Ghost in the Machine

I have been told that I am lucky I am ‘merely weird’. Because, with all the things I have done or lived through I should be ‘totally f***ed up’. And this was from someone who loves me.

It was the movie Amityville Horror that sparked this. I first got into trouble by saying I wanted to see the movie. My aficionado friend was horrified. It was a remake! I tried to get myself out of such a terrible gaffe by saying I had read the book, but it was a long time ago and I wanted to see what I remembered. I mean, the book had really scared the crap out of me. It got worse when I explained that I had been seven when I read it. Hence the comment about my mental stability.

In the book, the little girl has a rocking chair that rocks by itself. I had a child-size rocker in my room, too, at the time. I swore I saw it rocking one night. As we had no pets, there was no way it had been an animal. Even though I no longer wanted to have my own room, and I huddled under the covers in fear every night, there was no way to stop me from reading.

In kindergarten, there had been an advanced reading group, comprised of kids who already knew how to read. And boy was I pissed that I wasn’t in that group. I made up for that with a vengeance. By six, I had contraband books under my bed. I wasn’t afraid of 500 pages, and I loved ghost stories. True Tales of the Unknown, Anthologies, Legends, Haunted Houses, the Bell Witch, you name it, I read it.

The fascination with ghosts peaked somewhere around junior high, but some of it lingered. And while there aren’t any ghost stories coming in my books in the near future, it could easily be argued that this still explains a lot. I was in college when I met my first ghost.

By this point, I think it’s just well known that ‘AJ is weird’. So you have to understand that I don’t freak out or panic over much. Apparently I am either extremely coolheaded or else so stupid that I don’t realize that I should be afraid/panicked at the time. Later, of course, I turn to Jell-O.

So it’s no surprise to me that I stayed calm and analytical when I walked into my dorm room and found my dresser drawer open. As I had just stepped out for a moment, I knew no one had come in to the room and done it - unless one of my friends had decided to take a very subtle approach to psychological torture and had developed a Cherokee-like softness of tread. I was going for ghost!

After watching the dresser for a moment, and thinking excitedly ‘it would have to be a poltergeist’ - and no, the movies weren’t anywhere near as terrifying as the books about poltergeists are - I made my move. I pushed the drawer shut. I didn’t expect anything.

So you can guess how shocked I was when the drawer slowly came back open.

There was no noise. No one around. No strings. So, I spent another long moment staring at my dresser. It stared right back, one drawer open about eight inches. Then, I pushed the drawer shut again.

It opened again. Just as smoothly as the first time.

The third time I shut the drawer, it was the drawer above it that came open. I shut my mouth and figured that this made a practical joke a lot less likely. I mean, who would bother to rig two drawers?

Three more times I shut drawers and three more times the drawer directly under or over it would slowly come open. I checked the tracks the wheels slide in, I peeked behind the dresser, I felt all the sides for triggers, filaments, or any kind of device. But there was nothing.

My analytical brain knew that, at this point, I had to change the game if I wanted to learn anything more about my ghost. So I slammed the drawer shut.

And was immediately rewarded with a small meowl.

Yes, I had completely overlooked the fact that the kitten was missing. It must have crawled in when I stepped out of the room, or I just hadn’t been paying attention after all. It must have been really squished back there when I closed the drawers all the way.

Scrambling, and feeling really bad about smashing my kitten, I snaked my arm into the drawer and up over the back panel. Sure enough, my little furry friend snuggled into my hand and I pulled her free.

I thought we all learned a valuable lesson that day. I know there aren’t ghosts in dorm rooms now. Really, it’s a dorm and, urban legends aside, who would want to haunt it? I now look for more earthly explanations first. And the cat learned not to crawl inside the furniture. Or so I thought. Because one day about six years later, the couch started meowing every time we sat on it.