Ghost

I knew full well when I bought the house that there were ghosts in it, at least one. The sellers were very clear about telling me that a man had killed himself in the house, and they thought he was still around; they could hear him in the closet or in the attic, or going from one to the other. For example they'd hear the stairs, late at night, that led from the second-floor hallway up to the attic or back, and then the door to the master bedroom on the second floor, and then the closet door in that bedroom.

I slept in a small room on that second floor, because I could look out my window and see a charming street corner of the city with relatively steady traffic, which I liked, as idly I could enjoy people coming and going no matter what time or weather. I was not bothered by the ghost. Let him go back and forth as much as he wanted, work out whatever problem he had that had made him kill himself, even wail out at night if he wanted, which was actually rare. I did hear him occasionally, but I was ok with even that, and in an old house you never knew if that was just the rafters of the attic or the wind getting in some place where it shouldn't. 

The house was in a town by the sea; there were cliffs nearby and the fog would often roll in, shrouding it and the town for hours. It was a beautiful old house, though, with bushes and trees all around it and an attic window from which you could see most of the town and the sea.

While I was at that house, I fell in love with a woman, Sarah, and we planned to marry. She would spend a lot of time at my house, most of it downstairs, cooking, watching movies, playing Scrabble. But when she was upstairs in my room, she heard the ghost and had a different reaction from mine. She was not as eager to just let him be and let him wail in anguish at whatever was bothering him. She heard it as a call for help or a call to intervene in some way, to release him from his misery.

The man that had owned the house, one Alfred Morris III, had inherited the house from his parents, and had killed himself supposedly because his wife had died in the ocean nearby. No one knew much about the wife, Maria, or why she was out there - perhaps she had gone somewhere? She was from a nearby town somewhere, and though the neighbors had seen her, they didn't know her very well; if she had friends, they didn't even know who they would be. Alfred himself had grown up in the house, so knew every hiding place, every nook and cranny, so to speak, and most of the neighbors knew him and remembered him well - some of the older ones remembered him being a young kid, stepping on their flowers, or knocking on their doors selling tickets for the school carnival. They were upset by news of his suicide, which happened maybe a month or two after she had died.

I had accepted the previous owners' story - that they had bought the house from Alfred Morris III's estate after his death, that the ghost disturbed them but wasn't really the reason that they moved, that his suicide was big news in town so the house would always be marked to some degree. Even the neighbors liked to tell the story of all the news cameras parked up and down the street and the body being brought out and put in the police ambulance. There was some confusion about how they knew to look in there and whether they had actually searched the entire house, but the previous owners assured me that they personally had inspected every little closet and hallway and it was what they said it was - the old Morris estate, with all its history, and historical artifacts to be gone through, sold at auction or given to family members, a process that took months. 

But after Sarah moved in she wanted to act on the situation, so we both began asking around among our friends about the deaths, which had both happened about ten years earlier, in a single year. One of Sarah's friends maintained that Alfred III was gay, and that his lover, one John Maxwell, had died in the same year. This, if true, complicated the situation considerably, so finally I went and checked the newspapers and public records, as I hadn't been in the town ten years ago. It turned out that Alfred III had died at the cliffs, a popular place for locals to jump and commit suicide; it happened every few years or so. The wife had died earlier, and it had been at sea, but she was good with boats; why would she even be out there in difficult boating conditions? 

But this meant that the body they had taken out of the house, regardless of what the neighbors thought, was that of John Maxwell. 

Three suicides seemed to be a heavy burden, too much to think about while padding around the kitchen making coffee. I talked to Sarah about it quite a bit. Her friend who had first identified John Maxwell was suspicious, and said that they weren't all necessarily suicides, particularly Alfred's, which had been death from jumping from the cliff. It wasn't impossible, she said, for people to be pushed from up there. And though investigators may have found DNA or some other evidence on the body of Alfred, that wouldn't be enough to do any more than question Maxwell; they had closed the investigation shortly after Maxwell himself had died. 

The noises didn't abate after we had learned all this; on the contrary, they seemed to get worse once we became more familiar with the people involved. But Sarah and I both spontaneously began simply talking to the ghost, and telling him to be quiet or at least quit the wailing. It didn't stop or even change any of the noise, but it at least made us feel better. It was only when we had guests over, especially at the time of the wedding, that it was a little tricky. We knew a little too much, and it was better to just tell people part of the story.