Ghost Igator

Back in the spring of 1993 my mother died and left me a small sum of money. My mother and I had always had a troubled relationship. At the time of her death, we were not even on speaking terms. So the inheritance came as a surprise, and the feelings that came with it, mixed as they were with grief, confusion, and the knowledge that with her death we would never be able to mend our relationship, overwhelmed me.

I took the money and bought a small car and a small house. Recently divorced and a single parent with limited income, I had accepted that home ownership was probably now out of the realm of possibility, and yet suddenly, because of my mother’s death, my children and I had a home to call our own. I was grateful, and I was very sad.

 

We weren’t in the house more than a day or two when my children started to talk about seeing a cat inside the house, and hearing the voices of other children. At first I dismissed their stories: We didn’t own a cat, and I figured the voices they heard were almost certainly kids who lived in the neighborhood. Then, one day, alone in the house, out of the corner of my eye I caught sight of what looked like a cat darting through the kitchen and down the basement stairs. Immediately I heard what sounded like children singing at the bottom of those stairs.

Nervous and bit frightened, I descended the stairs only to discover nothing but an empty basement. The sound stopped as soon as I reached the bottom of the staircase and of course no cat was anywhere to be seen. I walked towards the end of the basement farthest from the stairs, and suddenly, as I reached the far wall, the sound of children singing seemed to be coming from upstairs where I had just been. I went back up the stairs and the sound stopped. No one was outside the house. No one was inside the house. No radios or TVs were playing anywhere.

Over the course of the next few months this phenomenon repeated itself several times. More than once the sounds even came when another adult was around as a witness, so it wasn’t just me hearing them, and it wasn’t just my kids. These sounds of children singing would seem to be in the basement, but then, as soon as we descended the stairs the sounds would shift to the upstairs. No neighborhood kids or sources for the sounds were ever found.

Then the knocking started.

One night I was awakened at 3:33 A.M. by three loud knocks on my bedroom door. I sat bold upright in bed, terrified, and got up to investigate the house, my heart pounding. Again, no one was awake, no one was outside. The house was completely quiet. This phenomenon repeated itself maybe a dozen times, always at precisely 3:33 A.M. Sometimes I would wake up before the sounds, look at the digital clock, see the numbers 3:33 and then hear the three loud knocks after first waking.

One night, a cousin of mine was staying over and the knocks came again at 3:33 A.M. This time I had my cousin as a witness. We rushed into the living room simultaneously to see what was going on. Finding each other, and relieved that we had both heard the knocking, we stood there looking at each other when suddenly, we began to hear footsteps too.

The footsteps seemed to be coming from the kitchen. When we checked the kitchen, they seemed to be coming from outside. We went outside, (which as I think about it now was probably not a great idea), and we walked all the way around the house in the dark, hearing the footsteps the entire time and never seeing a soul. Finally, after about 20 minutes, the footsteps stopped and we both went back to bed.

The next day, we were both sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee and talking it over. I told the story of the shadow cat and the voices of the children, along with the knocks that had been coming like that for weeks, always at precisely 3:33 A.M. Exasperated, I said to my cousin,

“You know, I just wish I had some kind of sign that this is all real. That it isn’t, you know, just my overactive imagination or something.”

In the kitchen, next to the back door, there was an antique mirror I had picked up at a yard sale before moving into the house. The minute I said that to my cousin, a large black shadow, maybe eight feet across and six feet off the floor, seemed to fly directly out of the mirror, through the house, and out the front door about thirty feet away. As it quickly swooped through the house, it make a loud whirring or fluttering sound, like the sound of many, many wings, or a flock of bats flying out of a cave.

We looked at each other without speaking, our eyes wide.

My cousin spoke first.

“Did you see what I just saw?”

When we realized that we both really had seen what we’d seen and heard what we’d heard, we jumped up together and ran to the front of the house, but we found no trace of the flying shadow.

That was the last I of whatever was in that house. We never had another experience after that, except for once, one Easter Sunday of that same year, when we developed photos we’d taken for the family gathering. In a single photo of me in the kitchen, a photo that was angled just so that the kitchen mirror appeared behind me, there was a clear image of an elderly woman in a black dress and a black scarf, looking out of the glass and over my shoulder into the camera.

“Is that the ghost?” My son, who had taken the photo, asked.

“I don’t know,” I answered.

I took the mirror down and threw it out. Several months later I put the house up for sale and moved out.