So you might of thought that wasn't really a ghost story, that was some sort of coincidence. Maybe I've been watching 'Lost' too much, but I don't believe in coincidences. Something similar happened to me while I was a teenager, a premonition that came out of nowhere, and more importantly, in front of a large group of people.
It was my senior year in high school, around 1991, probably the early fall because it was still relatively warm out. At the time my parents were separated, and my father lived at home with my sister and I. He was out of town for some reason that night, and we decided to get some friends together and drop some acid. (mom if your reading this, don't worry I haven't done it sense at least 95, at an amusement park in RI at the best rave of my life. Another story entirely...)
So someone scored some acid, and a bunch of us, probably around 10, kicked back and let the good times roll, so to speak. At some point we ended up on the roof of our family room, it was accessible by my sisters bedroom window and only one story. Were we lived in New Hampshire there were no big cities or even towns nearby that would add any light interference in the sky, so star gazing at night was amazing. Fucking amazing on acid. We laid up there looking at the stars for what seemed like forever, and had a few cliche conversations about the meaning of life, how small we are in the universe, and even a crazy argument about how our world might even be inside many, many other bigger worlds. But it was beautiful. And dark. We lived on a dead end street and next to a swampy conservation land, the only other light around was from our neighbor's front porch, which was a ways away, and if that was shut off we would only have the moon and stars to light our way. It made you feel, looking up at the stars laying on that roof, that you were floating.
At one point everyone had been quiet for awhile, and a few people had gone inside to use the bathroom. They had been gone awhile, no doubt entranced by the cat or maybe the wallpaper in emily's room, and who knows if we'd even see them again that night. Everybody had stopped talking on the roof , so you could hear everything from the crickets to the beavers slapping their tails on the water nearby. It was in this quiet that I heard this humongus crash that brought me up to an immediate sitting position. "What the fuck was that?!" I yelled.
Someone asked me what the fuck I was talking about. "That big crash sound!"
Everybody just looked at me with that 'WTF are you talking about' look.
Then it happened
For real.
A huge crash came from Emily's room. And everybody looked at me again.
"Did you hear that?" I asked, somewhat hesitantly.
I'll never forget what happened next. This kid named Rich Clivieo (I spelled his last name phonetically, cuz I have no idea how it's spelled), who was the local cheapskate pot dealer, looked at me with the most freaked out expression and said, "your a witch!" and scrambled away from me as far as he could on the roof.
Just then someone poked their head out of Emily's room and apologized for nocking a shelf off the wall that held every bit of ceramic art she had created in High School. Most had survived, but some did not.
For the rest of our trip, everybody gave me these odd looks, as if they weren't sure of what I would do next.
Anytime I saw Rich after that, he always referred to me as the "witch".
Friday, October 06, 2006
Thursday, October 05, 2006
It's Halloween time!
In honor of my favorite blogger, I thought I would share one of my many ghost stories...
Way back in 2000, I lived in an extremely small apartment in the Jamaica Plain area of Boston with my then boyfriend, and future husband, Chris. We lived across from Forrest Hill Station, which was the last stop on the Orange line. At the end of our street, there was the most beautiful graveyard that I have ever seen, Forrest Hills cemetery. It was filled with wonderful works of art and the most wondrous mausoleums I have ever laid eyes on. Sometimes they even have Art installations there, with all sorts of crazy sculptures and odd formations of objects. One time they had all these billowly dresses hanging from trees, god that was creepy thing to do in a graveyard, even looking at it in the day light.
At it's center there was a small man made pond that swans floated around serenely in, while huge packs of geese milled around it's edges, just waiting for some poor fool to pull anything edible from his pockets. You don't ever want to experience a riot of geese attacking you for your misguided attempt at charity, by feeding some birds with some old, leftover, stale bread. If your smart you'll throw the bread one way and run the other. But that is another story...
Anyways, one night in spring of 2000, I was woken up by Chris from dream. It was a really fucked up dream, consisting of a friend of mine named Renee. Now I had lost touch with Renee in the mid 1990's while I was still in Art School, I'd see her every once in a while, modeling at my school for cash, or around Allston. She started hanging with a more coke and heroin kind of crowd, and I was never into that so we lost touch. We were never super close but had some pretty fun times in High School, getting stoned and drinking. Chris actually dated her for a while.
She eventually overdosed, on a speedball it was rumored, and lapsed into a coma. I think I found out a good couple a months after this had happened, from a friend of a friend. We all in the back of our minds new something like this would happen eventually, she was a risk taker and was extremely unhappy girl. She had a hard life growing up, and she was one of those people who tried to dull the pain with drugs. I never visited her at the nursing home, but some of my friends did , they found it hard to see her like that.
The story gets worse. At some point the hospital orderly starts to rape her secretly, and repeatedly, for months. Eventually she gets pregnant and by the time the doctors find out, she gives birth 4 days later to a brain damaged baby girl. Eventually they catch the orderly with DNA and he's sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Now back to my dream. Renee appears in it, and is fully conscious, telling me "I'm awake, I'm going to be OK" over and over. I feel unbelievably happy and she is smiling at me, dressed in the old hippie clothes she used to wear when we were teenagers. Chris wakes me up, saying I was crying in my sleep. I tell him that I just had this great dream that Renee has woken up from her coma, "wouldn't it be great if this was some sort of premonition, and she wakes up?" I tell him. But Chris seems wierded out, "you were crying pretty loud", and this is from the guy who didn't even wake up when the homeless guy under our porch decided to yell anti-Semitic remarks at his cans at 2am.
The next day Chris' best friend John visits us, and because he knows her and I cant get it out of my head, I tell him about the dream. We all kind of laugh about it and move on to other topics. Sometime later that week, I get a phonecall. Its my friend Ade, "Sara, I've got some bad news for you. I just found out Renee has died."
immediately I ask her when. That's when she tells me that she died that night I had that dream.
I tell her about it, and get that funny response from people that don't believe in that shit, or don't want to believe.
I tell Chris what just happened, and he and I have a WTF moment together. Now I know why it was a happy dream and why I was crying.
Way back in 2000, I lived in an extremely small apartment in the Jamaica Plain area of Boston with my then boyfriend, and future husband, Chris. We lived across from Forrest Hill Station, which was the last stop on the Orange line. At the end of our street, there was the most beautiful graveyard that I have ever seen, Forrest Hills cemetery. It was filled with wonderful works of art and the most wondrous mausoleums I have ever laid eyes on. Sometimes they even have Art installations there, with all sorts of crazy sculptures and odd formations of objects. One time they had all these billowly dresses hanging from trees, god that was creepy thing to do in a graveyard, even looking at it in the day light.
At it's center there was a small man made pond that swans floated around serenely in, while huge packs of geese milled around it's edges, just waiting for some poor fool to pull anything edible from his pockets. You don't ever want to experience a riot of geese attacking you for your misguided attempt at charity, by feeding some birds with some old, leftover, stale bread. If your smart you'll throw the bread one way and run the other. But that is another story...
Anyways, one night in spring of 2000, I was woken up by Chris from dream. It was a really fucked up dream, consisting of a friend of mine named Renee. Now I had lost touch with Renee in the mid 1990's while I was still in Art School, I'd see her every once in a while, modeling at my school for cash, or around Allston. She started hanging with a more coke and heroin kind of crowd, and I was never into that so we lost touch. We were never super close but had some pretty fun times in High School, getting stoned and drinking. Chris actually dated her for a while.
She eventually overdosed, on a speedball it was rumored, and lapsed into a coma. I think I found out a good couple a months after this had happened, from a friend of a friend. We all in the back of our minds new something like this would happen eventually, she was a risk taker and was extremely unhappy girl. She had a hard life growing up, and she was one of those people who tried to dull the pain with drugs. I never visited her at the nursing home, but some of my friends did , they found it hard to see her like that.
The story gets worse. At some point the hospital orderly starts to rape her secretly, and repeatedly, for months. Eventually she gets pregnant and by the time the doctors find out, she gives birth 4 days later to a brain damaged baby girl. Eventually they catch the orderly with DNA and he's sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Now back to my dream. Renee appears in it, and is fully conscious, telling me "I'm awake, I'm going to be OK" over and over. I feel unbelievably happy and she is smiling at me, dressed in the old hippie clothes she used to wear when we were teenagers. Chris wakes me up, saying I was crying in my sleep. I tell him that I just had this great dream that Renee has woken up from her coma, "wouldn't it be great if this was some sort of premonition, and she wakes up?" I tell him. But Chris seems wierded out, "you were crying pretty loud", and this is from the guy who didn't even wake up when the homeless guy under our porch decided to yell anti-Semitic remarks at his cans at 2am.
The next day Chris' best friend John visits us, and because he knows her and I cant get it out of my head, I tell him about the dream. We all kind of laugh about it and move on to other topics. Sometime later that week, I get a phonecall. Its my friend Ade, "Sara, I've got some bad news for you. I just found out Renee has died."
immediately I ask her when. That's when she tells me that she died that night I had that dream.
I tell her about it, and get that funny response from people that don't believe in that shit, or don't want to believe.
I tell Chris what just happened, and he and I have a WTF moment together. Now I know why it was a happy dream and why I was crying.
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