Not Even Not Zen 435: Biomythography - Note 142, Superstitions Pt. 3

Superstitions, Part III

"Ghosts?" snapped my grandfather. "What do you mean, ghosts?"

His family sat around their long, white table with the extra leaf placed in it. The extra leaf allowed room for his adult children and his grandchildren, like me, to join the family meal. We were there so often in the summer, the leaf never left the arrangement. As I looked towards my grandfather at the head of the table, I saw Johnny's dark hair on one side, followed by Lois and Bill. On the other side sat Mike, Clinton, and Clinton's wife.

"Well, the doors open on their own, daddy!" said Johnny. He leaned toward the center to be heard.

"There are all sorts of strange noises," added Clinton. He was calmer and bore a sly smile. His voice carried better. "I heard them all the time while I was here. Once, a window fell shut all on its own."

"A window? A door? That ain’t nothing," snapped my grandfather. "That’s regular stuff."

The debate lasted a few minutes. I didn’t often see anyone in the family talk back to my grandfather. It was rare enough when I was a child that I remember clearly the two times it happened in my presence and this was one of them. One of my younger uncles, Mike, came down in favor of the ghosts. More importantly, maybe, the house got a cool breeze through the screens on the porch. No one wanted to go inside. We were comfortable where we were, continuing to eat and talk. Inside, as everyone knew, the house had no air conditioning. My grandfather had never gotten around to installing it. So in the hall or in the living room, you had to talk over the roar of a fan.

My grandfather had painted his porch floorboards light gray. He'd painted the frame of the porch white. The room often sat ten adults at once plus two or three children, so it enclosed a big area. It had screens on three sides, which meant everywhere except the actual front of the house.

After the list of haunting symptoms died down and the topic moved on, Johnny started it up again. He couldn't abide his father saying the house wasn't haunted. He knew it was. Oddly, my grandfather turned his gaze on me during the conversation. He seemed to notice how much interest I was showing. He knew I liked to believe in ghosts. There were a lot of them in the stories I read, even in the superhero comic books.

After his wife had put the dishes away, and after his older sons had left, my grandfather turned to me. He didn't let me help with the chores. He put his hand on my shoulder.

"I built this house," he grumbled. He nodded me to a spot on the floorboards in front of him. I moved to stand there. He leaned closer with his elbows on his knees. "There aren't any ghosts here. I know it. There's no such thing."

"But ..."

"That's comic books," he snapped. He knew how I was thinking. "Look, Johnny's a fool. Clinton likes to egg him on."

"Did people die here in this house?" I asked. Johnny had said so.

"No." He smiled and shook his head knowingly. "There weren't any people here to die and become ghosts before we moved in. I know because this place was a field in someone's farm before I came. It wasn't even a good field. The farmers before didn't clear most of the trees because of the marsh and the pond."

"What about the door that swings open?" I whispered.

"I built the whole house. So the door, too. It's a good door but, from the start, I saw it always swung back if it didn't latch right. The latch is loose. I know it. A breeze can blow it open. If someone opens a different door somewhere else in the house, sometimes the door pops open. It's just the way it is."

He got up. He stepped through the front door of the house and beckoned me to follow.

Inside, he started giving me a tour even though I'd lived in the house for months at a time when I was younger. He had given me a tour before, too. He talked about parts of the house he had built but this time he added in comments about the problems he'd had. In a minute or two, we came to one of the weird doors of the house. It had a knob that rattled.

"See? It's loose." He shook it. "But I got a bunch of these, all the same sort, out of the junkyard. I can't get another like it. I'm keeping it. It works. It's just loose."

He had me test the haunted door with him. First, he went to a nearby room. He opened and closed the door quickly. Next to me, the haunted door popped out of the jamb. Slowly, the oak board swung farther open.

"See?" he said. "The latch is loose. Also, the door isn't quite level anymore. I don't know why. The floor used to be more even."

Then we latched the door shut again. This time, my grandfather had me open the door down the hall. When I swung it quickly, sure enough, I felt a puff of air and the door down the hall with the loose latch popped free. I was fascinated. I kept doing it. After the fourth time, my grandfather lost his patience and said, "Okay, that's enough. You know how it works."

"What about the haunted window?" I asked.

"That's a trickier one," he admitted. "I think I can show you, though. Let's look."

On the way to the window, my grandfather pointed out that my uncles wanted to be haunted. They yearned for ghosts to be real. My grandmother, too. So they didn't really look at things too closely. He guided me to the window.

"This one sticks," he said. "I had trouble with it, getting it in. But the one next to it slides too easy. You can prop it up and think it's open. But it's still loose. The window can drop back closed. Go ahead and feel it."

I felt. It moved.

"Now try to push the sticky one down."

I tried. I barely moved the frame. I shoved again. Nothing, except a grunt escaped me.
 
"Tap on the loose one."

I followed his orders. The glass pane rattled. I tapped again and nothing much happened, so I stopped. My grandfather nodded for me to continue. I rapped on the top bar twice more. The second time, the window abruptly, and loudly, slammed closed.

"See?" He pulled the window back up to reset it. At first, it slipped closed. He cocked the bottom of the frame at a slight angle to make it stick. "All this stuff from Johnny and Clinton, it's nonsense. There are no ghosts."

"Can't there be ghosts somewhere?" I really wanted there to be a life after death - and a proof of it, too. I knew that was the crucial point. "Not here, but somewhere?"

"Test it." My grandfather shook his head. "Wherever you go, if you think there's ghosts, try it out. See if it's something else."

This was a lesson I had to learn more than once. Back in College Park, our family friends had to talk with me about the same sort of beliefs. In the Price family and the Babushka family, members of both repeatedly tried to teach me to be more skeptical. And in Annapolis, my grandfather was not a scientist but he had the attitude of testing things out. When you finally get in the habit of it - of seeing doors open on their own because they are slightly tilted or there is a breeze - you learn to observe your life a little more closely. Even though it can sometimes be sad to see things as they are, you learn to be suspicious of your biases.

I believed what my grandfather showed me enough that, instead of cowering in fear about his haunted house, I got up and looked more closely at it. I inspected loose shutters. I rattled latches. I watched how things worked and failed to work. 

Superstitions are never quite the same after you develop the habit of checking on them.