Let's hope Caspar is friendly!

I've been wondering lately if I have ghosts in my house. (I hope my parents don't raise the rent -- or maybe this could be my argument for a lowered sum each month.). Oh, it's nothing sinister or spooky or anything that Hollywood would pounce on in a second. It comes in a much more subtle form: photography. I have two cameras -- an old school (and awesome) 35mm roll film camera, and a digital one. Whenever I take digital pictures, I download them to iPhoto. Here's the weird part: with just about every indoor picture there is at least one round rather transparent thing on it, kind of like a fuzzy bubble. In the ghostbuster world, this is called an "orb" -- the spirit of a deceased person, taking the shape of a sphere of light. Or so they say. The thing that makes this so strange is that in all of the photographs I have taken over the years, I have never had this happen ... until I moved here. Now, from what I've read, this could merely be a speck of dust illuminated by the flash (which means I need to get my butt in gear and start dusting weekly!). OK, fine -- makes sense. But I've had this camera for a few years now, I've been taking indoor pictures for years, and this house is no more dusty than any other I've lived in. So why is this different?

It's just really strange. I know my grandmother died in this house, in her sleep in her bedroom (which is now our bedroom). But I don't know how I feel about ghosts. I suppose I was brought up with the "I don't believe in ghosts" mentality, although I can't remember an actual conversation or teaching time with my parents about this. I guess it was just assumed. I have worked in two places that were considered (although not officially) "haunted," but in only one of those places did I actually experience something myself. In my last job, before I stopped working to stay at home with my kids, I was a tour guide at a "house museum." A few of my fellow guides, as well as the site administrator, told me of things they had seen or witnessed, but thankfully I remained blissfully unaware. My only personal "ghost experience" came when I was working at a library in Washington, D.C. When I got there, many of my colleagues told me of various "sightings" and other unexplained events throughout the years, mostly experienced by the guards on the night shift (the employment turnaround was tremendous): seeing the figure of Mr.-- himself (the man who started the library decades prior), in formal evening wear and top hat, walking down the corridor in the middle of the night; the light above his portrait turned on or off (after being checked by the guards), etc. The one event I personally witnessed involved the elevator going to the stacks underground. I was sitting at the desk on the lower level on a Saturday afternoon, the floor being "dead quiet" (pun probably very intended), when I suddenly heard that tell-tale "ka-chungggggggg" as the elevator starting coming up from the floor below. I looked at the doors as they opened, expecting to see one of the weekend staff, but instead it was empty. The doors closed, and then I heard "ka-chungggggg" again as it returned downstairs. It did it again later on. Boy, did that creep me out. I told one of my colleagues later on -- a woman who had been there for years and has had many ghostly sightings herself -- and said, "Oh, that's just Mr. or Mrs.-- ... that's been going on for a long time." There had been numerous calls to the elevator repair people over the years, but they never found anything wrong. Weird.

Then one day in October, while I was shelving books on that same lower level, one of my colleagues sought me out and had a very strange look on her face. She was a middle-aged woman and a retired CIA operative -- in other words, a by-the-book kind of woman, an empirical evidence kind of woman, an "I laugh at in the face of ghost stories" kind of woman. She was shelving books on the very lowest level, an area that is always kept very dark, save for a few very dim emergency lights and the individual light switches you turn on for the particular stack in which you are working. It is indeed a somewhat creepy place. Anyway, when she found me she asked, "What does Mrs.--" look like?" I told her to follow me, and together we went to a particular room where her photograph was hanging. My friend's face got a little whiter when she said, "That's her. That's who I saw." She proceeded to tell me what just happened:

As she was pushing her cart of books down the long center aisle, she happened to glance to her right when she saw a figure crouching in the darkness of the stacks. Being very dimly lit, she couldn't make out who the figure was ... perhaps a co-worker shelving a book, not bothering to turn on the light? That would make the most sense, because no one is allowed down there unless you are an employee or a special guest of someone who works there (and even then you must be accompanied by an employee at all times). There is no chance a random person off the street would ever be there. So she walked into the stacks and got a closer look at the figure: not a co-worker, but rather an old woman, wearing very old-fashioned clothes, with a shawl wrapped around her shoulders. The woman looked up at her in silence, and as soon as my friend said, "May I help you?" the figure disappeared.

Boy, was I spooked. According to my friend, the woman in the photograph, Mrs.--, was wearing the same shawl and the same period clothing as the person in the stacks. I asked my friend if she believed in ghosts and she adamantly replied, "NO ... but I cannot explain what I just saw." She was truly baffled. I was truly freaked. I left my job about seven months later, when Don graduated from seminary and we moved back to PA. I could not shelve books down on that level after that experience -- and if I had to, I was extremely uneasy. I would be very loud in my shelving, I tried to "turn off" my peripheral vision, I would sing songs, I would recite a few Psalms ... anything to say, "Hey, I'm here -- don't show yourself!"

I still don't know what I think about all of that. I can easily dismiss my own experience of a mysterious elevator as something wrong with the wiring (even though the repair people couldn't figure it out). But this? A strange woman in the stacks? An experience told to me by a woman who lives in a black-and-white world (at least as far as that stuff goes)? And now here I am, suddenly seeing "orbs" in my photographs ... how do I explain that? Well, I can't.

I guess I'll just have to break out my dust rags more often. According to my new chore-challenge, imposed upon myself last week (and starting today), Monday is wash day (better get moving on that ...), Tuesday is dusting and vacuuming day, so Wednesday is no-more-orbs day. Love it!