That’s Baba Yaga.
“That’s…Baba Yaga.”
“What!? No it’s not, it’s Boney Legs! I read this book to my class in first grade, it was my favorite!” I said this quite defensively as if I knew ol’ Boney Legs personally. I loved this story so much as a child that I bought a paperback copy to send to my niece and nephews. But first, of course, I had to read it aloud in bed to my husband.
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He broke down the truth of my childhood friend gently, “She lives in a cabin in the woods… that sits on chicken feet…and eats children… That’s Baba Yaga.”
I turned the worn book over in my hands to examine the cover and gasped at the chicken-footed foundation printed before me.
“Oh my- you’re right! How did I not realize this?!”
When I was just a wee lil thang and my older cousin would babysit us, she’d regularly grab a flashlight and we’d all crawl through the miniature door that led into a tiny storage closet behind the stairs of her home. We’d sit in the dark, surrounded by cobwebs, and insulation, and huddle around the beam of her flashlight to read that book. She’d do a creaky old voice for the witch and we’d cheer on the children in their clever escape!
It’s still one of my favorite memories and children’s books. I just somehow hadn’t made the connection as an adult that the precious story I chose to read aloud to my classmates in first grade was the tale of Baba Yaga.
But isn’t this what we’ve all gone through at one time or another? Realizing the origins of so many of our favorite childhood fairytales are far darker than we knew?
Wait wait wait…the stepsisters cut off their toes and heels in the original Cinderella!?
The wolf was a rapist!?
Rapunzel was pregnant!?
It’s funny how the longer we’ve been around something, the harder it can be to see it objectively or in its full context. Everything gets sanded down and repackaged with time, whether it’s from our childhood mind or our own psyches' survival tactics. Sometimes it’s as lighthearted as not recognizing the villain in our favorite childhood story, and sometimes it’s the weight of family trauma we’ve learned to live with.
Oh that? That’s nothing.
Early this spring, my husband and I along with my aunt and uncle headed north to empty and clean out another family member’s home and storage units after they’d unexpectedly gone into assisted living.
Anyone who’s done this knows it’s no easy task, especially when you’re under a time crunch. It’s incredibly difficult to rummage through things someone’s collected over a lifetime, and have to decide in a moment if it’s going to be kept for them, donated, or trashed.
We had our work cut out for us and we had to get it done within three days so we could save them from having to pay another month's worth of rental fees. So we put our heads down and went to work.
That first night arriving at the hotel after a day's worth of rummaging, my husband and I were exhausted. This hotel was brand new. Hip and modern, but empty. Aside from us and the person working overnight? There were only one or two other cars in the parking lot.
We were snuggled up and watching Netflix when in a moment, I went from feeling fine, to not fine at all. First I started sweating, then my heart raced with panic, and then the nausea kicked in. It was sleeting and beginning to snow outside and I’m generally always chilly, so Joe was surprised when I asked if he could turn the thermostat waaaay down.
I threw the blanket off of my legs and began huffing and puffing in agitation.
I just gotta get to sleep.
As soon as I finally began to drift off, Joe switched off the television.
My heart was thumping in my stomach and I didn’t want to tell him how sick I was feeling. We had a lotta work to do the next two days and I was his teammate to do the heavy lifting. This was not a great time to get seriously ill.
I took slow deep breaths as the silence in the room hummed louder. Then, I heard a click, and light filled the room.
“Did the tv just turn back on?”
“Yeah.”
“Huh…”
He grabbed the remote from the nightstand and turned it back off.
We nuzzled our heads back into our pillows. A couple of minutes passed then *click.* Light flooded the room again as we both slowly turned toward the television screen.
“What the-” Joe moaned aloud
“Did it just turn on again?”
“Yeah.”
“Alright…”
We lay there in silence for a few minutes. Now my nausea was turning into a more pronounced feeling of panic.
He turned it back off. A few more minutes passed then-
*Click*
Oh for the love. Again?
My eyelids fluttered against the light. Joe let out a heavy sigh, turned on his bedside lamp, and flung the comforter back before going to unplug the television from the wall.
We didn’t talk about it. We just needed to get to sleep.
Come morning I was feeling back to my normal self and we plugged the TV back in before leaving the hotel. But when we walked back into our room that night, the TV had turned itself back on.
“Maybe it’s picking up somebody else’s remote in another room.” Joe threw out.
“Uhhh…yeah, maybe.”
That night we played it smart and unplugged it before going to sleep. But then the noises started above us.
“What are they doing up there!?”
“I don’t know!”
All the rooms in the hotel were uncarpeted, which was nice for sanitary reasons absolutely, but holy shit it made the noise above us especially loud. It sounded like whoever was in there was sitting in the rolling desk chair and pushing themselves across the room from one wall to the next. All. Night. And I mean all night, it kept on. It didn’t sound like they even stopped to pee!
We’d finally doze off, only to wake up and roll over to look at each other with our mouths hanging open in disbelief, “Ok, whoever’s in that room has got to be on meth or somethin’, this is goin’ on six hours.”
We thought about mentioning it to the gal at the reception desk the next morning, but what good was that gonna do?
Um, could you please ask the meth head upstairs to cease and desist their meth head activities?
And let’s be real. At this point, we just wanted to get this done and go home. I don’t know about my hubby, but I needed a lil denial buffer at that point rather than risk the response from the receptionist being, “Hm…that’s interesting, there doesn’t seem to be anyone booked in the room above you...”
For now, let’s just go with the meth head theory.
We stood outside the storage unit with my aunt and uncle discussing how rough they’d been sleeping at her childhood home while we had our weird mess goin’ on in our hotel. Washing donuts down with gulps of hot coffee, we shook our heads and let out heavy sighs that materialized between us like ghosts in the morning drizzle.
Twenty-four hours later, Joe and I were driving home with a rented U-Haul to fill a new storage unit with all the items to be auctioned off for living expenses.
We did it. We were on the home stretch.
By dinner time, we’d unloaded the truck, packed the new storage unit, and I was parked at our local U-Haul shop waiting for Joe to finish signing off on returns in their office. The back seat of our Jeep was filled with personal items to be returned to my aunt. There were some shoes and jewelry of course, but mostly notebooks and bags belonging to a son she’d lost years before.
His death had always been more of a bullet point in the list of reasons my mom discouraged us from having a relationship with her sister.
And as with so many of these stories passed around families. When aunts uncles and grandparents think the children are sound asleep or busy playing outside, definitely not listening at the top of the stairs, I’d only heard enough to know I didn’t know the whole story. It also wasn’t a topic I was gonna bring up and ask questions about, so it wasn’t until my thirties that I found out that it had been ruled a suicide, but his mother had always insisted it was murder. She was sure of it.
Joe hopped in the passenger seat and I put the Jeep in drive. I hadn’t made it a mile down the road before I started checking to make sure I hadn’t accidentally dialed someone on my cellphone. I turned the radio off and leaned my head over the steering wheel, squinting to listen closely.
“Do you hear that?”
“What?” Joe replied
“Whispering. Do you hear somebody talking?”
I could hear it plain as day, but I juuuust couldn’t make out the words. I shook my head and tried to ignore it the rest of the way home.
As I put the car in park and turned off the engine, we agreed we’d come back out for the rest of it after we got settled. We just wanted to get inside to see the kitties and pee and breathe for a few minutes.
We sloughed back out into the driveway just as the sun was setting and had begun packing our arms with items from the backseat when the Jeep’s radio turned on all on its own.
Joe and I stopped moving and looked at each other. A fuzzy voice started blaring out of the speakers as if a station was just a couple clicks away from being tuned in.
I shook my head again and addressed the cousin I hadn’t formally met. “Honey, I am so sorry, I know this isn’t ideal but we’re doin’ our best. We’re just tryin’ to get some of your things back to your mom.”
And with that, the white noise stopped and the radio screen went dark.
Later that evening, we had a discussion on the couch after watching one of our favorite ghost-hunting shows. How funny it was that after we both had decades of our own firsthand experiences, our brains still had an easier time validating other people’s experiences and discrediting our own.
As soon as we finished speaking, the smart thermostat we kept muted at all times decided to unmute itself and join the conversation.
“I’m sorry,” Alexa chirped, “I didn’t catch that.”
We raised an eyebrow and pursed our lips at one another.
“Ooook…”
Joe stared at me, “My hair is standing up. I mean like standin’ up.”
It only took a few minutes for us to sit back down on the couch and go back to watching our show. Illustrating exactly what we’d just been talking about.
It’s nothing. It’s nothing.
Then a few minutes later we were startled again as the quarter-gallon jug of Go-Jo hand soap crashed into the sink with a loud thud.
Naturally, we immediately investigated to find out what the noise was, and upon seeing the large jug in the sink, ran an experiment to see how easy it was to nudge it off the counter and replicate the noise.
Not very.
So as we turned off the lights and started up the stairs for bed, Joe looked around the living room and said, “Just don’t mess with our alarm clock ok,” quoting what I’d said to a menacing entity years ago in Greenville before we’d met.
I shot him an unsettled look, “No no no no don’t say that! Thaaaat did not go well the last time I did that.”
I know he was trying to bring some humor to an unsettling situation, but I was feeling a lil triggered. Someone else’s energy was in my home wipin’ their dirty boots off on my floor. I’d been here before and I did not wanna do this dance again.
That night, I dreamt that I woke up and walked downstairs to find all of our colorful memories and artwork removed from the walls, replaced by these black-framed sepia-toned photographs of maternal ancestors going back generations.
“Don’t you like it?” my aunt said excitedly.
“No. No I don’t.” I snapped. “I want you to take them down right now.”
The next day I gathered every item that was gifted or brought into the house for safekeeping from the storage unit, and if it didn’t feel good? It went out into the garage. These were not my burdens to carry.
A week later we found a buyer for the unit and went to do one final sweep and grab the last of things my aunt would want. There was a large chest that held the rest of her son’s personal items. Plastic grocery bags filled with paperwork and old photos, most of it benign. But when my hand touched a tennis shoe toward the bottom, my stomach sank and I quickly pulled my arm back.
“That’s enough. We’re not looking through any more of this. I’m pretty sure those are the clothes they found him in.”
As soon as the words left my mouth, something in the storage unit next to us slammed the adjoining wall so loud that Joe and I both stood up shaking our heads, “Uh uh. We’re done. We’re done here.”
I called my aunt's sister, letting her know we didn’t feel good about digging through anymore and didn’t know what to do but get rid of the whole chest. She immediately agreed to get rid of it, remembering that not only had her sister kept the clothes that her son had died in inside that box, but she’d kept all the crime scene photos as well.
That chest and its contents were packed away for so many years that to my aunt and her surviving children who frequented that unit, it had become just another piece of furniture stacked behind towers of nicknacks and cobweb-covered Christmas decorations.
Oh that? That’s nothing.
But it wasn’t nothing.
It was a whoooole lotta somethin, and we were just far enough from it to recognize the weight of it.
And even though at the time, the slamming walls, the radios turnin on, can be a lil freaky? I’m always thankful that they jolt me outta complacency, and remind me what I am or am not going to pick up and carry.
This time of year, we surround ourselves with traditions, movies, costumes, and decorations that startle us back into awareness and out of complacency!
We are constantly in communication with the world around us, with one another, with ancestors, guardians, and energies that are taking form as fast as we can dream them into being. But as incredible as this all is? Just like anything else, we can get so used to it to the point of becoming blind to it.
What better remedy than ceremonies and ghost stories and scares to reawaken that awareness and the realization of those connections and get that blood pumping and pulse racing again am I right!?
Frighten the denial and complacency right out of us!
So on that note- I hope you have the best Halloween full of so much fun and so many scares!
Next month, I wanna kinda continue on this theme of even if we recognize it, it’s not our responsibility. I wanna talk about the relationship between gratitude and guilt, and how so many of us suppress our sensitivities because they’ve felt like being born into a family business we never wanted to work at.
Thank you so much for reading! I love you and I’ll talk to you soon!
