Do you believe in ghosts? Before you answer, read these two stories.
In both stories, the previous inhabitants never really want to leave.
Janie Gabbett grew up in a farmhouse in Delavan, Ill. built by her great grandfather in the late 1800s. As the youngest in the family, she was sent to be the earliest, at 8:30 p.m. In Boo! a work of nonfiction, she writes:
It didn’t happen often, but enough times for me to remember clearly. I would catch of glimpse of some movement down the dark, empty hall as I rounded the corner toward the room that I shared with my sister Susie. Chasing the glance with a quick swivel of my neck, I saw a man and a woman dressed in unusual clothing peering out of an unused bedroom upstairs. He was taller by a fair bit. They never approached me, or even set foot outside that bedroom. They never spoke. They just leaned out of that bedroom doorway, smiling at me. Sometimes she would wave. Sometimes he would wink. Every time, I would scream.
Even today, I can remember her high-necked lace collar and long skirt under a cape tied at her neck and some type of hat or bonnet, as if she were on her way somewhere. He wore a round collar shirt, a thin bow tie like Colonel Sanders in the KFC commercials and a round hat that wasn’t shaped like my dad’s fedora. They seemed oddly dressed to me, given that my fashion frame of reference at the time didn’t stretch much beyond my mother’s shirtwaist dresses or Rob Petrie’s suits on the Dick Van Dyke show.
(Here’s a picture of them below. Frightening, no?)
Read Boo! exclusively on Esoterica.
Jonathan Papernick wrote “An Unwelcome Guest" exactly 25 years ago in the aftermath of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination. This short story follows a young, Jewish man who has recently moved into a home in the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem with his new wife when he encounters an Arab man in his kitchen. Is he real or not and whose home is it anyway? The short story appears in Papernick’s collection, The Ascent of Eli Israel and Other Stories.
Yossi Bar-Yosef felt his young wife Devorah stir in sleep. He rolled over in bed, felt her warm breath against his face and lay watching her until she was still again. Then she slept quietly. A large round moon hung low over Jerusalem, its white light spilling into their Muslim Quarter apartment. He sat up in bed, reached for his kippah on the nightstand, and placed it on his head. The night was silent in contrast to the chaos of the day; Arab merchants hawking fruits and vegetables, pilgrims shouting prayers and curses, army patrols strolling through the narrow stone streets. Now he could only hear his wife’s even breathing and the two soldiers joking quietly in Hebrew beneath their bedroom window. In a few hours the muezzin would call the Ishmaelites to prayer for the first time in the new day.
He got out of bed and made his way to the kitchen by moonlight, nearly skipping all the way in his bare feet. It was the month of Tishri, and the stone floors were chilly even for early autumn. He filled a pot with water, lit the gas with a match, and stood by the stove for a moment thinking of his wife, his Devorah Bee: her soft olive skin, her curly brown hair, her green eyes, the way her body felt beneath his.
“You are welcome,” the Arab man said, startling Yossi. “Welcome. Have a seat,” he said gesturing to the empty chair at the kitchen table. “Welcome,” the Arab man said again, smiling.
Read the full story here at Esoterica.
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