friend introduced it to me after he had caught an acquaintance in his apartment having sex with someone who was not his wife.
Apparently the guy had been running around complaining about his marriage and was trying to win their mutual friends onto his side. He went to great lengths spreading a rumor that his wife was cheating on him and despite all his best, faithful efforts they may break up. While my friend was out of town he thought he’d help out by giving his poor buddy a place to stay. What the guy didn’t know was that there were security cameras throughout the apartment and as soon as one of these cameras sensed movement it sent out an email alert.
My friend got a ping on his phone, checked his email, and there was a naked man scampering around his kitchen. Two seconds later another ping, and now there were two naked people looking through the refrigerator for a snack, giggling and hugging like a happy couple, and one of those people was not the guy’s wife. Busted.
Naturally, I bought the same camera immediately.
I installed it in my office at home, plugged it in, and headed out on the road for a show in Denver, fairly confident that I wouldn’t catch anyone naked but maybe I’d get to see my dog once in a while. I was sitting backstage waiting to go on when I got my first alert. I opened the email, checked the feed, and there was my dog, scampering around my office, looking for snacks, totally naked! It wasn’t very scandalous but still very exciting. Here I was in a totally different state and I could see real-time activity in my office. What a world.
I instantly thought what a cool beginning to a horror movie this would be. I pitched it to my opening act. “A guy is away, he gets a ping, checks his feed, expecting to see his dog, and there’s a man, staring directly back into the camera. An ugly man, with a scar across his face, unshaven, chewing on beef jerky. He’s in the house. His family is in that house! The murderer just smiles.” That’s a good story. Just then I got another ping.
I opened the feed again, wondering what my dog was doing now, and I swear to you, I received the image of a ghost. A shadowy yet very clear image of a man, wearing a trench coat and carrying his weapon. It looked like a ghost. A real, honest-to-goodness ghost. Spirit-like, shadowy, and somewhat menacing. I showed my friend and he nearly passed out.
I called home immediately. It was ten o’clock at night. I was in the horror movie that I just pitched. My wife answered the phone. I yelled, “Get out of the house. It’s in the house.” She was annoyed and hung up.
I called back. This time she humored me and answered my questions. The family was home, but no one had been in my office. There’s nothing in the office that would cast a shadow of a soldier. It’s on the second floor, no reflections from the street or passersby possible. This left me with only one explanation. There’s a ghost in the house! She hung up again.
When I show people this picture they freak out. Grown men shudder. Children run. One woman screamed and threw my phone across the room.
There are skeptics; there always are. People who don’t believe in ghosts always believe in explanations. They sit back, eating peanuts, nonchalantly tossing out ideas of other things it could be.
“It was probably the wind, maybe a raccoon, you were probably drunk.” They could be right on all of those counts, but none of it could explain away this ghost.
And to be clear, this is an amazing photo. This isn’t a blur. This isn’t a light that needs to be highlighted and conjured into an image of some sort. This is a photo of a man. Clearly defined and creepy as hell.
Naturally I began trying to find out more about this intruder. Or was I the intruder? The house is fairly new, around twelve years old, so why would a ghost from 1944 be walking around in it? Well, if you saw Poltergeist, then you know that it’s not the building, it’s the land: “You removed the headstones but you left the bodies, didn’t you?!”
Sure, the land has always been here, and there must have been other homes on the property before this place. I figure it was probably a modest home, and as we live in Southern California, it was owned by a struggling actor. He gets a couple of bit parts, his career is starting to gain momentum, and then Hitler ruins the whole thing. He has to give up his dream while he enlists in the army to stop the destruction of the planet, something that men back then didn’t think twice about.
He’s out there fighting the good fight, killing Nazis, drinking coffee out of a tin cup, maybe writing a letter home to his wife, and a bomb hits his foxhole and he’s killed. He’s confused, upset, doesn’t want to hang around in Germany, so he makes his way back home so he can call his agent and get back out there auditioning for parts. He doesn’t realize that he’s dead, and he just walks around the house every day wondering why his agent doesn’t call. It’s very similar to what I’m doing in that very same office right now.
It’s kind of comforting knowing that he’s here. He’s become my most reliable friend. Now, when things turn on and off without any of us having flipped a switch, we know who did it. When I hear someone whisper or see something move out of the corner of my eye and there is no one there, I know there really is.
You should totally get one.
I don’t see why a ghost is such a hard thing to believe in. We have a spirit. We are spirits. We have palpable energy. It doesn’t seem to me that impossible that energy can’t hang around in one of those planes we know nothing about.
Not all of it makes sense. I get it. It does seem a little strange that they keep their pants on and have only one outfit. If I were a ghost, I’m pretty sure I’d be naked all the time. And it is weird how confused they seem to be. You would think that if you transcend this world, you’d have a better understanding of what’s going on. They never seem to be that bright, which may be why they end up stuck in an attic for all of eternity.
I stayed in a bed-and-breakfast in Massachusetts once. These are perfect settings for ghosts because the whole thing is creepy from the start. “Here’s our house, we’re not using all the rooms, let’s have total strangers come and sleep in our extra beds, take a shower, use our soap and towels, and before they leave in the morning we’ll feed them some breakfast.” That’s spooky.
I had checked in kind of late. The owner had one eye, and he didn’t wear an eye patch. I figured that he probably did most of the time, but it was late and in the same way that most people feel great about taking off their pants at the end of the day, he had taken off his patch. It was a curious sight and I couldn’t stop staring, so I did my best to stay a little to his right, out of view.
He was a little cranky, maybe from my staring, and told me I could have my pick of the two rooms as I was the only person staying with him tonight. I suddenly felt like we were on a date.
Everything creaks in a bed-and-breakfast. The stairs, the doors, even the bed creaks. If you’re an engineer, you know it’s because of the aging materials in the house. If you believe in ghosts, you know it’s the sound of lost souls. Either way it makes it difficult to be as quiet as possible, which is what you are trying to do when you are staying in a stranger’s house.
I lay down on a bed that had a doily for a bedspread and looked like a good place for an old lady to die. I turned out the lamp that looked like a porcelain ship and closed my eyes. I couldn’t fall asleep. I was listening to all the weird noises and trying to figure out if anything was a threat. I heard the wind rustling through the leaves outside my window. I thought I heard footsteps, but it was just the old pipes groaning and shuddering. And then I heard something that I could not explain.
Actually, at first I felt it. A coldness came over me. Not like a window left open or the breeze from a ceiling fan. This was a dank, soulless cold more like a presence than a climatic event. And then I heard it. A woman, whispering in my ear.
“I like it here,” she said.
I bolted up and turned on the ship lamp, and there was nothing there. I told myself it was the wind, but man oh man, that was a pretty articulate wind. I turned the light off and lay back down.
“I like it here.”
Oh, come on! Was it Johnny One-Eye? Was I going crazy from exhaustion?
What was happening?
When the owner came into the kitchen in the morning, wearing an eye patch, he found me sitting at the table. I had been sitting there all night long, scared out of my mind. I asked him if anyone had ever said anything about a ghost in the house. I expected him to turn, lift his eye patch, and say, “So, you’ve met Delores. She’s always doing that.”
But he just poured me some warm orange juice and gave me a little chuckle as if I were making a joke. I pressed him a little further, but he obviously had no idea what I was talking about. But I knew it was real. I heard it. And how could I expect him to see it, on account of his eyes and all.
It was real. It freaked me out. And I left immediately.
But unlike that creepy wraith, my ghost doesn’t give off an “I’m going to murder you” vibe. First of all he doesn’t talk much, which I know is strange for an actor. He also doesn’t pick up steak knives and chase the children, which is good.
I named my ghost Karl. He’s kind of cranky, as all out-of-work actors are, but he has hope. I feel like he has that eternal optimism you need to survive in show business, even though he’s dead. As with all actors, it takes a long time before you realize when your career is over. I hope he isn’t reading this over my shoulder.
I like having him around. You really should be open to your own haunting. He’s like another friend. But like all friends, he can be annoying. He thinks it’s funny to hide stuff on me, but it’s really not. I know, people misplace stuff all the time, but this stuff goes away and appears in the same spot a little while later. Ghosts apparently have a pretty lame sense of humor.
And again, if you don’t believe that my ghost can move stuff around, I get it. I’m sure you can come up with a bunch of reasons why this isn’t possible. Well, if you need proof, I also have a video.
I really do.