Ghost Story - The Books

I had to look back to see if I've blogged this before. I don't think I have. If I have, I guess it will be interesting to see how this version compares to how I remembered it before. This is a real ghost story, though. Real in the sense that it's true, at least it is true as I remember it. There is no fabrication here, but the story is only as factual as I can remember. And since I'm the one telling it, and there is really no way to check the facts of the story at this point, it is as true a story as it can possibly be. Just like any story is, really, ghost story or not.

So after my first divorce, I was still living in my house in Westminster, CO. I don't know if living there is really right. It was more like I was just occupying the house at 8882 Lowell Way while I was getting drunk and playing video games between going to work and going to the bar. I didn't have cable. Couldn't afford it. Well, I couldn't afford it and afford to go to the bar and get drunk, so I gave up cable. This conveniently also gave me a reason to go to the bar, to catch sports events on their t.v. Like I said I also played a lot of video games, XBox to be more explicit. I also watched a lot of movies from Netflix.

My drink of choice at the bar was Bud draft. My drink at home was bourbon, Jim Beam if I could afford it and Early Times if I couldn't. So there were a number of mornings that I would wake up in the morning on my living room floor and be in the 7th inning of a 3 game series in Major League Baseball and not remember how the first two games went or be at the home screen of a dvd movie that I had started and passed out halfway through.

In my living room was a little bookshelf, sort of near where I sat and played games. The amusing thing to me now is that little bookshelf was like a fold-up $15 thing that may have come from IKEA but on it were all my "nicest" hardcover books, some very old Dickens, some first editions from authors like Nabakov and Chuck Palahniuk. So, being as I wasn't exactly in my best mental state, I barely took notice when the books on its shelves would end up "put back wrong". If you have books, I mean, if you really "have books" that you love, then you know what I mean about being put back wrong. Why are these ones in a series out of order? Or why is this Dickens down here with Leon Uris? That sort of thing. But I began to notice. Then they were back upside down or backwards. Regardless of how drunk I was, why was I putting books back backwards? Plus I began to not drink as much, trying to pull myself up by bootstraps and actually making it upstairs to my bed at night.

There was a weird thing about this house. It was new-ish. It had been built only a couple years before Jessica and I bought it, but had actually never been lived in. It was one of the first built in our neighborhood immediately after the model home that the backyard backed up to. On eof those cookie-cutter KB homes that is a great starter home, but you begin to notice that the doorways aren't quite plumb after you live in it a while. That wasn't the weird thing though. That's pretty much normal now. The weird thing is that I felt this old woman there, like a ghost. I never saw her; I felt her. But also sometimes those things happened like the stereo or t.v. volume turning up on their own, lights that flickered, things that had some rational explanation, but just the feeling that they were caused by some old woman seeking attention.

The weirdest thing was this clock I had out the back door. It was something I had picked up for free or cheap, maybe I had brought it home from Sharper Image where I was working. It was this outdoor clock with a thermometer and some pictures of different birds on it. It was always an hour off. At first I thought it was just slow or that I had forgotten to reset it after daylight savings or something. But no matter what I reset it to or when, I don't remember it ever being something different than an hour slow of the real time. I swore the old lady was resetting it.

So one night, I was there playing video games and suddenly very annoyed by some books that were out of place, several of them upside down on the shelf. I sat and reordered the books, making sure they were all in some rational order and right-side up. I had never made a case study of the outdoor bird clock but I set about doing so with the bookcase that night. I had a couple drinks but still remember going up to bed, eager to come down and see what happened to the books the next day.

When I did come downstairs the next morning and looked - Every other book was upside down. They weren't in some different order nor put back with spines in. Simply every other book on the shelves was now upside down. Even now I have to laugh at how clever it was - It didn't just take off all the books into a pile. It didn't just move a few books and put a couple back upside down as if to keep me guessing. That old woman said to me, "Oh, you want to know if I'm real or not? How's this?" and left behind a sign that was completely unmistakable.