Tales from the basement:
Garvey, John
OF SEVERAL MINDS John Garvey TALES FROM THE BASEMENT IT WAS A DARK & GLOOMY NIGHT... Since it's close to Halloween, it seems like a good time for ghost stories. But since this is a serious...
...When she died it turned out that the interior of the house was in terrible shape...
...The old woman told me that when she first moved into her house she was a young bride, and the city's southern limit lay only a few lots away...
...He didn't respond to the invitation to enter, but went away...
...People say their voices can be heard at night...
...And when our children were old enough to tell them the story without having to spend the night reassuring them, my wife and I told them about Mrs...
...I will say only that it impresses me that these stories have to do with people who have been in one place for a long time...
...We told her that these were car reflections, street light reflections-something reasonable-sounding...
...she teaches science...
...She and her late husband had bought another house across the street for her mother, who died years before, and that house had been uninhabited ever since...
...One of them was a woman who lived there with her two children as her marriage dissolved, and, to make some of the extra money she needed, she sublet parts of the house (quite illegally) to other people...
...She never really believed us...
...She wedged things under it, but it worked its way loose and nothing seemed to stop it for awhile...
...They weren't like that kind of light, she said...
...I was moved from outright disbelief in ghosts to a less certain agnosticism by an experience we had, and by the witness of an entirely credible friend...
...My daughter's reaction was a mild sort of "I told you so" response...
...Don't you feel foolish for having read this far...
...We were surprised at this mild reaction...
...She's always moving around in the basement...
...That's when he told us about his sister...
...I can understand why anyone would listen to ghost stories somewhat skeptically...
...The night my friend from the South Pacific told us these stories he and his wife said that they would never have talked about them openly back home...
...On the other hand, we all really enjoyed that evening of mysterious tales...
...Hunter had grown senile and, it was learned after her death, spent the last year of her life living in the basement...
...Happy Halloween...
...And isn't it pretty interesting even if you don't believe it, even if you believe that all of these things can be explained without your having to believe that ghosts are real...
...I'm agnostic about them myself...
...More: the house went unoccupied for a long time, and my daughter told us that at night she saw lights moving around inside the house from her bedroom window...
...Whatthe woman andher daughter didn't know, but we did, was that Mrs...
...Right beyond it were fields, and on harvest evenings she could hear the corn hitting the wagons' wooden backboards as she lay in bed...
...She had no children, and spent a lot of her time tending the yard outside...
...There were other stories that night, of animals who serve as totems cursing those who attack them, weeping women who vanish mysteriously, all of them the classic sort of ghost story...
...Happy Halloween.ear...
...These stories are found in every age and culture, and they are remarkably similar...
...But since this is a serious magazine, before telling ghost stories let me make my nod to seriousness by saying that Western deductive logic is a good, limited way to understand and explain some things...
...My friend's father-in-law was disturbed, because he knew that the visitor lived some distance away...
...The next day they learned that the man had not in fact visited them, but had died in his own village the night before...
...It was rented with minimal repairs to a series of tenants...
...The visitor was unusual on two accounts...
...An old woman lived next door when we first moved in...
...Almost everyone loves them, though...
...I both did and didn't want them to be true...
...A Catholic missionary priest lives near a place where the dead are said to take their leave of the island...
...Remember Mrs...
...She was fiercely independent and very proud...
...The priest told my friend that he also hears their voices, and prays that their leaving will be peaceful...
...Once, at a family feast, he and his father-in-law (who has an unusual ability to see ghosts) both noticed a man standing at the doorway...
...She let it be known when we offered to drive her somewhere once that she was used to taking care of things on her own (emphasis very much hers...
...The friend with the scared sister grew up, entered the Peace Corps, and married a woman from the South Pacific, where he decided to live...
...Modern folks...
...When they visited us we talked about the neighborhood, the one he grew up in, and our ghost story came up...
...A friend who grew up next door to it told us that his sister always drew the shades on her window, because she was afraid of the strange lights moving around inside the empty house next door...
...Hermother, understandably, wondered about this and asked what she meant...
...A door began to bang, as if a strong wind were blowing it...
...Henry James said, "only connect," so I will...
...Not everything is quantifiable or replicable in a laboratory, and there is more to the way things are than you can describe by weighing or measuring them...
...But not more than half an hour later we noticed that most of the kids in the neighborhood were gathered at the basement windows of the house next door-it was deserted once again-peering in, waiting for something strange to appear...
...The ghosts are too close there...
...He riffles through the papers, taps them upright the way news readers do to make it look as if they are really working, takes a final sip of water, and leaves the podium...
...Other things, however, it is not so good at explaining...
...Hunter's mother's house, the uninhabited one, across the street...
...my son seemed to let it drift past him...
...He and his wife are politically active...
...How about that...
...Then he told us better stories-true ones, he insists, and I believe him-from their island...
...no one else there was...
...The woman came next door, and asked if she could have a glass of wine with us to relax...
...It had been a tense week: her divorce became final and she broke a bone in her foot, and then one of the tenants tried to commit suicide...
...Hunter's house and the slamming door, and what my friend had said about the mysterious lights in the house across the street...
...We moved into a house in an old neighborhood toward the center of town...
...It could be that ghosts-or at least ghost stories-aren't going to happen often, or at all, in a culture where nothing lasts long and no one stays in one place long enough to make the kind of impression necessary to haunt it...
...I remember reading ghost stories when I was small and being frightened and loving it...
...Hunter's spirit...
...She told us about the wild night, and said that when the door began to slam her adolescent daughter told her, "It's Mrs...
...One night there was chaos there...
...I hear her moving around," the girl said...
...He simply stood, looking in without joining the company, and he was wearing traditional native dress...
Vol. 116 • October 1989 • No. 18
