No Such Things

Whenever I asked my mother the question, she answered patiently and deliberately: “There are… no such things … as ghosts.”

I was helping her hang laundry one Saturday morning in early Autumn and decided to use those few precious moments alone with her to inquire about the fears that had been plaguing me for some time.

“Well, how about the ghosts of Christmas Past, Christmas Present, and Christmas Future?," I asked. Every Christmas season, we watched the movie about Scrooge and the ghosts and the turkey and Tiny Tim. Instead of dreams about Santa, carols, and the-ever-hoped-for white Christmas and white pony, I would have nightmares about the black shrouded apparition garbed in clanking chains, and carrying a scythe. I was even more worried about the approaching holiday season now that we had moved into the tiny apartment over my father’s funeral home. 

“Nope, no such thing. You do know that’s a story…from Dickens’ imagination? Not a true occurrence. It’s fiction.”

I dug further into my bag of ghost memories as I took the wooden clothes pins from my mother’s long fingers and placed them into the striped laundry basket.

“So I guess Casper the Friendly Ghost is fiction?”

“Yes, dahlin’. How about handing me the wet sheets from the other basket,” she asked as her delicate body teetered over the edge of the makeshift roof deck to attach the flapping sheet over the asphalt below.


We had only lived at 13 Evergreen Avenue for six months. (Isn’t that the perfect street number for a funeral home…13?) The adjustment had been difficult from the very first moment. I was heartsick for our former home: my old bedroom, our wonderful backyard with apple trees and rhubarb plants and plenty of places to hide.

It was hardest at night. The prayer that my siblings and I repeated innocently enough every evening, now commenced my nightly horror show. “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” Is that supposed to be consoling? Is that supposed to reassure a kid?

No matter how tired I may have been earlier in the evening, once I whispered the “if I should die” part of that prayer, my mind would get stuck in the death groove. What happens if I die tonight? Or if not tonight, tomorrow? What will it be like when I die? Will I know I am dead? How will it feel to be dead? Will I be able to come back and visit my family, my friends? No, I guess not because that would make me a ghost…and there are…no such things… as ghosts.

Each night, my mother floated into our room in diaphanous night gown and socks, to cover us up and kiss us good night. If only she could stay. She could keep that dead man downstairs away from my bedroom door; for I could hear that corpse in the room right below me readjusting himself in the casket; or worse yet, preparing to sneak up the stairs to eat a little girl just for kicks.

The chill of my fears rushed through my veins and kept me vigilant at night. By day, I was on guard against the stories my new classmates would tell to scare me, and each other. They often succeeded. My parents expected my siblings and me to know better than to be frightened. “Oh that’s nonsense,” they’d say when I told them what gory stories the playground crew conjured.

 “You know better than to believe that,” they cajoled. No, you know better than to believe that. Me? I am only 11. I’m holding my breath and I don’t know when I’m ever going to exhale.


 I’m trying to cover all the bases as I stand with my mother this morning hanging the very sheets I tussle with as I try to sleep. I want to wrap her certainty around me like a blanket. When I return to school on Monday, my new friends will bombard me with ghost stories and tell me how afraid they would be to live in a funeral home. I tell them that I don’t live in the funeral home, I live over the funeral home, but that is a useless distinction. “Aren’t you afraid to live with those dead bodies?” “Do you see ghosts at night?” “Has a ghost ever tapped you on the shoulder?” “Does your mother fry up dead people’s livers and give them to you for dinner?

When the weekend is over and my alone time with my mother is just a comforting memory, I want to be prepared for the questions. I want to be able to answer them with the same conviction that my mother answers me: “There are… no such things… as ghosts.”

In the meantime, I ask my mother my final gnawing question. The one that should put my ghosts fears to rest. “What about the Holy Ghost? The father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.’ What about him?”

 “Girl,” she scolds, “you’d better take those sheets in the house and start folding.”