of those people thought of me as a nut case. Like so many kids that age, I wanted more than anything else to just fit in.
I decided that answering the question would only make things worse for me than they already were, so I claimed ignorance. My teacher and classmates all laughed at me. She didn’t bother asking the remaining questions. I did get what I wanted though. The harassment I was subjected to started to ease up slowly.
After that, my classmates began welcoming me with open arms. My intense interest in things paranormal gradually began to be replaced by playing baseball and basketball and by joining the track team.
An incident happened later that did keep my interest in ghosts alive though. One day I heard on the news that a female student at Indiana University in Bloomington was murdered the night before. Later that day, Julie, one of my neighbors, asked me if I had heard about what had happened.
I told her I had and she said, “Did you know that she used to live where you live now? She grew up in that house.” I didn’t know that, and now that I did, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. It just seemed creepy to me.
I told my parents about it and that somehow gave them the idea that going shopping in Bloomington later that day was a good idea! I didn’t want to go, so I was alone in the house, reading a book, when I suddenly thought about the girl who was killed the night before. I thought about how she had lived, played, eaten, and slept in the very house I was in. Suddenly, the glass of a small kerosene lamp that hung on the wall between my room and Meridith’s room exploded sending glass all over the hallway floor.
I sat there trying to decide whether I should clean up the glass or run screaming out the door. There was another kerosene lamp hanging on the wall between two other bedroom doors that didn’t explode, which made me wonder if she had slept in either Meridith’s bedroom or mine.
I came to the conclusion that since I was sitting there, it must have been mine. That made me want to pack my clothes and move out, and I probably would have done so if it weren’t for the big wet spot on the front of my pants.
When nothing else happened for about an hour afterwards, I decided it was safe to change my pants and sweep the glass up off the floor, saying a prayer for the young university student as I did so.
After living in Indiana for two years, my father was stationed back on Guam because his father was diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis or ALS. Most people know this condition as “Lou Gehrig’s Disease.” It’s a horrible illness that paralyzes every muscle in the body, eventually causing the death of the person afflicted when the muscles that cause the lungs to expand and contract stop working.
It became an opportunity to become reacquainted with my culture. The Chamoru mindset is based on respect, which extends to those who have died. We also have a great deal of respect for our ancestors, whom we refer to as taotaomona (tao-toe-mo-na).
We moved into a home that belonged to my mother’s parents while we waited for military housing to become available. One of the stories that my mother told us was that my grandfather was out in a field behind the house when he saw a young boy staring at him. My grandfather asked the boy who he was and what he was doing there. The boy vanished. My grandfather believed, until the day he died, that he had seen a taotaomona.
Strange occurrences happened while we lived in that house. For example, it was so hot and humid during the day that I typically took a shower at night. I noticed that when I finished and stepped out of the tub, the air around me was freezing. I started opening the bathroom window after I took a shower; then I began opening it before I took a shower. The result was always the same. Instead of stepping out of the tub into humid, tropical air, I always felt as though I were stepping into a walk-in freezer. My teeth would literally chatter while I was drying myself off. I finally started wrapping my towel around my waist, and I would walk out of the bathroom and into my bedroom to dry off and put clothes on. Then I would walk back into the bathroom to hang my towel back up. When I did, I’d notice that the air was usually warm and humid again.
What I didn’t know at the time was that the “chill” I felt is the way my body reacts when I’m in the presence of a spirit. I still get same sort of feeling to this day when I’m in the presence of an apparition.
I didn’t say anything to anyone about it, but one night when my family was eating dinner, my brother Eddie, who was ten at the time, innocently asked, “Has anyone noticed anything weird about this house?”
“What do you mean by weird?” I asked him.
“Sometimes at night when I’m falling asleep, I’ll hear what sounds like someone running around in the attic,” he said.
“I haven’t heard that,” I responded, “but has anyone noticed that whenever I take a shower I go into my room to dry off?”
“Yeah, I have!” Meridith piped in. “Why do you do that?”
“Because, whenever I’m done taking a shower, the bathroom is freezing!”
“Wow, do you think that this house is haunted?” Meridith asked.
“I don’t know but . . . ,” I started to say when my father interrupted.
“That’s enough of that kind of talk,” he said angrily. “You’re scaring the babies. Besides, there’s no such thing as ghosts.” I remember being surprised that my father would even say such a thing considering the fact that I had heard more ghost stories on Guam than anyplace else we had lived.
Did my father really believe that ghosts don’t exist? If he didn’t, something happened in that house a couple of weeks later that seemed to change his mind. My mother was gone one afternoon to pick up Eddie from school, and when she returned twenty minutes later, my father was sitting on the porch waiting for her with nothing on but his underwear and a T-shirt.
My grandparent’s home was at the end of a secluded dirt road. Even so, my mother was so shocked to see my father like that she asked, “What are you doing outside in your underwear? What if someone sees you like that?”
My father answered her question by saying, “Don’t ever leave me alone in this house again.”
“Why, what happened?” my mother asked, concerned because my father looked so scared.
“This house is weird,” was all my father would say. He refused to say anything more.
It wasn’t until more than thirty years later when he told my sisters what had happened that day. “I was taking a nap in the living room while your mother went to pick up Eddie from school. Suddenly, I woke up when I heard what sounded like someone running back and forth in the attic! I was so scared I sat outside waiting for Mom.”
There were four other houses on the road that led to our home. The first house belonged to an uncle who was never there. I was told he was always traveling. One night I was walking home when I noticed five men, sitting on their haunches, talking quietly, almost as though they were whispering. I was excited because I’d finally have a chance to meet my elusive uncle.
I walked up to them, waving, and saying, “Hi, Uncle! When did you get back?” All of a sudden, all of the men stopped talking and simply stared at me. It wasn’t exactly the response I was expecting, and I stood there looking back at them.
When
