Ghost Hunted

It was a chilly September day in Pocahontas, Virginia. I was watching the wind play with dead leaves in the alley behind Mom's Hearty Kettle. They scratched across the pavement like claws as gusts of wind whisked them up and they twirled in the vortex before drifting back into the gutter. Randal was hosing off the kitchen mats. The spray splashed dirt back up onto his stained uniform. 

I had not seen Randal since high school. When I returned to my hometown and took this job as a dish washer, I was not surprised to see Randal still working here too. His life had not seemed to change much since I knew him growing up. Except one thing did change—he was more talkative.  

That early morning in the alley, he told me about the strangest thing that had happened to him. One night, he swore to me, he opened his eyes, and his grandfather was standing at the edge of his bed. He saw him clear as when he had seen him last Thanksgiving dinner. Then he just disappeared. That same morning, his mom received a call from the hospital saying his grandfather had passed away that night. 

I stared at him. I was waiting for him to finish his story—still expecting the punch line. He searched my face and I could almost see the wheels in his head turning, like he was awaiting my reaction. So, he doubled down on his intensity.  

“I know it sounds crazy. But I know what I saw. And that can't be a coincidence with him dying right then. It's like he stopped by to see me before going to the other side,” Randal said to me. 

I nodded my head, looking down at my shoes. My face was still unchanged. 

"I believe you." 

His cheeks noticeably flushed. Until now, Randal seemed certain I did not believe him. He probably only told me about his experience because he felt like he could, and sharing made the story even more real for him. I had that effect on people. People, even strangers, seemed to feel like they could give me their secrets.  

______

While I worked with Randal, I pieced together more about what life was like for him during the years I was gone. After Randal's paranormal experience, he became kind of obsessed with ghosts. At first, he sold it to me as just his hobby. Later, he showed me the custom jackets. That is when it was clear to me what The Pocahontas "Paranormals" (TPPs) really meant to Randal. 

He and his "ghost hunting" crew were local characters. Our peers rolled their eyes when they saw them going about town wearing their jackets, or their van with the removable TPPs magnets parked in front of a graveyard or "haunted" house. The elderly of our town were the only ones to still just smile sweetly when they saw them. I think twenty-something-year-old Randal and his friends were still just the same little kids they remember playing on their lawns. 

But TPPs were "not like any other ghost hunting organization," Randal assured me. And now that I had let Randal talk this much to me about ghosts, he wanted me to be a TPPs member.  They were going to get the undeniable proof ghosts exist and sell it one day. Maybe they would even land their own TV show.  

TPPs' favorite place to hunt was the old coal mine. Years ago, a lot of miners died in an explosion there. It was my town's only real history. TPPs were there on weeknights after our shifts with cameras and tape recorders and EMF reading devices. We wandered through the shafts in the dark. It was a dangerous business. We were the only ghost hunters in this spot, and they would get the proof that could put TPPs—and Pocahontas—on the map. They could go from an old historic nothing-town to a ghost town with tourism like Jerome, or Salem. Randal hoped one day Pocahontas would become "the home of TPPs." 

______

Randal was not the shy kid I remembered from high school. It is like his personality had been lying dormant all these years, and ghost hunting finally gave him the nearest thing to purpose or deeper meaning someone like him would ever grasp. It had filled him with manic energy, and I had become his favorite outlet.  

You could say I was complicit at this point. I had every chance to opt out, but he interpreted my neutrality as openness. It was cathartic since I really did believe in this ghost stuff. I just never had anyone speaking openly about it beside my mother. Growing up, I believed in ghosts because I had seen them. It was a normal fact of my upbringing. My mother was Catholic, but she also had a heritage of "old ways from the old country."  

She had given me, or rather, I had access to a Dead Summoning spell. I am unsure where it came from. My mother may have told me it was translated from old Gaelic. I would not have believed the spell even worked except she used it on my dead aunt when I was twelve. My Mom wanted to know what Aunt Phyllis had done with Grandma’s vinyl records (she thought there was an old, signed Sinatra somewhere). She appeared to us almost like she had never been dead. I remember it was a shock at first. She chatted with my mother for a while and walked around the house. Then, Aunt Phyllis was gone forever by sunrise. I never spoke about any of it with anyone outside my family. 

One morning while washing dishes in the restaurant I was thinking about that weird night Aunt Phyllis came back from the dead for the first time in I don’t know how long. Randal’s talk of ghosts must have jogged my brain. He was lurking beside me, rambling on as usual.  

 “Ghost hunters are a joke to most people because they act so excited about a blurry picture of a speck of dust or radio static. They discredit us when they try to sell that pathetic crap as ‘evidence.’" Randal said. His camera in hand, he scrolled through the previous night's ghost hunting photos. 

I wiped my hands on my pants, clearing my throat. If I were about to drop a bomb on Randal, now was as good of time as any. 

"What if I told you I knew a way to summon the dead," I began, stretching my words so he could know I was serious.  

Randal glanced up. 

"It can only summon a dead person once...but it has 100% success." 

Randal stopped scrolling. He looked up at me with a dark gleam in his eyes. 

______ 

 A few days later we were in Randal’s basement. It was lit only by the glow of his gaming computer in the corner. His bed was shoved against the wall to make space for us on the floor. It was hard to ignore the mildew smell of the damp carpet. 

I was beginning to feel nervous, but Randal’s energy was contagious. I was as curious as he was about my mom’s old Dead Summoning spell and if it could still work for someone outside of my own family. 

I took out the old green hymnal from my bag and laid it on the floor. It smelled like my mom’s sewing room. I felt a tinge of guilt for sneaking it out of her house. I opened the cover and the yellowed, hand-written paper fell onto the floor. Randal rushed to pick it up, but I stopped him. It felt wrong to handle it directly; it was brittle and rapidly deteriorating. I meant only for Randal to read it during the spell. 

The spell was simple. It needed some hair from the deceased to be burned after we recited the passage. But there was a catch—we needed an “old name” for the person we were summoning. According to my mom, this was the name you are almost given before birth. It was one of the “cross outs” on the old list of baby names your mother showed your father as they prepared themselves for your grand entrance. Everyone had at least one. 

Fortunately for Randal, he had one of his grandfather’s hairs from his belongings from the hospital. But the old name was a hitch—he would have to guess what it was. But he had a good chance of guessing right. Randal’s grandfather was the first Donald in a line of at least four first-born Richards. Odds were favorable that his old name would be Richard. I was pleased with this. If the spell failed, at least I had one, unprovable way to blame it on Randal. 

So, we sat in his room, cross-legged on the floor like we were still kids. Randal was even sitting on the exact spot he told me he had last seen the manifestation of his grandfather that night by his bed. Randal was still pretending like he doubted me a little bit, but my read on his behavior assured me he was as full of hope as he could be that we would summon a ghost that night. We were ready to begin. 

Leaving the folded paper on the floor where it had fallen, Randal leaned awkwardly over it, holding his zippo lighter overhead to read the scrawls in the dark. His hand clasped a wiry, gray hair between his fingers, ready to burn. 

His voice cracked. He read slowly just as he did those years back in elementary when the teacher made us read aloud from books in English class.  

By ember black and tress of hair, 

By mother's name and whispered prayer, 

By name unborn, by name forgot, 

Rise from thy barrow, heed this spot. 

Through root and stone, through mist and fen, 

I call the forth to walk again. 

"Richard." 

Randal burned the hair. 

______

The next morning, Randal was unusually late for his shift at the restaurant. By his appearance, I would have thought he was hungover if I had not been with him the night before. Mom's spell had worked.  

Richard appeared to us at once. When Randal saw his dead grandfather, his face turned completely white. I thought he would pass out. For all his time chasing ghosts, he was not prepared to see one. But I was a bit surprised as well, this time.  

Richard did not look as normal as I remembered my Aunt Phyllis looking. It was a bit sad, his grandfather was still wearing a hospice gown, and in his ghostly form, he seemed confused to be in Randal's basement. Another problem was that Randal's grandfather had been quite deaf in his final years, which surprisingly, must have carried into the afterlife. Maybe my mom used hair from a younger version of my aunt and that made the difference in the age she appeared as a ghost? Anyway, Randal’s poor, dementia-ridden, deaf and ghostly grandfather would have to wander around the basement until sunrise with no way to communicate. I snuck out in the beginning. I figured I should let Randal sort out his own problem. 

Despite his night, Randal greeted me with weary cheerfulness, slapping me hard on the shoulder as he passed me in the kitchen. His tired eyes were gleaming, and I had assumed our successful ghost summons had only fired him up for more TPPs ghost hunting expeditions. 

______ 

It was an unusual night at the abandoned mine because for once, it was just me and Randal. Randal sprung this ghost hunt on me that night right after our shift at the restaurant. I did not want to turn him down because it would be more trouble than it was worth. Besides, this new hobby was growing on me.  

We parked just outside in the dark, headlights on, shivering slightly in the cool air as we looked at the map spread over the hood. The old map of the shafts showed us what remained open and what we could expect to be completely closed off. There was not actually much to see, and we never wandered far in because that would be dangerous.  

Randal said we would be doing mostly EMF work to pin down some new ‘hotspots.’ There was a tunnel we had never entered on our other hunts, and he only wanted to go far enough in to see if we could find anything near the boarded-up elevator. I did not love the idea of going into an unfamiliar tunnel but after Randal showed me exactly how far we would be going on the map, I agreed. 

As we entered the tunnels, Randal gave me a headlamp, and he trailed behind me with his night vision goggles. It was an unusually cold night, and the quiet made us drop our voices to a whisper for no reason at all—it just felt right.  I held the EMF reader in front of me. As we rounded the corner into the new tunnel, the reader beeped. I walked ahead, and  the reading climbed when my headlamp flickered. Randal's steps had grown distant behind me. 

I turned around to find him, but my heel dipped, and the ground gave way beneath me. 

I heard myself scream. I don’t think Randal even made a sound. 

______

Randal's night vision goggles flared like a glowing beacon in the pitch dark over me. It was only my distance from the light that made me realize I had fallen far down a pit in the mineshaft. As my eyes adjusted, I could only see Randal's outline at the top. I could not understand why he still did not say anything. He must have been so in shock and left quickly to get help. I thought I could hear his breathing. Or maybe it was my own, wet, rasping pulls for air. I strained to call out, but my lungs must have collapsed, and I was starting to choke on blood. 

Then in the distance, I heard Randal's van start. 

That is when I felt dread. What if he did not mean to come back ? The pit was closing into darkness around me 

Randal may not come back for me. But at least down here, in the Pocahontas coal mine, I would not be alone. 

______

I do not know how much time had passed since that last night in the mine. Just when I was starting to enjoy some peace, Randal summoned me. I expected him to try it eventually. One moment I was just a blended consciousness, I like to think a shimmery mist, drifting through the mines and the next moment, singed hair and: 

"Leroy." 

That's right, Leroy is the name my mother liked for me. I dodged a bullet with that one. But the hair, he must have stolen it one weird day we saw each other at the barber. But my old name? I am not sure. He may have worked on my poor mother to get it somehow... 

But I manifested. And it looked like Randal was prepared for his ghost this time. At first, there were just bright lights all around me. I felt like I was about to perform a solo "center stage." When I adjusted to my new form, I noticed he must have upgraded his ghost hunting equipment. He had a bigger camera. It looked like three of them, all on tripods and pointed directly at me. I really was the star of my own show. 

I thought I may as well do something other than just stand there since Randal did not seem to want to speak to me. The guilt had him, I am sure. He seemed much more invested in observing me and recording evidence than having a final man-to-man-ghost. I did not want to disappoint him, so I decided to put on a little show. First, I scraped a wall with my ghostly fingernails—what a scary sound! I did not know I could do that. Then, I pushed one of the floodlights with all my energy. It crashed into the ground! So satisfying. It would look great in a documentary.  

Randal was visibly tense now, and that gave me a little bit more energy. So I decided to try speaking. 

I cleared my throat. No sound. No throat to clear, so I tried again: 

Quoth the raven...my voice was a low, gravely whisper. But I could see his audio recording devices lit up. It was fine, this would be enough since my energy was waning. 

You see, there is no denying the fact Randal had killed me, or just left me in the mine to die. Now, judging by this setup, I am pretty sure he did plan my "accident" that night. But I am not angry at him. I am not a vengeful ghost. 'Why' you ask? Well, there is something about Mother's Dead summoning spell I never told Randal. And he obviously never bothered to read the rest of the verses. If he did, he may not have understood them anyway.  

Randal changed from that time he summoned his dead grandfather in the basement to the night he left me in the mineshaft. Randal became a man with blood on his hands. Just as I expected, he summoned his victim (me) with my own mother’s spell so that he could finally gather his most reliable ghost-hunting evidence.  

It is just a bit of a shame...or is it karma that Randal will never live long enough to see what would become of "The Pocahontas Paranormals." 

Thou blood-handed man, thy grave 

Lies near; 

The dead have heard, and they draw near. 

They'll clasp thy ankles, drag thee low, 

Seven days to reap what thou did sow. 

Seven nights beneath their 

Cold embrace, 

Till death itself looks thee in the face.