My Haunted Bedroom

 

My bedroom was haunted, but I never mentioned it to anyone. 

I was seven-years old, imaginative, and highly strung.  Life was an adventure, all the time, but I didn’t welcome the ghost, or whatever it was, taking up unwanted space in my life.  My goal was to find a family member who believed the haunting in my bedroom, sensed it for his or herself, and helped me come up with a plan for getting rid of it.

For several months, I tried dealing with it on my own.  At first, I used my head like my father said I should about all things in life. At night, I tried to sleep it off; told myself the bone-chilling cold in the room was an aftereffect of the heat, moisture, and air-conditioning unit that didn’t mix well with the Florida humidity; imagined that the dead in the cemetery across the street wandered at night with no regards for boundaries; and believed the fog at the end block of the cemetery was a consequence of whatever chaos they had going over there.  I stayed up all night, staring in their direction, showing courage and awareness for their activities.

My father would have been proud of my thinking skills.  He had always accused me of not thinking for myself because he was an angry man, especially after we moved to Florida, to a rented three-bedroom, one bath, 1960’s ranch style house on a grimy lake. The overgrown oaks, mangoes and avocado trees in the backyard created a canopy of darkness and moist muddy earth where my sister and I played, climbed trees, chased each other, and rolled around in the mud until sundown. 

Those first few months we didn’t go to school either.  My parents were having a hard time figuring out our new lives, especially since they didn’t have any money. My mother blamed my father and his complicated relationships (he had been married four other times and had seven young adult children) for our having to run away from our lives in New York City.  She prayed, cussed under her breath, and cleaned excessively to deal with the stress of her new life. She especially loved using bleach and water from the garden hose to soak the house with the concrete floors and jalousie windows as if she intended to drown it. But she had encountered a new challenge to her aggressive cleaning methods as each mirror or glass she wiped cracked or shattered: first the bathroom mirror, then the decorative hanging mirror in the living room, and then the sliding glass door, which came down on the backside of her right hand cutting it open.

My father accused her of being insane as he drove her to the emergency room while she prayed even more fervently and hollered about something evil living in the house.  Regardless of her awareness for the unnatural, I did not tell her about my bedroom--the source of everything unnatural in the house--since her aggressive cleaning practices and fervent prayers had not made a dent in the problem.

My five-year old sister was the only one left to recruit, so I invited her to sleep in my bedroom one night, told her I was scared to sleep alone. She brought with her two spoons and the Heavenly Hash ice cream with chocolate and marshmallow from the freezer because she loved eating, sleeping, and talking.

“I can’t find Jimminy,” she said, staring at me with her big brown eyes as we both dipped our spoons into the half-gallon of ice cream she held in her small, chubby hands.

“Where did you put him?” I asked, concerned for her sadness over losing a favorite teddy bear.

“I think I left him in our old house in New York.”

“He must be in one of the moving boxes. I’ll help you find him,” I said enjoying the ice and cream and conversation on my bed as if there was nothing wrong with my bedroom.

“I don’t like it here,” she continued.

“You mean this room?” I asked excited, thinking she might be sensing its strangeness.

“No, here in Florida.”

“You will. Just sleep now,” I said, taking the ice cream away from her, figuring she would feel something when she tried falling asleep.

“I don’t want to sleep.”

“You can’t sleep?”

“No, I don’t want to.”

“Please sleep. Just sleep,” I ordered, annoyed by her lack of awareness for the situation.

My sister slept soundly that night, snoring softly like a child in deep dreams, and she didn’t mention anything about a ghost, so I didn’t mention it either.  I thought then I would have to shoulder the haunting on my own.

Three months later, my stepbrother moved in with us. My mother assigned him a cot in my bedroom.  William was running away from women problems in New York City, like my father had done.  He was handsome with green eyes and dark blonde, curly hair. After he got a job at the mall as a security guard, he worked all day and dated all night the women he met while working.

On the nights he slept at home, I looked for signs he sensed something odd in my bedroom. When he had no response, snoring as if all was right with the world, I threw my pillow at him. One night my pillow woke him up.

“What happened?” he asked startled, his head of curly hair standing on end.

“Can you feel it?”

“No, what?” he asked annoyed,

“A ghost?” I said breaking my protocol of secrecy by mentioning my secret.

“It’s good to have imagination when you’re young. Just don’t let it get you down,” he said before putting his head back down on the pillow and snoring out loud.  Annoyed at his lack of awareness for the problems in my room, I took consolation in the fact that my father said he wasn’t all that bright.

One morning, when I saw William walking down the hallway into my bedroom, I called out his name, even though I found his black suit strangely loose-fitting and too short for his long legs. My mother said he had already left for work that morning. Now I knew that whatever lived in my room looked like a young man with short, brown hair cut close to the nape of his neck who wore an odd black suit and bulky shoes like those worn by my favorite characters in, “Little House on the Prairie.”

Two months later, William left town because of women problems; this time his problem stemmed from a woman he promised to marry even though he didn’t intend to do any such thing.

His departure was proceeded by my great aunt’s arrival. She was moving to Florida and needed somewhere to stay until she figured out her next living arrangement. She was elderly with a big round stomach, short, white, curly hair, and blotchy skin. She also had a bad smoking habit and claimed as her only real possession in life, a small, black acrylic jewelry box she kept locked with key under her cot.   She was assigned by my mother the same cot in my bedroom as William had slept in.

My father despised Great Aunt Bertha and let her know it any time he could, blaming her for the upset in his childhood, including not providing him a home after his father threw him out of the family house for misbehaving when he was 10 years old.  She cried a lot and asked forgiveness for her callousness even though he never accepted her apologies.

By now, I’d given up on finding an ally to help me with the problems in my room.  I still spent sleepless nights staring at the cemetery. When exhausted, I laid in bed, covered my head with the blanket, and slept fitfully. 

My curiosity about Great Aunt’s jewelry box distracted me somewhat. One afternoon when she was in the dining room eating her dinner late. I grabbed her box and tried to open it. When she caught me fiddling with it, she smiled. "Since you want to know what I keep in there, I will show it to you,” she said in Spanish, smiling while pulling from the silver chain around her neck a gold key. She sat beside me on the bed as she opened the box with slow, anticipating excitement.

The box was filled with pictures of dead people, their skin pallid, sweaty, broken; their bodies tight in narrow wooden coffins lined with white lace. The pictures were black and white. Mourners also wore black--veils, dresses, shoes, suit—with faces drawn out in pain, screams, and tears as they hovered over coffins or followed horse-drawn wagons to a muddy cemetery in a turn of the century Cuba, from which my family originated.

My aunt was talking, but I could not hear her clearly. She sounded muffled, whispering… “this is your Great, Great, Grandmother Gilberta. This your Great, Great Grandfather Juan…”

I could hardly breathe or move.  The sun was setting, and the wind howled from a tropical storm due to make landfall that night. Soon the room would get unnaturally cold. “This is not good,” I thought to myself as I stared in disbelief at the pictures my great aunt held with pride in her small, dried hands.

“I know you feel it to,” she continued. “I know you do,” she said as I leaned in closer to her.

I looked straight in her slightly slanted, heavily hooded, black eyes. For once, someone understood the happenings in my room. She smiled softly.

Then she placed the pictures back in her box with great care, stood up from the bed, kicked the cot up against the wall, placed the box in the center of the room, grabbed both my hands, and led me in a séance around the opened container. 

Her words were shrill, piercing, unclear.  She chanted a spell or prayer. I didn’t know or care. The tone, movement, and spirit of her courage emboldened me. “Good,” I thought, “go back into your boxes, all of you,” I silently ordered the ghost of the dead man in my room, the dead in the cemetery, and the dead in the pictures in the jewelry box.” I knew her clearing was working; I could feel it in my Great Aunt’s strange smile, bobbing head, and slow circle around the jewelry box. My room and house would finally be rid of all unnaturalness, I thought, holding tightly to both of her hands.

When my bedroom door flung open, our séance stopped abruptly.  My heartbeat quickened. My father stared into the room, trying to make out our figures as the sun set and took with it the rest of the daylight. When he made out the box on the floor, he hollered in anger while staring straight at his aunt, “I told you I don’t want that shit in my house,” he said, storming into the room, grabbing the box, and taking it outside with him.

My Great Aunt followed, limping and begging him to return the box while I screamed, howled, and cried a “no, no, no.”  Nothing stopped him. When he opened the front door, he walked briskly to the end of street and flung the pictures in the direction of the cemetery. By then, my aunt had fallen on the sidewalk, crying.  Just as suddenly, the wind from the storm picked up speed carrying the pictures in a tornado-like vortex up to the clouds and over the empty street and towards the cemetery.

It was my turn to act, all would not be lost: the dead were not allowed to think they were welcomed to my bedroom in large numbers, so I ran across the street without looking and chased after the delicate white and black pictures right through the open black iron gate of the cemetery. In pajamas and bare feet, I ran over the dry prickly grass and hard headstones which hurt my feet, always with my hands in the air trying to catch the flying pictures, running alongside them deeper into acres of dark cemetery with signs in clear white block letters titled resurrection, redemption, faith (I was reading and pronouncing well since I was five, but I could not make out the meaning of big words).  Still, I ran all over the quiet, dead place, leaping, grabbing for the sky, and thinking the cemetery wasn’t so scary if you ran through it as fast as the howling wind.

At some point, I heard someone calling my name, ordering me back to the house, but I did not listen. I didn’t care about the storm, cemetery, or darkness.  All I focused on was getting the pictures back, even though the wind kept taking them further away from me. I don’t know how long I ran and grabbed for pictures in the wind, collecting very few of them, but determined to catch them all.

The next morning, I woke up in my bed. My bruised feet hurt.  I didn’t know how I made it back to the house.

“Did you get all the pictures back?” I asked my mother when she came into the room to check on me.

“Don’t worry about that. Your Great Aunt is gone to live somewhere else,” she said. I felt no consolation in losing my only source for dealing with the dead.  That same afternoon my father said that we were moving to another house he rented five blocks up the street and away from the cemetery.

As we drove to our new home, two weeks later, my father said to my mother who was sitting in the passenger seat beside him that he had heard from the owner of our former rental that a young man once committed suicide in the house.

“Yes,” I thought to myself, “and he lived in my bedroom.”