Three Ghost Stories

When I was sixteen, we lived in the middle of the woods in a super tiny town in an 1860s house. The whole town was haunted, if you ask me. One day, my girlfriend Renee rode her bike over with her Oujia Board. Dead serious, we were meeting after school for this dead serious ghost session and we were both like, totally dead serious about it...that is how we sounded. Well, it was serious in the sense that we weren't merely fooling around with the Oujia board. We actually had a specific spirit in mind—the one my mom had recently seen. Apparently, on returning back to bed one night after investigating a strange noise she heard outside, my mom startled a ghost in her bed. The figure she saw was a tall woman in white pajamas, who leapt back from the bed to squat down with her back against the wall. My mom made a specific point to say that this woman's knees were drawn up to her chin, and that she gripped them like she was protecting herself. The woman's eyes were wide open and full of fear. That's the last thing my mom remembers before falling back to sleep. Renee asked the Ouija Board, "What is your name?" The planchette spelled out "R U I N." We never did it again and my mom is still mad we messed around with a Ouija Board. Renee and I are both ruined, now that I think of it. In different ways. Sorry to bum everybody out. I should call her.

My second ghost story is thirdhand. My aunt tells a story about seeing the faint figure of a woman out in the back field of a house where she was staying as a guest. I relate that story elsewhere. That's a good one. It's safe to read it, nobody gets ruined in that one.

My third ghost story is more personal. Last year, the Boston music community lost Asa Brebner, a friend and downright rock star who everyone adored, every last scruffy, dastardly inch of him. Asa was the kind of guy whose stories are better than fiction, and he'll grudgingly tell them if you ask him. "Everybody knows all this stuff," he grumbled when I interviewed him. "For the younger readers," I implored. I meant myself. I didn't know any of the stories, Asa was a good twenty years my senior and had seen it all. I love his music. I bought every single record. I wish I had found the money to buy one of his art pieces. Asa painted and made interesting wall art out of old guitars, Barbie dolls and toys, which he glued together and painted. I've donated some items for the projects, like a bunch of extra Barbie doll legs I had laying around (my pieces use the tops, I didn't need the legs). I love Asa's work. His pieces are gorgeous. Asa left this mortal coil suddenly in March 2019, to the great shock and grief of the entire Boston music community. Asa's send-off was held in a pretty big local theater, with bands preforming songs from Asa's vast discography of roots rock and America. When I logged in for a ticket, it was sold out. I shook my head: Oh, Asa. You always wanted shows to be earlier in the day. They'd do better, you wrote in a blog piece titled, if I'm not mistaken, "Fear of Late." You wrote that it was an affliction that all your friends have and that condition keeps them from coming out to your plentiful rock shows. I have the fear now, too, old man. One day in the spring of last year, several months after Asa died, I was in my kitchen and I felt him. Just for a few seconds, out of nowhere in the middle of the day, I smelled him and felt him there. I even felt drawn to the back part of the kitchen, in front of the back door. When his scent drifted away, the feeling went away too. But I felt really really serene all of a sudden. Just a quiet, deep kind of peaceful serenity. "Asa," I whispered, kind of mysty-eyed. I wasn't scared. It felt good. I feel so honored to have gotten that goodbye. There'll never be another Asa Brebner. ∎