How to Tell If Ghosts Are Around
“Did you steal my eggs?” I asked Samantha, standing at the door of her bedroom, hand on my hip.
“What?” Samantha asked looking up from her closet cleaning expedition. She was holding up a pink stiletto with feathers sticking out of it. Girl loves her shoes, but she refuses to get rid of the random patch of hair that grows on the top of her foot. Not her toe, mind you her foot. It really ruins the look.
“My eggs are missing. I went to the grocery store last night, bought a carton of eggs, put them in the fridge, and now they’re gone,” I explained.
“And you think I took them?” she looked at me as though I were either an asshole or German. She had an intense dislike for Germany and Germans. Don’t ask.
“Well, I don’t know where they are. I went to the grocery store, bought a carton of eggs, put them in the fridge, and went to sleep. And now they are GONE.” The eggs were cage-free of course.
“Were you drunk last night?” Samantha asked, going back to her shoes.
“Did I drive drunk to Kroeger to get a carton of eggs? No, I did not,” I replied huffily. I couldn’t believe she would think that of me. “The only place I would ever drive drunk to is Jack in the Box for cheese fries. And you should know that.” I had never actually done that (and OBVS I WOULDN’T), but I did once walk drunkenly through the drive-thru. It was really awkward.
“Are you sure Kyle isn’t playing a prank on you?” Samantha responded, still not understanding the dire nature of this predicament.[1] First off I eat eggs every morning. Sure I mix it up with different kinds; scrambled, poached, fried. Mushrooms and shallots or spinach and feta. And occasionally I might change it up by switching to an almond flour pancake. But for the most part, I stick to eggs. They’re easy as hell to make, full of protein, and taste delicious. What’s not to like? Unless you are a vegan of course.
“No way!” he yelled piping up from our room. “I’m starving too!” He was busy tearing apart our closet looking for the carton of eggs.
“OK, this is crazy,” Samantha said getting up from the floor. “Where could they be?” I could see now she was invested in the mystery of the eggs. I had fashioned myself as a Nancy Drew of sorts, but with better outfits. But I just didn’t envision it happening to me like this. I didn’t fuck around when it came to breakfast. There would be hell to pay when I figured out who did it.
“I looked in the fridge, under the bed, Kyle is looking in the closet, and in my car. The thing is the eggs were the only thing I bought. It’s not like maybe I left the bag at the market. And I remember putting them in the fridge,” I explained exhaustedly.
“What about the dumpster? You did empty the trash last night.” Kyle said coming out of our room. “There was nothing in the closet.”
“Good idea!” I exclaimed.
The three of us went to the dumpster with the seriousness one might reserve when on a mission to save earth from a meteor. Never mind that eggs are only $4, and I could buy a new carton. It was the sheer weirdness of the situation that intrigued us. How does an entire carton of eggs disappear? Kyle pried open the doors where the giant industrial trash bin was kept. There was only one problem; it was about 8 feet tall. Or maybe it was 7. Whatever. It was taller than us.
“How the hell are we going to look in there?” Kyle asked.
We all stood there quietly staring at it. “I know!” I shouted suddenly. “Duh! I’ll use my old cheerleading moves. I’ll stand on your shoulders!”
“Um, I don’t know if that’s the best idea,” Kyle said. I looked at him. He had a point. It wasn’t like he was a trained cheerleader. And if he had been, I’m guessing we wouldn’t be dating.
“Better idea, I’ll just sit on your shoulders,” I suggested.
“How the hell are you going to get up there?” he asked while laughing. “You know this is crazy right?”
“What’s crazy is that my carton of eggs is fucking missing!” I yelled.
“Samantha, get on all fours. Kyle, bend your knees in a chair position in front of Samantha. Samantha, I will climb on your back and then hop on Kyle’s shoulders.” I really would make an excellent drill sergeant. I wondered if the army was in the market for a petite Indian drill sergeant that sounded like Minnie Mouse.
“You want me to get on all fours on the garage floor?” Samantha asked.
“I’m sure you’ve been on all fours in worse places,” I reminded her. I love how all my friends have no problem getting dirty when there’s a cock involved and all of a sudden they act as pure as the Virgin Mary when you ask them to do something simple like get down on a garage floor. “Besides, do you want to solve this mystery or not?”
They did as I asked and I finally got on Kyle’s shoulders.
“I can’t see!” I shouted. “It’s too dark in here. What if there’s a rat in here?”
“This was your idea!” Kyle shouted back.
“I can’t see anything in here, and it smells. Let me down.”
After Kyle let me down, the three of us stood there looking at each other.
“Now what?” Samantha asked.
“OMIGOD!” I exclaimed.
“What?!” they asked in unison.
“What if it was…the ghost from New Orleans?” I asked.
“Holy shit,” Kyle murmured. “What if you’re right?” This mystery had suddenly gone from Nancy Drew to Scooby-Doo.
Time for a (brief) flashback. Back when Samantha and I had gone on our cross-country road trip, we stopped in New Orleans for a few days. I am a firm believer in ghosts. I mean if we can exist in our bodies why couldn’t we exist out of them? One is not weirder than the other when you think about it. Unless you’re one of those people who only believes in what you can see. In which case, I have to warn you there are these things called viruses and bacteria that make you sick. But no one believed in them until the late 19th century when scientists found them under a microscope. Anyway, I digress.
The point is that I love a good ghost story. Not that I think I’m actually going to see one, but I love the creepy stories. Samantha, however, is scared of her own shadow, so dragging her to a ghost tour was no easy feat. However, after much begging and pleading, she agreed to come along. We signed up for a ghost and vampire tour led by a man dressed like a 19th-century aristocrat and the voice of a cartoon ghoul.
We went to the French Quarter where he told us disturbing stories of the slaves being chained for weeks in a small cell while waiting to be sold. We went to the Civil War Hospital which was converted into a hotel. We heard about paranormal researchers from Duke University who had been killed and had their entire bodies drained of blood. And for the crowning achievement of this creeptastic tour, we stopped in front of Lalaurie House. To call this place a horrific torture chamber would be an understatement. The wealthy owners had been abusing their slaves with various forms of human experimentation. One being (GRAPHIC WARNING: Skip to the next paragraph if you don’t want to know) crushing up someone’s bones so they could fold them and put them in a box. Another body had been skinned and hung. Slaves pinned to the table or their eyes gouged out. It was nothing short of horrific.
I was beginning to seriously rethink this ghost tour. I was cool with ghosts but not gore. I pretty much never get scared, but this was starting to freak me the fuck out. Long story short, when rescuers responded to a fire at the mansion, they discovered the tortured slaves. An outraged mob (kinda surprises me that people were outraged by slave cruelty back then; isn’t that a paradox of sorts?) then attempted to attack them lynch mob-style. But the family managed to escape, supposedly back to France as legend has it.
The point of this insane story is that our tour guide very specifically told us not to take photos unless we were OK with ghosts possibly coming home with us. He told us not to take photos anywhere near the Lalaurie house. According to him, the Lalaurie house was haunted as fuck and no matter what they tried to do with the space, (turn it into a furniture store or low-income housing) people always left when they got scared shitless by the weird stuff happening. Personally, I wasn’t going to take any chances. I don’t fuck with ghosts. I’m cool with the Casper kind, but I’m so not into poltergeists or creepy ones of any sort.
So what does Samantha do? Wait until we were a few doors down and then take a photo.
“What are you doing?” I hissed. “Do you want the ghosts to follow us home?!” I couldn’t believe Samantha was so lax when it came to our safety.
“Nothing is going to happen,” she muttered. I couldn’t believe scaredy-pants was suddenly open to photographing potential ghosts.
It wasn’t until we got back to L.A. and developed the photos (she had been shooting with film) that we saw it. The ghost.
“What the fuck is that?” she asked throwing the photo down.
“Holy shit!” I screamed. “Is that a ghost? In front of the house nearby? I told you not to take a picture!”
“Well, it’s kinda cool, though, isn’t it?”
She had a point.
Do yourself a favor and really examine that photo. That shit is cray. It was a perfectly clear night. No rain, no fog, not even any wind. Every other photo came out fine, including the one right before and right after. It was simply impossible that the photo randomly had a white blob in front of it. At least as far as I was concerned. I never had it appraised or anything by a professional ghost hunter, scientist, or photographer but I do have eyes, and that is a ghost.
I later showed the photo to my friend Sean. Sean was gay (or homosexual as he liked to call himself), from Alabama, with a slow, thick drawl and predilection for calling everyone “sugar.” He was also obsessed with hair metal and when he wasn’t telling me about his favorite supermodels (Cindy Crawford and Fernanda Tavares) he would be regaling me with stories of how he used to dress like Tommy Lee. He also happened to be gorgeous, and every woman in a 20-mile radius used to hit on him in the hopes that he would somehow become straight. Ladies, if your man still has every magazine Cindy Crawford has ever appeared in he’s not straight.
“Sugar,” he responded slowly letting the word linger. “If there’s anything this homosexual knows for sure, it’s that what we’re looking at is a ghost.”
“Are homosexuals able to see ghosts better than the rest of us?”
“Honey of course. Don’t know you about Gia?”
“Who’s Gia?”
“Gia Carangi. She haunts me at night.”
“You can’t be serious.”
For those of you who don’t know, Gia Carangi was a supermodel, famously played by Angelina Jolie in the movie Gia. She was wild and crazy and addicted to drugs. When Cindy Crawford first arrived on the scene, people called her “Baby Gia.” But most importantly Gia is dead. She died from AIDS complications. And apparently, she was now haunting Sean.
“Really?” I asked raising an eyebrow inquisitively. “What do you guys do together? Snort coke?”
“No girl, I don’t say anything to her. She’s always just sitting there sharpening her knife. You know she don’t play.” I found it intriguing that so many gay men either spoke like Kim Kardashian or Nicki Minaj.
Since I’m sane, I clearly did not believe Sean for a minute. But I thought it was super cute that he had an imaginary ghost friend. I wondered if I could turn my very real ghost from New Orleans into my friend. Like the kind that ran errands. I could have Ghost do things like run to the store and get some scotch tape when I ran out. Or fetch cream for my coffee. But then I realized that would technically be stealing. Sure the ghost could never be arrested, but it would be wrong nonetheless.
Then again the only stealing going on was from me. Ghost was clearly not interested in helping me, but playing pranks on me. I decided to reason with Ghost.
“Listen Ghost,” I said one day when I was in my room by myself. “We can totally get along. It doesn’t have to be this way with you stealing my stuff. Think about how much fun it will be.”
The next day all of my lip glosses went missing. I always kept my lip glosses carefully stored underneath my sink in a cute floral pencil case I got at Target and had transformed into a cosmetic bag. All 10 of my lip glosses were always in there. I had gone into the bathroom to put on my makeup when I realized it was missing. In a frenzy, I cleaned out the entire cabinet, discovering I had a bottle of lavender body wash hiding in the back along with a gaggle of hair bands that had been hanging out by themselves. Bastards. I had been looking for them.
But lip glosses? Nowhere to be found. The only thing more frightening than this was the time I couldn’t find my tampon.[2] I couldn’t remember if it was still in my hooha or if I had actually pulled it out. Or if it had just fallen out when I had been peeing. Thirty minutes and several mirrors later I came to the conclusion it was definitely not in there. P.S. if you find me suddenly dead please check my uterus for a missing tampon.
Yes, I know what you’re thinking. That I misplaced the lip glosses. That I left them in some club in a drunken stupor. That I accidentally shoved one up my vag thinking it was a tampon. Well, I would like to take this opportunity to tell you that is not true. Unlike my tampons, I take great care of my lip glosses. There is simply no way they could just go missing. Especially when everything else was in place. Obviously, I was dealing with a psycho bitch ghost. Did she not realize how awful I would look without my favorite MAC lipglass?
I thought about telling Kyle and Samantha, but there didn’t seem to be much of a point. They had already been with me through the egg incident, so didn’t want to pull them into another situation. Clearly, they were of no help anyway. But I was pissed as hell at this stupid ghost.
I decided maybe the ghost would just go away on its own. Perhaps she (or he) would just get bored and go back to New Orleans where she came from. Then she decided to fuck with me again.
Every night I plugged my cell phone into the socket. It had a little light that turned red when it was charging and green when it was done. One night, in particular, I plugged it in and noticing the red light as I fell asleep. I woke up the next morning only to find my phone unplugged with the cord carefully wrapped around itself and sitting on the chair at my desk.
“Kyle!” I shrieked, waking him up. “My phone is unplugged!”
“So what?” he asked, waking up groggily.
“I plugged it in last night, and I know I did because the light was red,” I said continuing carefully as though I were recounting eyewitness testimony at a murder trial. “And then, I found it this morning unplugged in the chair. Did you unplug it?”
“No, I didn’t unplug your fucking phone,” Kyle said, trying to figure out why he had been woken up so early.
“But don’t you think it’s weird?”
“Well, yeah it’s a little weird,” he mused. He went over to examine the evidence. “It’s wrapped up pretty neatly. You’re not normally that neat.”
“Shut up,” I snapped.
Kyle went over to examine the evidence. “There’s no logical explanation. I remember that light being on too. Well whatever, I’m going to make breakfast.” He nonchalantly walked out of our room not giving a shit.
He apparently didn’t realize how serious this whole situation was.
“GHOST!” I shouted. “I am not putting up with this shit anymore. If you’re going to hang out here, you have to do something useful! You can’t keep just fucking with me. If you’re not going to help me, you have to GET OUT!” I yelled.
“What are you yelling about?” Kyle asked coming back into the room.
“I was just telling the ghost away,” I told Kyle matter-of-factly.
“Um, OK,” he said rolling his eyes and walking back out of the room.
Kyle may have thought I was nuts, but the truth is I never saw the ghost again. The power of my threat was enough to banish Ghost forever. Now if only I could find a ghost who could actually help me out.
