felt the dirt and gravel of the road under my flip flops. I walked home wondering what was up with my uncle. Yeah, he didn’t know me, but I thought he would have been friendlier.
I got home and asked my mother, “When did uncle get back?” She asked me which uncle I was referring to. “The one who lives in the first house,” I told her. She told me that he still hadn’t come back.
I told her about the men I saw and what had happened when I talked to them.” Where did you see them,” she asked, looking more concerned than I thought was necessary.
“Near the banyan (breadfruit) tree in front of his house,” I said, nonchalantly, not thinking anything about it.
“Were you afraid?” she asked.
“No, I just thought he’d be more excited to see me. But if it wasn’t him . . . ”
“I think you saw the taotaomona,” my mother said, quietly. She said this because the people of Guam believe that our ancestors live in the roots of the banyan tree, which rise above the ground, and form what looks like a hut. I didn’t bother telling my father what I saw. After all, didn’t he just tell us that ghosts didn’t exist?
I didn’t think much more afterwards about what had happened that night; although any night that I walked by my uncle’s house, there could have been a five-piece band playing John Philip Sousa songs and I still would have made sure I didn’t look in the direction of that banyan tree!
When “base housing” finally became available for us, my parents rented my grandparent’s house to a “stateside” couple with three kids. I don’t remember much about them except that the husband, Rick, talked about running for a seat in the Guam Senate, and his wife, Jeanne, was a columnist for the local newspaper.
A couple of months after we moved out and they moved in, my mother received a call from Jeanne asking that the shed on the side of the house be taken down. My mother told her that my cousin Roque and I would be happy to do it (not that she had asked either one of us).
While Roque and I were taking the shed apart, my mother and Jeanne talked through the kitchen window. I took a short break to ask Jeanne for a couple of glasses of water. As Jeanne was getting the water, she hesitantly said to my mother, “Rose, may I ask you and Anthony a question? Has anything strange ever happen while you lived in this house?”
She had my interest now, and even though she handed me two glasses of water through the kitchen window, I wasn’t going anywhere!
My mother answered her question with a question. “What do you mean?”
“Well . . . ” Jeanne continued. I could tell she was struggling with whether or not she even wanted to tell us what she was about to say. “ . . . every once in a while we’ll leave and when we come back home, all of the lights will be turned on in the house, the burners in the stove are turned on, and the water in faucets will be running . . . and this happens in the middle of the afternoon! This kept happening and we thought the kids were leaving everything on. So Rick and I would go through the entire house before we’d leave and make sure everything was off. When we’d come back, everything was turned on again!”
My mother and I looked at each other not knowing what to say. Finally my mother said to Jeanne, “Those things didn’t happen when we lived here.”
The fact that we didn’t laugh at her or disbelieve what she was saying seemed to encourage Jeanne to tell us more. “Just the other night I was falling asleep and I heard what sounded like our vacuum cleaner in the living room! So I got up wondering why one of my kids was running the vacuum in the middle of the night. I put my robe on, and as soon as I put my hand on the doorknob, the sound stopped. I opened the door, walked into the living room, and there in the middle of the floor was our vacuum plugged into the wall!”
I was stunned. Nothing like that had ever happened while we lived there, though I thought it would have been exciting if it had. For me it would have proven ghosts do exist no matter what my father said.
“What did you do?” I asked. By this time, Roque had become tired of waiting for me to bring him his glass of water and was walking up to where my mother and I were standing. I handed him his glass and whispered, “Stay here. You’ve got to hear this!” even though I knew that he had not only a healthy respect for the dead and the taotaomona, but also an even healthier fear of them as well.
“I unplugged the vacuum, wrapped the cord around the handle, and put the vacuum back in the closet. I checked in on the kids, and they were all fast asleep.”
I told Roque what Jeanne had just said to my mother and me about the vacuum. Just as I suspected he would, he gulped down his water, handed his glass to Jeanne, and walked back to what remained of the shed. I couldn’t help but smile as I watched him walk away as fast as he could trying not to be obvious about it. I knew he wanted to finish taking down the shed, all by himself if he had to, so that he could get home and as far away from my grandparent’s house as fast as possible.
When I turned back around, Jeanne continued her story. “I went back to my bedroom and was just about to fall asleep when I heard the vacuum again! So I got up, put my robe on, and as soon as I touched the doorknob, the noise stopped. I walked out into the living room, and there was the vacuum, plugged into the wall, in the middle of the floor!”
I wanted to hear if anything else happened in the house, but I started to feel guilty about leaving Roque all alone to work on the shed. When we finished, my mother and I got in our car and went home. We didn’t say a word to each other about what Jeanne had told us, but my interest in ghosts had just been rekindled, and it would soon burst into a full blown obsession.
Tropical storms and typhoons are a part of life on Guam, and every once in a while a storm would approach the island that would have people boarding up their windows, or if you lived in military housing, putting up metal storm shutters. Once, when just such a storm was coming, a few friends of mine and I decided to have a “storm shutter party.” We went to each other’s home and put shutters in the windows.
The last house we did was for a girl named Patty. A straight “A” student, Patty was not known for making stories up to get attention, but what happened that day certainly got mine. After we had finished putting up the shutters on the windows of Patty’s home, she told us that she had made sandwiches for us to eat and to help ourselves while she went upstairs to take a shower.
Twenty minutes later we were all standing in the kitchen, the sandwiches gone, talking, waiting for Patty to come back downstairs. Suddenly, we heard a blood curdling scream coming from upstairs. We found Patty in her room, trembling and crying uncontrollably.
When she finally calmed down enough to talk to us, we asked her what had happened. She told us that after she took a shower, she was in her room standing in front of the mirror brushing her hair. She could see her bedroom window and how the shutter enabled her to see the reflection of her room in the window. Then she noticed something that scared the living daylights out of her.
“I was brushing my hair when I noticed a movement out of the corner of my eye. I looked in the mirror, and I could see a young girl with long blonde hair, wearing a white T-shirt and blue jeans reflected in the window. She looked as though she was looking directly at me, and she had her right hand in the air, above her head, as though she were holding something in her hand.”
“What was she holding?” we asked her. “Was it a knife?”
“I don’t know,” Patty said. “Her hand was cut off by the edge of the window. I turned
