Ghost stories

My house seems to have become home to a new poltergeist and, as usual, I attract the benign, weird ones. (This is true of my life in the physical realm as well.)

A few years ago, shortly after my friend Bill and I had moved into the city, I was unpacking boxes on the third floor of our turn-of-the-century arts-and-crafts style house. I had just finished with one of the many cartons labelled "Miscellaneous" and decided to dash downstairs for a cold drink. Walking through the dining room where, a few minutes earlier Bill had been hanging an enormous mirror over the fireplace, I stopped abruptly in my tracks. There was a football on the dining room table.

I called to Bill in the kitchen and he joined me in the dining room. "Look at that," I said, pointing to the pigskin. "Isn't that odd? That's my football."

"You own a football?" Bill said. "That is odd."

After I punched him in the arm, I explained that what truly made the football's presence in the dining room extraordinary was that, just a few minutes earlier, I had unpacked the same football and placed it on the top shelf of a closet on the third floor. I had then placed several other items on the shelf in front of it. I had closed the closet door. And I had come downstairs to find the football in the middle of the dining room table.

Neither Bill nor I are particularly inclined to believe in spirits, but neither could we come up with a plausible explanation for how or why sporting goods were mysteriously moving around our house. A few weeks later, after a party, a cobalt blue glass water pitcher disappeared from the kitchen, only to rematerialize two nights later in the second floor bathtub. Still later, Bill came home from work one day to discover that the bedspread from his bed now adorned the bed in the guest room and vice versa.

Events like these became commonplace in our house; every few weeks, something would disappear and show up again in the most unlikely place. We ceased to be at all freaked out by these translocations and, instead, speculated that our house ghost's afterlife must have been as singularly boring as our own miserable social lives such that he or she resorted to rearranging our belongings for entertainment.

After a couple of years, Bill got married and moved to Ohio, we sold the house and I moved in with a friend on the other side of the park in a house that seemed to be free of whimsical spirits. There were demons in the house, it's true, but that had everything to do with my roommate's emotional state and nothing at all to do with the paranormal.

Fast forward seven years to two weeks ago Monday. A bottle of cocktail onions appeared in my refrigerator.

Because I am usually too lazy to garnish my Bloody Mary with a celery stalk, it has been established that neither my housemate nor I drink anything to which it is necessary to add vegetables. The origin of the bottle of cocktail onions confounded us both. Last night, having been confronted with the mysterious condiment for the past fortnight, I threw the bottle in the trash.

This morning on my way out the door, I went to the fridge to get a can of Mountain Dew or, as I call it, the breakfast of champions. You can probably guess what was sitting on the very top shelf. The onions are back. And so, it would seem, is my old playmate from the world beyond, and these days he wants a martini after a workout on the dining room gridiron. I have no idea where my football is right now, but I expect it to show up any day now.

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