GHOSTIES

My relationship with the Other Side is most akin to Haley Joel Osment's dilemma in the first half of The Sixth Sense, in that I've seen ghosts multiple times and they seem to want to hang with me, but I'm really scared of them and don't want to.

Or at least I don't now. When I was a kid, I was totes down with making ghost-friends, at least according to me ma. Until I was 7, my family lived in an apartment, and then we moved to a house one town over. One day, I turned to my mother and asked, "Why didn't the little girl come with us when we moved?"

"Uh... what little girl?" my mom asked. (I only have a brother.)

"The little girl who sits on my window sill at night and talks to me," I said.

OMG WTF BBQ?!?? But my mom kept her cool and said if I wanted the girl to come back, I should just think of her and invite her to our new home. Now, I was a weird kid, with many imaginary friends, but I could differentiate between fantasy and reality. And I was convinced this nightly visitor was real, not pretend.

So, ghost. An interesting footnote here is that I had no memory of this little girl until my mom brought it up years later, and then I vaguely recalled talking to someone at night.

Since then I've had a few more experiences, all of which also occurred at night. I realize this takes some of the oomph out of my story: it's not uncommon for people's brains, especially when entering or leaving sleep-mode, to interpret some innocuous object they see in a dark room as a human form. Or, for that matter, to be in a sort of twilight, half-awake half-asleep state, and again misinterpret the vestiges of a dream as reality, i.e. something supernatural occurring. But the fact that I saw this little girl EVERY NIGHT, and she spoke to me before I fell asleep, makes me somewhat more inclined to see my subsequent creepy experiences as possibly ghost-oriented.

ANYWAY: other experiences include: sleeping over a friend's house and waking up in the middle of the night to find a boy in the guest room bed with me (was not my friend; there were no other young men in the house); waking up in my parents' house one night and seeing three women seated on an antique bench in my bedroom, staring at me (interesting to note for the next several days my dog behaved very strangely, as though she was spooked by something); and hearing a very freaky deep voice intone my name several times one night in a pub in Australia that I felt was haunted as soon as I entered.

Since then I've sort of put in a formal request to the spirit world to leave me alone. So far so good.