In the spirit
Oct. 27—It was a warm and breezy fall night. The house was dark, but the streetlights caught the lacy curtains and projected a pattern that seemed to melt onto the walls. We'd all tucked in for the night after a ghost walking tour of town; however, my eyes were still like saucers, my brain clearly still caught up in the vivid storyteller's passion for her topic.
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Then I heard it: A distinct creeeeeaak of the floorboards on the second floor of the late-1800s house where we were staying for a ghost hunting-themed getaway several years ago in the very haunted town of Virginia City, Nevada. Probably 13 seconds after his head hit the pillow, the spouse was fully sacked out, not the least bit affected by the wild tales told earlier that evening of lingering spirits left behind from an era of horrific mining accidents and other perils of life before the 21st century.
Something happens to the human body when the brain experiences an unfounded fear: All senses become Spider-Man — like; heck, I think I can even hear spiders. But the worst one?: The freeze. Why can't I just get up, flick on a light, and peer down the hallway? Instead, I clutch the covers to my chin and set my eyes on the doorway, fully expecting a Pennywise-meets-Ghostface-meets-stoic Shining twins to swoosh through the door and just ... I don't know, do whatever that mashup would do.
I hear myself swallow and find the courage to elbow the spouse. He stirs, then returns to the regular breathing rhythm of a man who has not a fear in the world.
The creaking stops and I convince myself, as they always do in horror movies, that it was just an old house settling and my hyperactive Spidey Senses. So I close my eyes.
Big mistake.
I feel the end of the bed bump slightly, and now I'm like a rabbit trying to disappear into its surroundings — I can't even open my eyes. Then I feel a hand rest atop the quilt covering my arm. At this point, I'm so scared I am literally trying to wake the spouse through telepathy. It's at this point that I remember I also have children sleeping in the house.
"Can we sleep in here? We're scared."
My eyes fly open to see my then 12-year-old daughter standing over me with her little brother standing by her side — thankfully, not The Shining twins.
"What?! What are you afraid of? There's nothing to be worried about," I say perhaps a little too breathlessly as I sit up from my ring of sweat.
To say I'm very impressionable when it comes to ghost stories is a wild understatement — a genetic trait I might've passed on to the kids. But I also can't get enough of those stories: See "Spirited away," page 28, which offers a tease to a proverbial trove of tales.
The late Santa Fe author Antonio R. Garcez collected ghost stories told to him by New Mexicans for decades, and his published anthologies reflect a regional flair for storytelling as well as our spirited people and places.
Just don't ask me to read too many of them.
