Patty about that day and if she now believed in ghosts because of what she saw. “Honestly, Anthony,” she told me. “I just don’t know. Now I think it was just all my imagination, that’s all.” That’s all she would say about what had happened from that day forward.
Even though I didn’t experience what she saw personally, I knew she had seen a ghost. When I found her in her room, she was too terrified for it to be just her imagination. She had seen a ghost. I might have seen taotaomona, but to me, they weren’t really ghosts. They were my ancestors, guardians of the island.
In my mind, I could explain the taotaomona. I wanted to see, and experience, something I couldn’t explain. I wanted to see something like what Patty saw. I wanted to see a “real” ghost.
“Do you know any ghost stories?” was a question I began asking everyone I met. I just couldn’t get enough of them, and on Guam, there were a lot of them. Once my grandfather passed away, my father retired from the Navy after twentytwo years of service, and we moved back to the States.
While I was on Guam, it seemed like most of the people who lived there, including those who weren’t native to the island, took the existence of ghosts as a matter of fact. Perhaps it’s because there isn’t a square inch of the island that hasn’t been soaked in blood from all the wars fought on the island, starting with the Spanish-Chamoru war fought between 1671 and 1695 and ending so far with the battles between the Japanese and American armed forces for control of the island during World War II.
When we moved back to the States, though, whenever I asked if anyone knew of any haunted houses or had experienced anything supernatural, I typically received a look that said, “Do you really believe in ghosts?” It reminded me of the time I grew up in Indiana, so I became more careful of whom I asked.
I had a wander lust in my 20s, so I moved around a lot. Around 1983, I lived in Salt Lake City for about seven months. I met a couple of women, Karma and Peggy, who shared a trailer home. As I got to know them better, I asked, “Do you know of any true ghost stories or haunted houses?”
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