When Ghosts Speak - Mary Ann Winkowski [33]
It was after the six left that I turned my attention to another ghost who’d been lurking in a corner of the dining room and staring at me with what I can describe only as creepy eyes. I have to confess that he made me feel very uncomfortable. Even the homeowner picked up on the strange tension in the room.
“There’s still someone here, isn’t there?” she asked.
I glanced again at the man in the corner. He was tall and very thin, with dark, unkempt hair that fell in long, jagged bangs across his forehead. He was dressed in a weird, ill-fitting outfit that looked like a cross between a uniform and pajamas. But it wasn’t his clothing that made me uneasy. It was the unblinking stare that he had fixed on me. His eyes were a strangely pale shade of blue and completely devoid of any emotion or warmth.
“There is someone here,” I replied. “And he’s just, well, not right.”
“Who is he?” the woman asked nervously.
The ghost blinked for maybe the first time. A smile flitted across his face, but it didn’t make him look any friendlier.
“She knows who I am,” he said. “Everyone knows Harold Blakely.”
Now, I certainly didn’t know any Harold Blakely, but I wasn’t going to mess with this guy’s delusions of grandeur, either, so I just nodded.
“Tell her,” he insisted, gesturing at the woman sitting across from me. “Tell her that I’m here.”
Unnerved by my silence, the woman gestured toward me. “What’s he saying?”
“I think maybe he’s mentally unstable,” I said to her. “He says that you know who he is, though.”
I told her his name. She gasped.
“Oh, geez . . . so you do know him?” Now it was my turn to be amazed.
The woman nodded. She explained that her mother and Harold’s mother had known each other long ago, when her family lived in Kentucky. The two had stayed in touch over the years and through several moves by each family. When the woman was a young college graduate, first living in Chicago, her mother and Harold’s mother hatched up a plan for her to go on a date with Harold.
I looked from the elegant, successful woman sitting across from me to the creepy character standing in the corner and raised my eyebrow.
The woman nodded her understanding of my reaction. She had agreed to meet Harold once, she explained, but that one time was enough. She couldn’t say exactly why, but he had simply freaked her out. She never went out with or spoke to him again.
“Trusting my instincts probably saved my life,” she continued.
Clearly I was missing a piece of the whole picture. I must have looked as puzzled as I felt.
“Don’t you remember the story from about fifteen years ago? The one about the guy in West Virginia who killed, chopped up, cooked, and ate his mother?”
I couldn’t help it. I whipped my head around to stare at the ghost.
He just stared back with those creepy, expressionless eyes. “My mother was okay with it,” he said calmly.
The woman told me what she knew of the rest of his story, Harold helpfully filling in the blanks. He had spent the rest of his life in a mental institution for the criminally insane, until just a few years ago when he had killed himself by suffocation. He’d been at this woman’s house ever since.
“And she hasn’t seen any other men since I’ve been here,” he said with satisfaction.
I had no idea about what he was talking about, but when I relayed his comment to the woman, she laughed despite the circumstances.
“I think you’ve just solved the mystery of why I never get asked out on a second date,” she said.
Usually I ask homeowners if they are ready to release the ghost. In this case, I already knew the answer. It was definitely time for Harold to move on. But I’ll admit that I had a few questions: Would he see his mother in the Light? Would she be afraid? Angry?