A Ghost Story-Part Two

The Sheriff’s Ghost

The moon always shines brighter when you’re in the woods. It’s just so much easier to see without all the lights distracting you. I always notice it when the smoke from the campfire makes my eyes water and forces me to look up at the sky. It must be my eye’s way of telling me what I need to see. As I shifted my attention back to the fire, I continued to tell my story…

I had heard the story of the Sheriff’s ghost plenty of times before I moved to that town for work. I had lived in little towns like that one before, and I knew that it was the kind of place that clung to it’s old stories because there was not much else to that place. I thought the stories were entertaining, but I never really gave them a second thought. Not until I finally got all moved into to apartment 300.

I felt the usual discomfort that you feel when you move into a new place. I kept forgetting where everything was. I had not settled on the spot where I would throw my wallet and keys when I first walked in, so I kept losing them. My coffee mugs were never in the cabinet that I thought I had put them in. My toothpaste was always on the counter when I thought for sure I had put it back in the medicine cabinet.

There was a stillness that hung in the air in my apartment. It always struck me as strange. Every other old building I had lived in had thins walls. You could hear every argument your neighbors had, every footstep up the stairs in the hall, and every time a car would enter or leave the parking lot. Instead, my apartment was still. Not the still like a secluded stream, but still like a stagnant, green pond in the woods. It was lifeless. I could never quite find any rest in it when I came home at the end of the day. I could never relax because it always felt like someone else’s apartment. No matter how many times I wrote the check for the rent, I always felt like a visitor.

I had not realized how deeply the town held onto the story of the Sheriff’s ghost until I started going to the neighborhood bar just around the corner from where I lived. The bartender loved telling the story and talking about it, even though it was obvious to me that I was the only person that was not a regular. I would sit sipping my stout as the bartender told me over and over that the Sheriff had lived in this same neighborhood. Apparently, the bartender’s father had run the bar back in those days; and the sheriff regularly came in on his way home from the station. That is why the bartender always set a pilsner and a shot of the bourbon, the Sheriff’s usual, at the corner of the bar. The old barkeep swore up and down that three separate times, he had been closing the shop and found those glasses had been drunk by the ghost. No matter what day of the week or how late I stayed, I never saw anything but full glasses at that corner of the bar.

I won’t act like I never had my moments. There was a low hum in my apartment. It was inconsistent and had a strange rhythm to it. One night it flared up so loud that I felt it in my chest. It sounded like a man screaming in pain. There’s a difference between a shout and a scream. A shout is for someone else, it has direction, it’s intentional. A scream is different, it’s something else that escapes from someone in a moment of desperation. From that night, the hum sounded different. It had the familiarity of a distant voice. I never understood what the voice was saying, but I recognized it every time I heard it.

I began hearing a strange clicking noise after a few months of living there. It would echo through the stillness of the apartment. It happened every evening without fail. It reminded me of the turning of a socket wrench at first. It would last for two to three minutes at a time and there would be a louder, different click which always signified that it was over. One night, sometime after my usual drink at the bar had changed from stout to rye, I sat in my apartment listening to clicking. In that moment I thought about the Sheriff’s ghost. I remembered that the Sheriff died playing Russian roulette in his bedroom. For months after, the tension in my neck and left shoulder lasted well beyond the 2–3 minutes that the clicking went on.

For about six months, I found myself losing sleep. I tried to stay out of my apartment later and later. When I was there, I kept becoming more and more aware of just how out of place I felt. I started keeping my wallet and keys in my pocket even when I had no intention of leaving. Started folding my blankets at the foot of my bed like you do when you visit someone else’s house. I went from simply not getting rest to being actively stressed out in my own apartment. I could feel the muscles in my neck tightening and a sinking feeling in my chest each night as I listened to that distant voice and that spinning revolver.

I finally found some relief one day when the landlord stopped by. He thanked me for my patience with him as he tinkered with my window unit, then replaced latch on the window above my kitchen sink. For a time, I started sleeping peacefully. I felt at home for a time, until I heard that voice again one night. Then another night the spinning revolver came back. The sinking feeling came back, and I felt like a guest in the Sheriff’s home again. To be honest, today I can’t even tell you how long I found rest. It might have been a year, or it might have been a week. I only remember when the ghost came back. No matter how closely I listened I could not tell if the ghost was real. I could never tell if I was hearing those sounds or just remembering them.

I took to my old habits. I stayed out later. I stayed more busy. I kept folding my blankets at the foot of my bed each morning. One night when I was out late at my neighborhood bar, I saw a very drunk man stumble to the bar, drop the Sheriff’s shot into the Sheriff’s pilsner, and down the boilermaker before the bartender came back from the storage closet. I went home that night to the same stress and fear that haunted me every time I heard the Sheriff’s ghost. I don’t know if I ever started believing in the ghost, but I never stopped wishing that I did.