My wife and I live in a mountain valley thirteen miles north of downtown Los Angeles and two thousand feet above it. On a clear day, standing atop the highest foothill on the south valley rim, one can see spread out below most of the vast “city of angels,” from the San Bernardino Mountains sixty miles east of us to the Pacific Ocean forty miles south and thirty west.
It was about 2010 I think. I’d just taken a long hike halfway up that tall foothill, called Verdugo Mountain. Nearer the clouds, with our little valley beneath me and the massive San Gabriels to the north, I found a flat rock to sit on. There I sat, letting in whatever came into my head. It was something I did occasionally back then. It would be pretentious to call it meditation, though some of it may have been. Mostly it was woolgathering, I’m sure.
After communing with nature, I hiked down to the valley floor and back to our townhouse complex on a street shaded by mature trees. I was climbing the stairs to our second floor when I noticed a slight, quick break in the light a few feet ahead of me. What’s that, I wondered. It was like seeing a person on the other side of a fence pass behind a crack. Just a flash of something, then nothing. For reasons I can’t explain, I thought it might be a ghost—though I’d never experienced one before. It didn’t frighten me because I sensed no bad will. In fact, I felt it might like me. I waited for more clues, but there were none, so I continued on to our master bedroom as I merged into my plans for the day. I kept thinking about the incident though.
Today our valley is filled with an LA bedroom community. But four hundred years ago it was the land of the Tongva, one of several bands of people the Spaniards called Gabrielino. Remembering where I’d sat on that green spring hillside flush with wildflowers, I realized that a Native graveyard couldn’t have been better placed than right there—on a peninsula of surviving wilderness with coyotes and rattlesnakes and deer that divides the city of Glendale, human population 197,000. Was it ridiculous to think that the ghost of a long-buried brave, perhaps approving of my respectful, meditative visit to his resting place, might have come home with me? Maybe he’d sensed kinship, a love for nature similar to his own. Or maybe he wanted to check out the creature comforts available to the living. My dreamy fantasy was ridiculous, I know. Yet it pleased me to imagine those things. And there I left it.
A few weeks after that, I saw the light disturbance again, this time in our master bedroom on the second floor. I was more certain then before it was a ghost and thought it might have taken up residence with us. I still wasn’t worried because it seemed benevolent. Our three-bedroom condo is big enough for two people and a ghost, especially since the ghost had so far been quiet, well mannered, and largely out of sight.
Another day my wife and I were talking in the master bedroom when the light disturbance happened a third time. It seemed to catch Jayasri’s attention, so I asked her, “Did you see that?” I’d mentioned my two previous sightings and wanted to know if she could make the connection on her own.
“Was that the ghost?”
“What do you think?”
“It’s definitely something. Could be a ghost.”
I knew that as a child she’d experienced a ghost. She’d told me several times about being visited by her grandfather’s spirit in the days following his death. She knew it was him because he brought the heavy smell of incense and tube roses into the room, the same smell she remembered from his funeral ceremony. Jayasri was one of his favorite granddaughters, and her cousin, grandpa’s other favorite among the girls, reported a very similar happening at her house around the same time. Neither cousin thought it was a big deal. In their Bengali culture, ghosts are an accepted part of the natural world.
I had no previous experience with ghosts, and many in my cultural group—American honky—doubt their existence. I was open to their existence, based partly on my wife’s story and partly on my conviction that modern science doesn’t have all the answers. There was something else. At the time of my father’s death in a hospital room, I was holding his hand when he exhaled his last breath, a long sigh that sounded more substantial than mere air. Didn’t I perhaps hear the departure of his nonphysical essence?
Over the next several years my wife and I saw the light disturbance a number of times, usually independently. It happened almost always in our master bedroom. I now was sure a spiritual visitor had moved in.
In the fall of 2013, Jayasri and I attended Haiku North America, held that year aboard the Queen Mary, permanently grounded in Long Beach Harbor and operating as a hotel. The ship, though retired from the high seas, is said to retain all the ghosts it ever had, a claim broadcast by the City of Long Beach, which currently owns the Mary and runs the hotel, a money-losing proposition every year. One way city fathers reduce loss is by hosting monthly ghost events aboard the ship. The biggest transpires on Halloween. That night you can wander the ship’s decks with a tour or freestyle, giving yourself, they say, an excellent chance of a ghost sighting.
Halloween was still a month away when we were there, but one evening during our stay a two-hour lecture on ghosts was delivered in the ship’s auditorium. My wife and I attended, hoping to learn more about the subject. One of the Mary’s officers, a rotund fifty something in a white uniform, introduced us to what was known about the ship’s ghosts. His talk was buttressed with slides and film footage of the spirits doing their thing. We saw animated though relatively motionless human figures standing around looking at the camera. They were the color of bleached flour, with the bodies and faces of people. They looked quite real, but who could tell for sure? Long Beach is a short drive from Hollywood, where imaginings of all kinds are made to seem actual when of course they aren’t. Among the Queen Mary’s ghosts was the spirit of a cat the same white color as the human spirits, though only partly visible in wrap-around bands. For some reason, that cat alone strained my credulity, maybe because it was cute.
We could tell that the ship’s officer was a passionate ghost believer. In his years aboard the Mary he’d racked up many personal sightings. He’d also interviewed passengers and crew who’d had experiences of their own. He told us where the ghosts usually hung out during the day—behind the louvered panels lining a hallway on the ship’s deck. And he knew where on board during a night walk you’d be most likely to bump into a spook. His most powerful argument was his unshakable and fired-up personal belief, so strong it infused him with charisma. To him, ghosts were as real as living people. And certainly more interesting.
Not long after my wife and I returned home from Long Beach, one of my high school classmates contacted me about a problem he was having. David Willis and another classmate had founded a website commemorating the deceased members of Wichita East High’s Class of ‘63. One of our departed Blue Aces was presenting problems. No record could be found documenting his graduation or even his attendance at East during our senior year. The student in question, Richard Johnson, had been a close friend of mine in high school and in the years following—right up until his death at age twenty-five in 1970. David had emailed me to find out if I knew what was going on. Had Richard attended our school and graduated with us, as he remembered? Our fiftieth class reunion was two weeks away and he wanted his website to be ready.
I composed an email telling David that to the best of my knowledge Richard had graduated with us. I knew for certain he began his freshman year at the University of Kansas the following fall because we sat together in an Intro to Logic class. Also, he was a pledge at the TKE fraternity house directly across the street from the apartment in married student housing where I lived with my quite pregnant first wife.
I was about to hit Send when I noticed my glass of ice water running dry. I picked up the glass, seated on a DVD coaster, and started out of the room. I heard the DVD hit the carpet behind me and realized it had stuck to the bottom of the glass, as it often did. I planned to pick it up when I got back.
On my return, though, I couldn’t find the coaster in any of the likely places it might have rolled. Nor was it in the improbable though possible places. I finally found it in an impossible place, behind my spare roller chair and halfway under a wicker wastebasket. No way on earth that almost weightless DVD could have gotten there without a helping hand. But whose hand? I was alone in the house, except for the ghost.
It was then the penny dropped—as Richard had known it would. At a time when my mind was on him, he’d placed the coaster in that spot to inform me he was our household spirit. And wasn’t he also asking me to confirm his presence at East during the 1962-63 school year? His well-executed scheme had required complex planning, probably over many years, and precise implementation. He’d been one of the brightest students at our high school of thousands, so I knew he had the wits to pull it off.
It puzzled me that no record remained of him at East. How could that be? Then I remembered how often Richard had been absent from the classes we shared senior year. With his devastating hangovers alone he must have missed a month or two of schooldays. He’d also lost three weeks to a thyroid surgery. Had he missed so many days he didn’t qualify for graduation? That would explain a lot.
I wondered why it was so important to him that his classmates remember he was part of our graduating class. He’d been dead and gone for decades and was deep into his afterlife, so why did high school still matter to him? I lacked a good answer, but I could see clearly that it did matter. Ultimately that was enough for me. He’d spent years and probably a lot of effort to deliver his appeal—and he’d been a close friend. I decided to help him if I could.
When I finally sent that email to David Willis, he asked if I’d like to write something about Richard for the memorial website. This seemed the perfect way to satisfy Richard—so I said I would. And who better than me? If anyone knew him, I did.
As I thought about what to write, I realized my entry would necessarily be longer than the others. I wanted to establish my friend’s existence in a way people would remember. I wanted to explain exactly who he’d been, reframing him for those who had a partial picture and introducing him vividly to those who hadn’t known him. I also wanted to introduce his ghost, seemingly as atypical as the living Richard because his spirit brain, though lacking in matter, functioned as well as his living brain at age twenty-five. Better, no doubt. Without a body he couldn’t fog his mind with alcohol and drugs as he’d done so often during his last decade.
The piece about him came easy and was fun to write. In two days I had fourteen pages that needed little revision. I felt sure he’d like it, though it revealed his warts. I emailed it to David with that special feeling that comes with going the extra mile for a friend. David told me he’d post it that same day. Just before I went to bed, I checked to see if it was live. It wasn’t.
The next day I checked several times and it still wasn’t live.
The day after that, same thing. I’d begun to get anxious. I assumed Richard was reading everything I wrote on my PC, so he knew what I knew and presumably he was anxious as well. By that afternoon I was so antsy I emailed David to ask if he’d posted the piece. He said he had, right after I sent it. He couldn’t explain the long delay. All the earlier entries he’d posted went live within twenty-four hours. He was worried too.
When I entered our master bedroom, I caught an unusual smell. A bad smell. I followed my nose to our closet, where a foul stench slugged me in the face. It was the odor of a body dead many years and beginning to mummify. I figured it was Richard having a shit fit. I doubted his upset was directed at me. He was just expressing it to me. And why not? We were the ones most invested.
I told my wife what was happening. She wasn’t worried. Not a bit. “Your piece is fourteen pages. Right?”
“Right.”
“Must have surprised David’s webmaster. He may need time to evaluate it. Try to be patient.” She smiled. “He may have to use a team of readers.”
I was not in the mood for being teased. “Funny.”
She left the room. And I began stewing again.
I was seated at my desk when I saw something white moving in my peripheral vision. A medium sized moth was coming toward me, flying the way moths normally do, butterfly style—up and down and around while advancing. It came right to me and circled my head, ignoring my glowing desk lamp. It then flew back to the closet, travelling this time in a highly unmothlike manner. It flew straight and fast as a bee, sailing into our closet and disappearing among my hangered shirts. I went to the closet and looked through the shirts and couldn’t find the little bugger. I thought I knew why. The color of the moth, or rather its lack of color, reminded me of the spirits on the Queen Mary. The moth had to be Richard, who’d just revealed himself as a shape shifter that could disappear at will. It struck me then that our shallow closet with its sliding doors resembled the enclaves behind the louvers on the Queen Mary, where ghosts were said to spend their days.
That afternoon my piece on Richard went live, just as Jayasri had predicted. I read through it and it was all there, all 4800 words. I was thrilled, believing I’d told my friend’s story well enough to draw in the readers most likely to understand and appreciate him. I was still at the computer and the story was on the screen when the white moth arrived and began flying around me, moth style. It dipped under the table my computer rests on and disappeared from view. I was wearing shorts and felt what I thought was the moth’s head bumping back and forth between my bare knees. The bumping became more insistent, now more like a big human knuckle striking my knees. I pushed my roller chair back so I could see under the table and witnessed the most amazing scene. Richard’s large head was materializing, though incompletely. White bands interspersed with the invisible revealed the facial contours I remembered well. It was him for sure, animated and fully conscious. He looked to be about twenty-five. He began laughing hugely, just as he’d done in life when greatly amused. It was a silent laugh but I could hear it in my mind, from memory—a whole-hearted, mocking laugh directed at the listener, at himself, and at fate. My friend was very happy.
