Ghost Story

Into the Wilderness: Story 57

The political landscape has been such a roller coaster that I couldn’t bear to dwell on it. I’m both heartened by the democratic “wave,” as it’s being called, and terrified of the possible increases in my ACA premiums. So I have decided to write about something more predictable than today’s politics: ghosts.

Halloween and All Soul’s Day have just passed, a time of year celebrated by the Celts as Samhain (pronounced Saw-when), marking the end of harvest, the beginning of winter and a period in which the demarcation between the real and ethereal worlds thins and becomes permeable. Thanksgiving also is right around the corner, our American annual holiday celebrating our theft of indigenous land, sublimating the Puritan horrors in stories of mutual exchange and custom sharing. At this time of year, in addition to all the complexities just noted, I always remember something else: my ghost story. I never thought much about ghosts until I lived with one for sixteen years.

My first house was built in 1922. Only one couple had lived in the quaint, white Dutch Colonial until we bought it in 2001. The house’s blue shutters framed single-paned casement windows, original to the house, through which the wind whistled. The couple had made few improvements in their nearly eighty years of ownership. The kitchen was a well-maintained 1930s dream with a huge integrated porcelain sink, countertop and ridged draining board. The enormous Anderson stove— a brand started by former Chambers stove employees— included a broiler, soup well, oven and six burners— all working perfectly until a coil broke and a replacement part couldn’t be found.

The first time I saw the ghost, I thought he was my husband. It was a Saturday and I watched him walk across the kitchen into the pantry. He wore a red checked flannel shirt. I actually followed him into the tiny, walk-in pantry, chatting about chores needing to be done. In the pantry, however, he evaporated like computer pixels from a broken screen, a whole image and then a disconnected montage of colored squares fading to empty space. I called for my husband to find where he was. He was outside in the backyard, nowhere near the pantry. Another time, I watched the ghost walk up the stairs into the bathroom, his heels clacking on the old wooden steps from bottom to top.

My daughter could see him too. She mentioned the nice old man in the checkered shirt on multiple occasions, a comment that could terrify any parent into wondering if some crank was hanging around the house. But I was never scared about this visitor. I knew he was the previous owner, a plumber who had meticulously maintained the pipes and plumbing. I figured this was why he always walked into certain spaces. He was pointing to them, alerting us to problems. The pantry held the furnace’s chimney, and the bathroom had a tiled shower with a cracked pan. When the pan gave way, water poured through the floorboards and down the front of the lone wooden kitchen cabinet, an unfortunate waterfall.

Discovering the broken chimney turned out to be more curious and dangerous. Early after moving in, we had to replace it. The workmen mistakenly did not vent it correctly and dangerous levels of carbon monoxide had been building in the basement and seeping through the chimney into the pantry.

We discovered the issue because our kitchen sink got stopped up the night before Thanksgiving. Only one plumber was willing to come out to the house. After he unclogged the sink, he asked to look in the basement. “Sure,” we said. He had no reason to go in the basement, but he asked several times. I thought, “he’s looking for extra work.” Already cleaning the muck on the floor from snaking the clogged sink, I let him go down anyway. He’d find an overloaded laundry room and messy playroom, and not much else.

The plumber descended the basement stairs and was down there for about five minutes. But then his heavy boot treads thumped upstairs. “You have to get out of here immediately,” he said, opening every window in the tight kitchen. He ushered me and my girls, sister and niece outside into the frosty night air. He had discovered a carbon monoxide leak. We called PSE&G, and he insisted they come out immediately. They did.

The carbon monoxide levels were so high, starting the stove could have provided an adequate spark for a fire. Since I had been prepping the turkey when the sink clogged, I was planning to turn on the stove. We also could have died from carbon monoxide poisoning. We’d been having headaches, wondering what was going on. Now we knew they were caused by the carbon monoxide— this was before detectors were required.

The plumber was a good guy with an eerie intuition, not an opportunist. He only charged for unplugging the sink. The PSE&G contractor correctly vented the chimney that very night so Thanksgiving could proceed as planned. He charged less than $200. The pantry I had followed my ghost into was the source of the leak.

In telling the story now, I wonder about the confluence of odd factors. Did I sense the leak and imagine my ghost, a carbon monoxide hallucination? Was it all a bunch of coincidences? Was it simply a plumber Good Samaritan and an unusually responsive PSE&G? Perhaps all. Perhaps none. The timeline for some of these events are years apart, though the forced structure of storytelling pushes them closer together.

I am thankful for the strange set of coincidences that led to resolving an invisible and impending emergency. I still believe in my ghost who visited periodically with fatherly protection. When all was done and we had fixed the pipes and electrical wiring, he left us. His work was done.

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