Ghosts

Ghosts, or ghostus, as my younger son calls them when asking if they're real, inhabit our old house. My friend who lives there now tells me she sees them, and her husband backs her up.
When I was growing up, my mother had various palm readers over at the house, and I remember this one woman standing in the foyer saying, "Yup, he's here." She meant my father, and she said it mystically, not nearly as colloquially as I've made it seem. She transcended mere mortals and lent appropriate gravity to such a disclosure. Pretty much universal skepticism greeted that disclosure, since he didn't hang around there while alive.
Maybe his posthumous presence signified an attempt to atone for his sins. My mother, while overtly skeptical, probably believed that he could have been there as a result of some divine poetic justice that wouldn't allow him to have peace, though I'm sure she didn't let him have any peace while he lived. Like a capital-gains tax: You make the money and get taxed on it, then you invest and pay taxes on those earnings. I will hound you while you live, and then some kind of spiritual prosecutor of justice will hound you after you're dead. I wonder if some kind of 12-step after-life program exists, one in which you get the opportunity to make amends to those you have wronged. If so, how the fuck can you do it when you're a ghost?
TV has provided a venue for numerous ghost shows. One show bears the "Ghost Hunters" moniker. These people go to allegedly haunted places, with electronic equipment in tow, where they attempt to find evidence of the supernatural. I'm not sure who manufactures this ghost-hunting equipment, but ghost hunters often seem to possess such gear. A Google search, however, yields no shortage of opportunities to procure ghost-hunting equipment, including a starter kit. I guess ghost-hunting neophytes need to use the start-up kit, lest they conjure up something with which they don't know how to deal. You shouldn't entrust ghost-hunting equipment to just anyone. Anyway, the atmosphere on this show is tense, man, tense, and someone invariably asks, in an anxious whisper, "What was that?" in response to something only they saw or heard.
In our household, my cousin and mother used to play a game called Ziriya, like a Ouija board. http://www.museumoftalkingboards.com/ziriya.html
That board told me, while my mother and cousin were guiding the pointer, that it wouldn't answer my questions because I wasn't a believer. Stupid fucking board. And never once did I feel the gravitational pull while making circles on the board with the pointer. And I was ready to believe, I wanted it to tell me I was going to have a black Trans-Am like in Smokey & The Bandit and be a big-league pitcher. So God and ghosts and communicative cardboard all had a place in my formative years.
My mother also moved furniture around frequently or, rather, had me do it. These exercises amounted to the equivalent of digging holes and refilling them. Maybe she was trying to confuse the ghosts. We once were carrying a heavy mirror down the cellar stairs, I on the top and she on the side. She criticized my approach, at which point I informed her that I was the load bearer. She said I wasn't and pretty much taunted me to release my grip. I knew I shouldn't have, but I did, and the mirror slid down the stairs and shattered on the concrete floor below, leaving us to stare down at our fragmented, sharp-edged reflections.
I've occupied plenty of altered states, but the only ghosts I've ever seen are the ones that long ago planted roots inside me. I've lived through times during which I thought I heard noises and had to rely on whether the dog reacted or not; If the dog failed to react, I figured I hadn't heard anything external. I wish I could see a ghost, other than the ones who look back at me from the mirror.