If you tell me a ghost story I will listen attentively,
because I enjoy ghost stories, but don’t expect me to believe you. As an
engineer I believe in what I can see, hear, touch or what can be proven empirically.
I have never read a document that produced a shred of evidence supporting the
existence of ghosts.
And yet...in our house there have been a couple of events
that can’t quite be explained.
My wife and I
were lying in bed still awake though it was late. We heard our daughter running
down the hallway toward our bedroom. She wore onesie pajamas and the plastic
soles on her feet made a distinctive sound. When she reached our door she
stopped. We waited for her to come and jump into our bed, as she’d done many
times before. And we waited. And waited. Finally, I got up and checked. She was
in bed sound asleep.
If it had just been me I would have guessed I had a
hypnagogic hallucination...but both my wife and I experienced this. To think
this was a hoax by a two year old is ridiculous. Two year olds don’t have the
coordination to tiptoe silently. They don’t have
the acting skills to pretend they are asleep.
Fast-forward ten years. My second daughter is sleeping in
the top bunk of her bed. The bottom bunk is reserved for her friends when she
has a sleep-over. She hears me come into the room and climb up the ladder. But
it isn’t me. I’m out of town on business travel. And no one is there. It really
disturbed her. After that, for at least a year, she always propped pillows up
in the gap in the rails where the ladder goes.
Two unexplained events in the course of ten years is hardly
a haunting. What both events share is the sense of mimicry. And they mimic
routines that held strong emotional power for me and probably for the other
members of my family.
I took these events and wove them into my Spear Bearer short
story Mimic. As writers we are always recycling things from our lives to reuse
in our stories, and this is just one example of that.
Oh, and one last thing: My oldest daughter really did have
an imaginary friend named Kracken. And don’t tell her, but he always kind of
gave me the creeps.
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