Somewhere in Massachusetts, my great-grandfather, a child of parents who had immigrated from Donegal before he was born, heard a knock on the door one night. He was closest so he was the one to open it. Nobody was there.
A few minutes later there was more knocking and once again when he opened it, he saw no one. The third time this happened, Jim was annoyed. He went to his mother and told her, "Somebody's playing tricks on us. They've knocked on the door three times and ran away before I could see them."
"That's no trick," his mother said, "Somebody back at home has died and this is the way they've come to tell us."
Mail came slowly in those days but what arrived in an envelope weeks later was no surprise to my great-great-grandmother. A relative had died on the same day there were three knocks on her door.
Neil Gaiman wrote a novel called American Gods, telling how deities accompanied immigrants when they came to America but lost strength when they were replaced by television and other gobblers of attention. In my bloodline, this diminishment happened to ghosts.
There were no knocks on the door the night my father died. I was with friends, having a good time, when suddenly I knew I had to go home. There was no reason to give my puzzled companions, only that I needed to leave.
When I got home, I sat in an empty house in the dark and all I wanted to do was sing. And that's what I did for an hour or more, until my sister called and told me that our father had died, around the time that I knew I had to come home.
"America," a Welsh friend told me, "is the only country that denies the existence of ghosts." When I first moved to Thailand, I didn't understand why, with every move to a new dwelling place, I always spent a quiet hour or two one night in my first week of settling in, sitting in the dark with a lighted candle. It just felt right.
I came back to the States, knowing ghosts existed. I'd lived with one for a little while. But as an American, I didn't expect to find one soon after my return.
I came back with just enough money to rent a room in a friend's house. She had inherited this from her mother, a difficult woman with a flair for making her surroundings beautiful, both inside and outdoors. Her taste veered toward the Japanese so her house was one that embraced space and light and her garden was one that respected its rocky hillside setting.
I immediately found a bookstore job that filled my daytime hours and at night I was happy to be alone in a downstairs bedroom, away from the main living area. It was quiet and cool and dark so sleep came easily and ran deep, until the night I had a terrible dream. Someone I couldn't see was speaking to me and what they were saying was obscene and horrible, I woke up, mentally shook myself, and went back to sleep. That voice filled my sleep again, even though I tried to escape it by fitful bouts of waking and sleeping. It was disturbing enough that I told my sister days later. She looked troubled and said "If it happens again, come stay with me."
A week or so later I awoke to the sound of pounding on the downstairs door that faced the garden. Still half asleep, I heard it move along the side of the house, passing my bedroom and moving up to the floor where my friend slept. There it repeatedly struck the front door, loud enough that I knew my friend must have heard it. When it finally stopped, I was sure it left because the police had come to investigate.
The next day I asked my friend if she had called 911. She had no idea of what I was talking about. "It was probably raccoons," she told me.
I knew better. When I got home from work that evening, I brought a candle and flowers with me. I sat in the dark and silently told my friend's mother that as much as I loved and appreciated the home she had made, I wasn't going to stay in it. I would however respect her and feel grateful to her.
For the rest of my time in this place, my sleep was untroubled. It wasn't until after I'd moved to an apartment that my friend told me the truth. Before she moved into her mother's house, she'd rented it to a woman who left within a few months. During that brief tenancy, the woman heard closed cupboard doors slamming open against the wall and then shutting with explosive bangs in the kitchen when she was the only person in the house.
There are ghosts I've longed to see, the spirits I've loved. In America, they have no place. Only the ones who have the force of malignancy, my father, my friend's mother, are strong enough to break through the barrier of denial, and that makes me very sad. There was only one time in this country that I saw a whisper of a human shape come into view and then dissolve. I was listening to a Thai singer at the time so that may have made it feel at home.
It's never come back.
