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. Over time, the noises grew louder and more pronounced. This past April, we heard a succession of footsteps that could only be described as someone walking across the floor.

That someone is most likely Nate, the previous owner who died here in 2017. He loved this house and never wanted to leave it. He was known for his sense of humor and love of pranks. The photo in his obituary shows his shocking white hair, which reminds me a little of my own. This last detail echoes the final twist in another Stephen King tale, The Shining.

Before you accuse me of being delusional, I asked AI whether I had ghosts. Here is what it said:

"Hearing footsteps upstairs is most often caused by wildlife activity, thermal expansion of building materials, or the brain’s natural tendency to pattern-match ambiguous sounds. If physical causes, such as rodents or structural shifts, are ruled out, medical or psychological factors, such as sleep disorders or auditory illusions, should be considered."

My exterminator assures me we have no rodents, let alone on the second floor. Structural shifts are extremely unlikely. It is true that I have a pronounced sleep disorder, but Joe has none of these conditions and hears the footsteps at the same time I do.

If all of this sounds a bit like the plot of yet another horror film, such as the classic The Uninvited, make of that what you will.

For now, we and our ghost are in an uneasy alliance. I will let you know if that changes. 

Have a haunted Halloween.

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