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Don't Call Them Ghosts |
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| IN ANTICIPATION, along with some expectations, I began this book. I had heard of this, or a similar experience, and I’ve had my own visitation experience so I looked forward to learning more about this story and the children. As I read, my feelings vacillated between excitement to read the next line to “is this over yet?” There’s nothing like a good ghost story and this one has the added ingredients of children in spirit, children in the physical and a mother’s love. I had more questions than answers at the end but it was the writer’s prerogative not to pursue more details, which might have been available, as she explains in the Afterword, but she didn’t want to change the history of her experience. It is a sweet story meant to be read without expectations. This is the author’s first book and wasn’t meant to be a treatise on the reality of life after life, ghosts, etc.. However, I had my expectations and they remained unmet. That’s unfair to the author so I will close by saying this is more than a ghost story, it is a love story which spans years and dimensions—a mother’s love story. EXCERPT: Boom! Boom! Boom! The thunderous noise ripped through our sleeping house. Something in my brain was commanding me to open my eyes. What in the world was that? I thought to myself. I rubbed the crumbs of sleep out of my eyes as I slowly opened them to the darkness. I lay there silent and listening, curled in again the small of my husband George’s back. Had I heard a booming noise or did I dream it? Maybe I had just drifted off into that shimmering sea where we seem to float between sleep and consciousness, that often jolts us with the alarming thought that we’re falling or that we’ve missed our step.
Boom! Boom! Boom! The sound tore into my ears like reverberating thunder, but I knew it wasn’t thunder. It had been a beautiful clear evening in May, with not a cloud in the sky. George stirred from his sleep. “Did you hear that?” he whispered. “Of course I heart it,” I whispered directly into his ear. I was too scared to speak any louder and even more scared to move. “What do you think it is?” I asked anxiously. “I don’t know. Are all the kids in bed?” he murmured under his breath. I released my bear hug on George and quietly, so as not to even have the bed squeak, turned away from the security of his body just leaning over to the other side of the bed enough to see the amber glow on the alarm clock-l:05 A.M. Speaking rapidly and barely audibly, I replied, "They were. Before all this racket started. In bed and sound asleep." I had completed my routine bed check before turning in just after midnight. George and I had laid in bed talking about our new house, a very old Victorian style house we had just moved into two days before. Boom! Boom! Boom! The splitting noise intensified, again blasting my momentary pleasant thought through the rooftop. "George, the noise is inside the house," I exclaimed in a whisper. "It's coming from downstairs." He could hear the anxiety in my voice.
I bolted straight up in the bed, breathing heavily from the uneasiness of what George might encounter. I waited for George to say something. Finally; I called out in a loud whisper as if trying to shout in a lowered voice, ”What is it” All I heard was silence. After three separate successive occurrences of those deafening booms, I figured whoever was causing all this commotion wanted to make sure we heard them, so why whisper? Common sense told me that it wasn't a burglar. Intruders, who break into other people's homes in the middle of the night, try not to get caught, but who was it? And where the heck was George? "George?" I called to him sharply, no longer whispering, but in a perfectly audible voice. Still there was no reply.
A little concerned for George's safety and a little annoyed at him for not answering me, I threw back the sheet and bedspread and got out of bed. As I approached the doorway; I cautiously peeped around the door frame and looked down the hall to see George still standing silent on the landing and completely motionless. He was frozen to the spot, leaning against the wall, his left hand holding his handgun limply, his right hand gripping to the banister so hard his knuckles were white. His gaze told me he didn't hear me when I had called out to him. His stare was glued to the entryway below. All the while the drum-like booms continued. What did he see? What was down there? As if in a trance, I grabbed hold of the banister with a firm grip and slowly walked the length of the hallway; standing beside George. I looked over at him, but he didn't look at me. He never took his face away from the entryway below us. I was afraid to look downstairs. I lowered my eyes to the front entrance and instantly became as paralyzed as he by what I witnessed. The old house has double doors, both outside and inside. The outer doors were screen doors and inside are finely finished, sturdy hardwood double doors. At the bottom of the stairs, in the entry; our eyes were fixed on the inner double wooden doors. Finally; and for only a moment, we looked away from the doors and at each other in stunned disbelief, my eyes questioning George for an answer. Both of us hoped the other would say that our eyes, the house, our imagination, something or somebody, was playing a trick on us. But we knew better. We knew. There was no way that what we saw could have been anybody's trick and certainly not our own imaginations. The outside doors remained closed. We could see the metal hooks latched tight on the screen doors as the inner double doors were slamming back and forth. Those solid wooden doors swung open wide, all the way to the wall-then Boom! , they would slam shut with deliberate force. We saw nothing, nobody was to be seen. Our bare feet might just as well have been nailed to the floor of the landing, as we stood spellbound gazing down at what we saw. Dumbfounded, we watched the doors open wide and slam shut for three or four more performances. After it became obvious that we had seen the show, it stopped. We stood there waiting for an encore, but the show was over. I was trembling so hard I grabbed onto George's right shoulder for some support. Without speaking a single word to each other, we both walked in dazed disbelief back to our bedroom. George returned his handgun to its hiding place beneath the mattress and we got back into bed. We neither one knew what to say, so we didn't say anything, not a word all night. Soon enough I heard George's soft familiar snoring, but sleep did not come as easily for me. I lay there in the dark with my eyes wide open, thinking about what had just happened. I knew what it was. When there is no explanation for something so bizarre, then the only explanation is not only simple, it's obvious. And whether George would ever agree, it didn't matter. How I wanted and loved this house! Now two days after we moved in, I find it is already occupied - by ghosts! © Serena Poisson, 2005 ©
Don't Call Them Ghosts by Kathleen McConnell, 2004. Llewellyn
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| ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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Copyright:
New Earth Publications, 1999-2009. PlanetLightworker.com is published
by New Earth Publications, | |||||||||
Without
saying one word, he quietly slipped out of bed and pulled his trousers
on. Sliding his hand under his side of the mattress he retrieved his
handgun. If he was expecting my usual argument about the handgun, he
was wrong. I hated his keeping a loaded gun under the mattress, but
I hated the idea of an intruder even more. George tiptoed barefoot to
the landing of the stairs and didn't utter a word for what seemed like
five minutes. After those few agonizing minutes of dark, dead silence,
the crashing booms echoed again. He turned on the light at the top of
the steps and that gave an illuminating yellow glow to the downstairs
entryway as well as to the upstairs hallway. The loud booming continued.
