The Haunted Shed
When I was a little
kid, I loved ghost stories. Whenever I found myself in a library,
ghost stories were the first things I looked for, and I read as
many as I could get my hands on.
As an adult, I don't
really understand what the appeal was, because nine times out
of ten, those tales of headless women and sleepers having the
blankets pulled off of them by invisible hands in the middle of
the night, would scare the living-bejeesus-shit-stuffing out of
me. And then, I would obsess over the stories, re-assembling the
most terrifying details in my imagination over and over again
for days on end.
One would logically
assume that this is not the kind of experience that a child would
willingly subject themselves to, or repeatedly seek out, yet that's
exactly what I did.
The psychologist
in me would like to think that these frightening stories and images
were symbols representing traumatic, fear-inducing, real-life
events that were floating around in the murky grotto of my subconscious,
and that the compulsive reading of ghost stories was an unconscious
attempt to stimulate the repressed fears in order to process them.
It was a primitive form of cathartic therapy.
Yeah--that works.
One book in particular
occupied a large portion of my childhood awareness. It was entitled
Fifty Great Ghost Stories and I purchased it at the elementary
school bookmobile. It was very thick and every one of it's detailed
and highly descriptive stories took place in the late 19th century.
The Victorian era was
a world I was already familiar with from reading the Sherlock
Holmes adventures by Arthur Conan Doyle, and it was very easy
for me to get lost in the book's gothic landscape of crushed velvet
and heavy drapery, shadowy corridors in dark mansions lit by candelabras,
domestic servants and horse-drawn carriages, and young squires
returning home from tours of the continent.
It must have been the
end of the school year when I bought the book, fifth grade I believe,
because I spent a large portion of that summer immersed in the
gloomy, macabre world that it evoked. I sat in my room with the
curtains drawn, reading and wallowing in stagnant pools of both
romantically-tinged melancholy and garden-variety depression,
alternating with overwhelming and uncontrollable feelings of being
really creeped out.
It seems I was a
goth kid before there even was something called goth; before the
Cure purchased their first tubes of black lipstick and nail polish.
It was a psychologically
unhealthy situation to be sure. A lot of my depression grew out
of a difficult and largely unsuccessful transition to a new school
and new neighborhood where I felt like a complete outsider, and
staying inside reading morbid ghost stories in isolation was not
doing anything to improve my emotional state.
Halfway through the
summer something shifted, and I was able to pull myself out of
the house and into the sunshine. I sought out what few friends
I had in the neighborhood and spent my time in communal play,
like a healthy, well-adjusted child is supposed to, but my preoccupation
with ghost stories still lingered.
There was an empty field
near my house that my friends and I spent a lot of time in. It
was actually rather small, but to our child's perspective, it
seemed enormous. The field was flanked by trees which blocked
the surrounding suburban tract housing from view, and we could
imagine that we were exploring in some forgotten wilderness far
from civilization.
At the edge of this
field stood a large shed. The shed had a small window and a door
that resembled the front door of a house, which made it easy to
imagine that someone, some hermit-like being, might actually live
there, or had once lived there, since the shed seemed as if it
hadn't been used in years.
In a very short time,
we had constructed an entire mythology around the shed and it's
imagined former inhabitant. We tried to satisfy our fevered curiosity
by peeking in the window, expecting to see ancient but still intact
tables and chairs and a bed, but the view was completely obscured
by dust and dirt and cobwebs.
There was something
eerie and unsettling about the big, house-like shed, and my friends
and I were both fascinated and scared of it at the same time,
and the summer passed with the shed's mystery persistently skulking
about the periphery of our young minds.
Then, on a cloudy
day late in the summer, when signs of autumn were just beginning
to harsh our Tom Sawyer barefoot buzz with the threat of a brand
new school year, something happened which amped the shed mythos
up to War of the Worlds panic proportions.
My friends and I were
farting around in the field, looking at the clouds and chasing
butterflies and putting grasshoppers into jars, when a gnarled,
rickety and very thin old man suddenly materialized behind us,
seemingly out of thin air, startling us and making us jump.
The man had an extremely
wrinkled face, like a desiccated prune that had fallen into the
back of a cupboard and been left to fossilize, and his beady,
yellow eyes exuded an aura of malevolence.
"What are you doing
here?! You don't belong here!" he shrieked. His raspy, high-pitched
voice was strangely asexual; it could have belonged to either
a man or a woman, and the queerness of it sent shivers up my spine.
"You shouldn't
be here! Get out of here!" he screamed, with all the hysteria
of someone defending themselves from mortal danger. He moved towards
us with a shaky, spastic gait, and swung his cane at us wildly
like someone batting at an attacking bee, and we stumbled all
over each other like the Three Stooges to get away from him.
Later that day, our
imaginations went into overdrive. The old man had been so bizarre
and evil and freaky... so inhuman... his voice so otherworldly...
like a wailing banshee... And hadn't he just appeared out of nowhere?
There could only be one explanation. It was the ghost of the man
who had once lived in the shed. Yep... that's what it was alright.
So hungry were we for
something strange and mysterious to occur in our bland, sanitized,
suburban world that we didn't even entertain the notion that it
could have been a real flesh and blood person who we simply failed
to notice sneaking up on us; some crotchety old coot that we'd
never seen before because he usually stayed inside his house watching
game shows on tv and eating soft foods that wouldn't foul up his
dentures and who needed to vent his spleen over being old and
weak and impotent.
Nope. It was definitely
a ghost.
We stopped going
to the field after that--we were too spooked, and for a while
we re-hashed the story of our encounter with the ghost of the
shed, each time embellishing it with more ghostly, supernatural
details, giving ourselves an adrenaline rush to equal any preteen
sugar high.
But like any addictive
activity, our tolerance level soon peaked, and the story just
wasn't scary anymore. And besides, school was starting, bringing
with it newer and bigger stimulations.
But there was a part
of me that didn't want to give up the ghost, so to speak, and
so I started making up stories. I told my friends that I'd been
walking past the field and seen the ghost of the old man, illuminated
by a supernatural light, inside the shed folding clothes, or something
ridiculous like that; that i'd seen him wandering around the field,
digging something up with a shovel, or possibly burying something
with a shovel. I can't remember all the silly stories I concocted,
but I'm sure that the details came straight out of Fifty Great
Ghost Stories.
I don't think my friends
ever really believed me. They were tired of the ghost game. But
I got so involved in my own stories that I actually began to believe
them. It was a strange kind of self-hypnosis, and for years afterwards,
in my mind, I was convinced that I had actually seen a ghost in
or around the shed in the field.
It wasn't until I was
a teenager that the spell wore off, and I thought back to that
summer and said to myself "Oh yeah--I made all that shit
up."
It had been my longest
sojourn in the land of the unliving, and although I made a few
brief visits as a teenager, like the time I had strep throat and
spent a week with a high fever, reading nothing but ghost stories
and listening to the Doors' Strange Days, their darkest album,
and putting myself into a very disturbing head-space, my eagerness
to go there diminished, and by the time I was a young adult, I
had no more need or desire for walking those gloomy corridors.
My inner psychologist
feels that in some strange way, I must have identified with the
ghostly protagonists of those stories. After all, they were unhappy,
earth-bound spirits trapped in some stressful or traumatic situation,
and that's exactly how I felt in the fifth grade--trapped.
Nowadays, when I
go to the library, I usually peruse the occult section for books
on astrology and my other various esoteric interests, and I often
flirt with the idea of cracking open one of the many books of
true ghost stories.
All those ghostly women
in white, wringing their hands and searching for their lost children;
the little boys and girls peering forlornly out of the windows
of the rooms where they were murdered; the brave young men defending
buildings that no longer exist--they're all whispering to me "Come
back, David--we miss you..."
Perhaps I'll have a
chance to visit them on the day that I die, making a brief stop
in their tragic shadow-world, before my soul moves on to the next
adventure.
David Aronson
October 2006