My husband and kids have always been drawn to horror. As grade schoolers, my children moved from Goosebumps to Amityville Horror before they even hit double-digits. While my daughter wore out our VHS copy of The Ring over her afternoon snack after middle school every day, I sometimes think that my son’s intense interest in film critique somehow erupted from watching Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, which is one of my own favorite movies. Theoretically, I know a conscientious parent would never have permitted PG-13 movies until children were a chronological match for the labeled rating and content, but I could not produce enough fright to meet my family’s demand unless I unleashed the demons of hell. Today I can count on my nuclear family to scoff at Paranormal Activity, but to adore The Omen. As both children seem to have developed relatively normally, I guess we have not facilitated their entire developmental unraveling by permitting so much scariness at such a young age. If anything, horror movies have prepared them for many of the unsettling conditions of this century.
For my part, I find war movies frightening and disturbing, and I tend to not want to view anything that is based in reality. I guess my preference is fantasy horror, in which there is some kind of alternate reality: demons, ghosts, rituals. I dislike gore, (I call films like Saw “Ghorror”,) and draw the line at torture. I like fright and suspense.
I am not really sure how to describe my bottom line on ghosts. Like many, I have experiences that I cannot fully explain. I still swear that I saw some kind of figure running from a stone memorial and hiding behind a tree at my college, but there are some likely explanations for my seeing something unusual in that my college brain sometimes had a little extra serotonin on board. I also pledge that my mother’s house is haunted, but even the guys on Mythbusters would think the same---that’s a later blog entry. Considering critically my actual ideas about ghosts, spirits, apparitions, I am pushed to admit that I believe on some level, but their existence doesn’t really intrigue or scare me.
In the late 80’s, my sister and I undertook a contract working in the Aleutians, the sweeping hook of an island chain off of Alaska in the Bering Sea. We processed seafood, mostly crab and cod. While the work was sloppy, back-breaking and relentless, we each had East Coast college educations that prepared us for the assignment. We were poised to accept all duties when seafood wasn’t being offloaded and processed, and once my sister took a full 12-hr shift watching cement dry.
The shifts were 12 hours on, 12 off. I worked nights and my sister Lee worked days, which gave us some privacy in the cramped accommodations of the floating processing plant. We shared a small cabin on a permanently docked barge that started out as a liberty ship, consigned to bring fallen soldiers back from the Pacific during WWII. Ship gossip held that the barge’s abundant refrigeration system was originally constructed for a floating morgue. Our more creative colleagues described sightings of individuals in uniform roaming the decks, and many a beer was opened in libation to those souls originally transported on our barge.
Because we worked alternate shifts, and we bore a strong family resemblance, for a few weeks early in our contracts our colleagues couldn’t tell Lee and me apart and thought we were one woman working around the clock. While we each felt like we were working endlessly, Lee and I were caught together over a meal in the dining hall to thundering remarks of, “Oh look everyone! There’s two of ‘em! That’s how they do it!! Are you guys twins?” While I am 4 years older than Lee, I am sure we administered twin glares in response to the unwanted attention. We have a family and gender propensity toward disapproving stares that still gets me in trouble.
The meals Lee and I could easily take together were breakfast/dinner, due to our day/night shift work. The food at our company, UniSea, was excellent, and it was common to have a choice among duck stir-fry, prime rib, salmon, tortillas, coconut shrimp for the 6pm meal, and full breakfast, compete with sausage, eggs, French toast, fruit for the 6am meal. There were many generations and ethnicities represented and the dining hall seated 50-60 workers coming and going to the round-the-clock work.
One of these busy meals found Lee and myself in an exchange something like: “You know, when you’re working and I’m sleeping, I sometimes wake up hearing sneezing and snoring and sniffing. It always sounds like it’s coming from your bunk.”
“That’s funny, when you’re working and I’m sleeping, I hear the same thing, except it’s coming from YOUR bunk!”
We laughed it off, possibly because it seemed extremely real, or maybe we were too disinterested to delve too deeply. Listeners to our conversation explained that there was a long-told tale of a seafood worker leaping or falling to his death from the deck outside the porthole of our cabin, and the sneezing sounds we heard were probably him, lost to an eternity of sinus trouble. Still others imagined the Sneezer was one of the officers originally occupying our cabin, because we were in the commanding officer’s accommodations. It was certain that the bunks, safely space-efficiently build into the walls with drawer compartments beneath, hadn’t changed location, and therefore it would be easy for a ghost to always find its berth, head cold or not. Somehow none of this was scary, and if there were a spirit haunting the room, Lee and I had nothing but compassion for the poor thing. It was really sickly.
Today, I look more for signs than I do for spirits. I like to notice hawks, because I really admire them and try to imagine what it’s like from their vantage point, and they remind me of my dad. I put bees and wasps that I find in the house outside, safely, asking that they tell their friends that I am a kind ally and therefore they don’t need to sting me. My husband, daughter and I compare sightings of our deceased cat, Eartha, whom we lost last summer. Catching her just out of my field of vision is a great comfort because I feel she is still with us. If there are ghosts about, I wish them well, and request that if they are bored and they have a little time, could they throw in a load of laundry or two, or run the vacuum?
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