Living with the Ghost of Nate
We moved into our dream house in November 2020. The French Country-style dwelling is ideally suited to Joe and me: roomy, with free-flowing indoor and outdoor spaces and plenty of nooks and crannies to showcase my collector’s passions. It is also haunted. The first evidence of this appeared almost as soon as we moved in. Outside, out of the corner of my eye, I would often catch a blurry apparition moving briskly through the gardens and the outdoor pool area. Then there was the red balloon, whose string was tied to a shrub in the backyard one morning. Stephen King readers know that a red balloon tied to a string is the calling card of the menacing Pennywise the clown, the antagonist in the 1986 horror masterpiece It . You may think this paranormal activity frightened us, but Joe and I accepted it early on as part of our living situation. That was before the footsteps began. At first, they were mere thumps from the second floor. The footsteps always came from the second floor....
