Ghosts IV
Posted on April 4, 2008 at 10:36 PM
Back to the house in Oakland: so many things happened there that I actually wrote a book about it. The book is fiction, but I only share the truth of it, here. I was lying in bed when I heard a Victrola playing in the other room. When I got up and entered the room, the music had stopped. Those two rooms were actually one back in the day, a dividing wall had been put up in the fifties.
In the mornings the front door would open on it's own, and you could hear somebody coming down the hall in to the kitchen. This happened so often that I put up wooden beads hanging from the entryway to the kitchen as a ghost trap, but the beads never moved of their own account. I used to hide from it, lock myself in the powder room, an old pantry off of the kitchen, and listen behind the door.
The neighbors next door were very sweet, an old couple in their eighties; they just sat on the porch in the summers, drinking wine. The lady's name was Lucy. We shared an old brick driveway. Knowing that they had lived there the past fifty years, I told Lucy about the Victrola and the morning visitations. She said that the Operhalls had lived there up until the seventies when Mrs. Operhall had died, an old woman, falling down the stairs and breaking her hip. She said that Mrs. Operhall's mother came over every morning, and that they spent the whole day in the kitchen, baking, and talking. She also told me that Mrs. Operhall had an old Victrola in the room where I had heard it, and that she played it up until she died.
