1. Because I live in New England and it is always drafty here, even in summer, even indoors, especially at night. These houses so often have both basements and attics, so much cold air entering and escaping.<\/p>\n
2. I find photos of my friend Steph where I shouldn\u2019t and always at the right time: in the trunk of my car after a break up; in an old folder containing tax documents; the only item out of place in my locked apartment after I\u2019ve been gone all day.<\/p>\n
3. Because sometimes there is no rational explanation.<\/p>\n
4. In Ecuador, a group of students calls me late at night from a house across the village. Stalks of corn tower over both sides of the road, which is marked by their long, jagged shadows. The woman who owns the house lets me in. The calendar on her wall is three years passed. \u201cThey say there\u2019s a ghost,\u201d she says, \u201cthe girl doesn\u2019t have a fever,\u201d and she shrugs her hands towards me, offering me the problem. She leads me through a room littered with bright plastic toys, back to the bedroom where my students are awake. I think it\u2019s good my students haven\u2019t woken up her children with their ghost.<\/p>\n
5. They exist in nearly every culture. Some fear them and some worship them, some do both. Skeptics argue we are all looking for belief that death is not the final word, that our loved ones still hang around us, caring about our broken hearts and burnt toasts. I say: of course they are still here: where would they go?<\/p>\n
6. A photo of Steph out of place on a shelf after an open house, a day of strangers trudging through my home, leaving doors unlocked, closets open, my dead friend waiting to sit with me when I come home to the vacated space.<\/p>\n
7. Because I need to.<\/p>\n
8. Once I was home alone in the sense that I was home but also that I was alone, in the sense that I wanted to sleep with a knife but also that I wanted to wake up with a knife. Instead, I left the lights on and worked at falling asleep. In the middle of the night, my purse fell off the table where it had been squarely placed. A breezeless room, a heavy bag, I got up and wrapped a serrated knife in a dishtowel and spent the rest of the night with it tucked in by my head. \u201cIt was your father, of course.\u201d My mother said the next day, \u201cI\u2019m sure he didn\u2019t mean to frighten you.” I unwrapped the knife and slid it back in its cradle.<\/p>\n
9. In the bedroom in Ecuador, the girls are white-eyed and frantic with a new panic. They aren\u2019t afraid of ghosts back in the US. One girl saw a woman in the corner by the ceiling, long black gown, long black hair, just floating. I picture someone who\u2019s held their breath and jumped into a pond with all their clothes. The girl had bought a necklace that day at the market. \u201cI think they\u2019re connected,\u201d she reports, \u201cIt was choking me.\u201d None of them can sleep. \u201cDon\u2019t try to tell us ghosts aren\u2019t real,\u201d they say, \u201cWe know what we saw. We threw the necklace deep into the cornfield.\u201d<\/p>\n
10. Because I live in New England and I recently bought a used Oujia board at a thrift store, and if that\u2019s not just the most haunted sentence you\u2019ve ever heard. A friend gasped when she saw it, told me she was sure this was how I would die. My sister begged me to get rid of it, said it was dangerous, even older than the one she\u2019d had in college that had warned her about an unfaithful man. It\u2019s too worn-down to use, with a glider than won\u2019t glide, but stumbles clumsily between YES and NO and doesn\u2019t even produce a satisfying letter scramble for me to interpret. I keep it anyway.<\/p>\n
11. Because I want to.<\/p>\n
12. My father died and the man I had just married was angry about the timing. \u201cDo you think he can see us now?\u201d I asked, \u201cYou know, like the things we do?\u201d But the man laughed a little angrily because he didn\u2019t think I was serious.<\/p>\n
I wanted touch in a way that might have been OK for a father to see, or even do, like a hug around the shoulders for comfort or my head on his chest. When this failed, I went for other kinds of touch, thought this might make the man less angry, followed him into the shower. About two minutes in, a shampoo bottle fell from a shelf with no apparent provocation and hit my head.<\/p>\n
\u201cWell he didn\u2019t like that much,\u201d laughed the man I had married, dripping.<\/p>\n
13. What I tell my students: I don\u2019t know if ghosts are real or not, but if they are real, they\u2019re real all the time, and they\u2019ve never hurt us before. The girls consider this and fall asleep. I make my way out, weaving between plastic tricycles and half-blinking dolls on the floor. The mother and I make eye contact, smile, shake our heads. The next day, the students tell me there were no children at the house.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Sonja Vitow teaches French, Spanish, and Creative Writing at a small middle\/high school in Boston, Massachusetts, where she is also a student in a middle school ukulele class. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing (fiction) from Emerson College, and is co-editor of literary magazine The Knicknackery. When she is not teaching or writing, she can be found personifying her miniature schnauzer and attempting to learn how to embroider.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 1. Because I live in New England and it is always drafty here, even in summer, even indoors, especially at night. These houses so often have both basements and attics, so much cold air entering and escaping. 2. I find photos of my friend Steph where I shouldn\u2019t and always at the right time: in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4833,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"footnotes":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false},"categories":[45,12],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/pen-for-10h.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p42xiC-1fa","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4784"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4784"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4784\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5027,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4784\/revisions\/5027"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4833"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4784"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4784"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4784"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}