Home, Haunted Home

I woke up in the middle of the night. The weight of someone sitting next to my feet pulled me back from my sleep, and I fell from the lush clouds of my dream and landed hard against my bed. I extended my left arm to my side and felt the shape of my husband sleeping placidly next to me. I also heard Momo, my dog, barking outside our room. Growling. Growling louder than that one time he defended me from the jaws of our neighbor’s dog. Growling with all his might and scratching the door. Save for Momo’s barks, the night was still. It was so still that I could hear the thump of my heart racing against my chest. Lub-dub, lub-dub. It was a symphony of growls and heartbeats that inundated the room, soaking the walls in thick anticipation. I was sweating. Cold sweat made my clothes stick to my skin, and somehow, I felt trapped. The darkness of the room pressed against my skin, asphyxiating me. The air reeked of a musty smell. It smelled like blood. I focused on the sensation coming from my legs and my feet and confirmed that the weight was still there. Something or someone was sitting next to me. It was not my husband, for he was lying next to me. And it was not Momo, because he kept frantically barking and scratching the door.

Is this a dream? It can’t be a dream. My sweat and the thumps of my heart feel real, I told myself. And Momo’s desperate growls feel real. I inhaled deeply and tried to swallow but then realized that my mouth was dry and that my tongue was stuck to the ceiling of my mouth. I remained still for some minutes, trying to shield myself from the world using my blankets. I tried to think of something else. I imagined Momo running happily on a green lawn under the golden sun during a tranquil afternoon. Momo was carrying his favorite toy in his mouth, and my husband opened the back door that led to our yard and started running after Momo. I spent some minutes contemplating my husband playing with Momo under the sun, but then I resolved to open my eyes. It had been enough. I had had enough of this. I had been experiencing the same sensation every night for almost a week. Someone or something came to sit next to me every night, and I needed to find out what it was. I held my breath and opened my eyes. A cold chill ran down my spine, raising all the hairs of my skin. My heart sank.

Standing in front of me was a young man.

It was a tall man, wearing a white straw hat, with his hair blonde as hay plastered against his head. His face was pale, so pale I could feel the mist of the night caressing my face and I could feel my blood freezing.

I tried to scream, but no sound came out of my mouth. The man, the figure, jumped upwards, with an unhuman elastic freedom, and then appeared right in front of my face. My blood was cold and gelid, so cold it could be said it was made of ice, and those ice shards clashed against each other inside my veins, and they could barely squeeze past each other to bring blood to my heart.

His face was pale, and his eyes were clear as the moon that shone outside.

I tried to scream again. This time, sound erupted out of my throat, and my husband woke up with a jump.

The figure swirled upwards, in less than a second, and rammed its dark clouds against the ceiling, and became a black fog that floated still in a corner of the room. I kept screaming.   Holding my hands against my head. I didn’t know what else to do. Momo kept barking and growling, pounding against the door. My husband was silent as if assessing the situation. He then put one of his arms around my shoulders and drove me closer. He then whispered to my ear that we were going to walk slowly towards the bedroom door. I kept looking at the corner of my room. Was it looking at me? It was certainly looking at me. I could feel the shadows lurking, swirling menacingly, and studying me. My husband rose up slowly from the bed, and ran towards the door, and opened it.

Momo rushed in, barking loudly and desperately. All the hair on his back was raised. Once he entered the room, Momo stood still for some seconds, and then, cautiously, started turning around to face the shadows. Momo growled deeply and slowly. He didn’t trust whatever was hanging from our ceiling. Then, Momo started walking slowly towards the corner. One step at a time. When Momo was very close to the wall, a few inches below the figure, the shadows bolted towards the end of the room and escaped through the open door.

Momo calmed down and his hair went back to normal. He turned around and ran towards us. He seemed relieved. He seemed happy. He jumped on our lap as he usually did when he received us after a long trip. He started licking us and pressing himself against our laps and jumping excited around the room. My husband turned on the lights of our room, and I confirmed that we were all alone. The shadows have left. The man with the white straw hat and with the eyes as bright as the moon had disappeared.

I couldn’t go back to sleep. Where was the man? Where had the shadow gone? I was anxious. I was nervous. Why had it sat on my bed? Was it coming back? Was it still inside the house? I remembered that one time my husband had mentioned using a Bible to guard against bad spirits. So, I ran towards the tall, wooden drawer we keep next to our bed and pulled a Bible out from the third drawer. I wasn’t the most faithful devote, my husband wasn’t either, and honestly, we hadn’t been to church in over a year. Yet, somehow, the Bible was the only thing that felt comforting at that moment.

I clung to the Bible and ran back to our bed and curled next to my husband. He pulled Momo on top of the bed with us and we clumped in a corner of the bed, protecting ourselves with pillows and blankets. I told my husband what I had seen before I had screamed. I told him about the man with the white straw hat and with the eyes as pale as the moon. He hugged me while I spoke because I was still shivering. I was still trembling underneath Momo, who was now sleeping quietly on top of my lap.

Why had I been experiencing the same sensation every night? Was I imagining things? I couldn’t have been imagining things. My husband seemed to have perceived something in the room, so I couldn’t have been imagining things. And Momo had reacted strangely. Momo had pointed exactly to the corner of the room where I felt the shadows were lurking, so I couldn’t have been imagining everything.

My husband rose from the bed and walked towards the corner of the room. He lit up some candles and placed them around our bed. He then walked back to our bed, and sat next to me, and asked me if me hugging the Bible meant that I wanted to make a prayer. It felt like a good idea. We prayed a Holy Father together. The words were coming out of my mouth soulless. We were both murmuring in the middle of the night. Once we finished, I started the prayer again. I felt like a broken record. My mind was blank, and I didn’t want to go back to sleep, so I repeated the prayer. My husband joined me one more time. When I was about to start the third prayer, he stopped me and held me by the shoulders.

“Anna, you need to stop and calm down.”

I tried to resume praying, but he stopped me again.

“Anna, look at me. This is worrisome. You said yourself that you’ve felt this same sensation seven nights in a row already. And you keep having nightmares.”

I remained silent. I had nothing to say.

“Maybe you should try going to see a psychologist. You know it has worked with me so far”

My husband was a journalist, and he had been held hostage by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC in Spanish) for some months. He lived with the guerrilla, marching through the jungle under the rain, rolling through sticky mud at night, fighting mosquitos and fleeing the police for months, and fighting for his life. After our government discussed his release and he returned home, he experienced panic attacks. Green cars triggered him, shooting scenes in movies triggered him, and he experienced nightmares constantly. He always woke up screaming, in pain, feeling like someone was stabbing him. He went through therapy for PTSD for many years until our life recovered some of its normalcy.

I didn’t have a traumatic experience, though. Not one as terrible as his at least. My family environment hadn’t been perfect while I was growing up, but I doubted that was the explanation behind the shadows sitting on my bed.

I remained silent, then looked at my husband, and replied.

“Maybe I could try calling your shrink. We could schedule something for next week. And I could also try calling my sister and asking her how she managed her situation that one time”

My husband made a face. It wasn’t that he didn’t like my sister. Everybody likes my sister. She’s sweet and she’s respectful and she’s nice. But she’s a character. I guess you could call her odd. She’s the type of woman that fills her house with crystals to attract the good energies. She’s the kind of woman who scrubs her house once a year and then pours oils and lights incense to scare bad spirits away. Weird things just happen to her. And my husband and my sister only get along if she doesn’t bring up her weird stories. Otherwise, he just exits the room. He does the same thing when he’s around the rest of my family. He just can’t stand that much crazy, he always says.

“I know that you think she’s weird but—”

“Yes, she’s weird and if we bring her into this, things are bound to get weirder”

“Yeah, I know she can be weird sometimes, but things like this have happened to her before, and she has gotten rid of them. It doesn’t hurt to try”

He inhaled deeply and then sighed a long sigh.

“Yes, I guess it doesn’t hurt to try,"”, he finally said.

After our short conversation, I set the Bible aside and moved closer to my husband. He put his arm around me and pulled me closer. Momo joined us. We dozed off for some hours until the sun was bright outside and our room was warm. It was Sunday, and we decided to go to the market. Sellers in short wooden booths sold fresh produce. Fresh eggplants, bright red tomatoes, sweet oranges, and fresh basil leaves were displayed everywhere. Some women selling flowers shouted here and there trying to sell their goods. Momo was happy socializing with other dogs. Some kids approached us to pet him, and he was happy to receive attention from everyone. As I walked through the dairy section of the market, I checked some cheeses, feeling their surfaces and enjoying their smell. They had honey goat cheese. It had been long since I had tried goat cheese, but I refrained from getting some because my husband doesn’t like cheese. He’s lactose intolerant. So, I ended up buying some fresh tomatoes and a couple of onions. My husband bought chives for dinner. Once we were done buying vegetables, we walked towards a small coffee shop, bought the day’s newspapers, and sat down for a while. We chose a table outside to let Momo interact with the people walking by.

I checked my phone and called my sister. She responded right away, which surprised me. She usually woke up late in the day, right before sunset, to carry out her rituals.

“I’m so glad you called,"”, she said. I could feel her relaxing on the other side of the line, “I had a dream about you last night and I woke up all sweaty. And my horoscope said today that someone from my family was in trouble and needed my help”

Here we go, I thought. My husband was not going to like this. I decided to omit that part of the conversation to avoid any discussion.

“Are you ok? Do you need money? Are things good with Alejandro?”.

My sister was getting ahead of herself as usual.

“Things with Alejandro have been good lately. We’re good. We have been good for a while. We also don’t need money, so don’t worry about that. We’re well past the dark times of his PTSD”

“Then what is it?”

“It’s me. I’ve been having this...… this sensation. It’s not a dream. It...… it feels real. I’ve been having this sensation that someone sits on my bed at night for seven nights in a row. And last night, I saw it”

My sister gasped.

I told her about the man with the white straw hat and about his eyes as clear as the moon. I told her about how Momo’s hair was all raised when he entered the room. And I told her about how Momo had growled and barked until the shadows left my room.

My sister remained silent and then added “It does sound like what happened to me some time ago. Do you remember that?”

“Yes, I do remember it. That’s why I called you to ask you about it. I think you mentioned hiring a spiritist of some sort”

“Yeah, he came and cleaned my house. He said I had the spirit of a dead widow haunting my house. And he did some rituals and cleaned my place”

“Could you give me his number?”

She explained that the spiritist had changed numbers. Right before finishing her house's cleansing, he told her he had sensed someone was looking for him, and that he needed to leave town. He disappeared without further notice and changed his number. I was hopeless. The person that had helped my sister and that could help me was gone.

“You could still try looking through the newspapers. That’s how I found him last time. You know the classified ads section? There’s always a lot of witches and wizards and spiritists advertising there”

I promised to keep her updated. And she insisted on coming to our house the upcoming week. I tried to prevent her from visiting us to avoid upsetting my husband, but she insisted. Once I closed the call, I opened the newspapers we had just bought and looked for the classified ads section. As she had said, there were many spiritists advertising. “Arquimides, the Great Shaman”. “Amazonian Indian Wizard Yaravi”. “The Great Gypsy Witch of white, black and red magic”. “Arauca, Great Chief of the Jungles of Peru”. “Voodoo Witch of Haiti”. “Great Embera Shaman, healer of witchcraft”. All the ads had small pictures of the supposed spiritists. Some had glass balls next to their names. All of them advertised being able to fulfill unrequited love, to scare away bad spirits, and cleanse life of all suffering. Their ads occupied a sixth of the newspaper’s pages. There was a lot to choose from. I didn’t know where to start.

My husband realized what I was doing and tried to snatch the newspaper away from me. We fought for the newspaper for a while, pulling the pages back and forth. We didn’t care that people walking past us were looking at us judgingly. People sitting in the tables next to us had also stopped eating to watch us fight. He was fighting for reason and for science and for psychology, and I was fighting for feelings and for magic and for hope. Then we heard the crack. One of the pages ripped, and I was left with only a piece from a page from the classified ads section. My husband had won, and he was holding the entire newspaper, with a smile plastered on his face. But he had unknowingly helped me select among the spiritists.

Only one name and contact information were included in the piece of paper I was holding in my hand. “Powerful Santera* Angel of Light. Expert in Cuban Santeria and in solving extremely difficult cases. I help find huacas**, treasures, and exhumated tombs. I cleanse your house of all witchcraft, of any type of spirit and I fight any type of demon. My powerful rituals are the best solution to all your problems. Please call 6090-5585.”

Right at that moment, it started to rain. It was a soft rain at first, but then the droplets started getting bigger. I looked at my clock. It was 3 pm. It always rains at 3 pm in July. And the weather forecast had predicted it was going to be a thunderstorm. Dark clouds covered the sky like fat, grey sheep pasturing in the air. We had spent too much time strolling the market and reading the newspapers. I tucked the piece of information inside my purse, trying to hide it from my husband, and took out my umbrella. We ran to our car and drove home.

I called my husband’s shrink and scheduled a date for the upcoming week. I also requested a day off work, saying that I needed to solve some personal matters. Which was true in some way. I wanted the spiritist to visit our house while my husband was at work. I didn’t think he would approve of me bringing a shaman home and letting her carry out magic rituals.

That night, we ate pan-seared cod with spring peas and spring vegetables, all garnished with chives. My husband explained that chives pair delicately with seafood; they are oniony, but not overpowering. After dinner, we watched movies together for a while. Momo rested placidly on one of our couches. We watched one movie after another. I simply didn’t want to sleep. I feared to have an experience like the one from the night before. My husband insisted on going to bed. We both had work the next day after all, or so he thought. He turned off the TV and we climbed our bed. We let Momo into our room, and he squeezed his way between my husband and I. We all tried to sleep. The room was dark, but some light from the streets crept through the slits between our curtains. I kept looking at the ceiling, and I slid my hand under Momo and next to my husband’s hand, to give myself some strength. He pressed my hand against him, and then he fell asleep right away, leaving me behind with my anxiety and my nerves. Once he fell asleep, he let go of his grip. I kept looking at the ceiling. At one point of the night, the air of the room became rarified and cold. Then my heart sank.

There was the shadow again.

It appeared in the middle of the room, like a small, dark tornado. Swirling slowly and forming a tall column, like fumes coming out of a factory. I tried to scream, but no sounds came out of my mouth. I tried to move my hands to shake and wake up my husband, but my hands were not responding. I was frozen. Frozen in time. Immobile. Momo started growling, though his growls weren’t as loud as the ones from the night before. I wanted him to growl harder and to bark loudly to wake up my husband, but he didn’t. Momo kept growling quietly, while my heart was thumping louder with each beat. I was growing desperate. Since I couldn’t move or scream, I tried closing my eyes. But I couldn’t either. Life was forcing me to face this moment.

The shadows, which at that moment looked like strands of smoke, swirled closer and closer together until they fused to become a man. There he was. The tall man with the white straw hat and with his eyes as clear as the moon.

I tried screaming again, in the hopes that my second scream would wake up my husband, as had happened the night before. But no sounds came out of my mouth. The man started walking towards the head of my bed. Each of his steps accompanied by four of my heart beats. I tried moving my hands again, to wake up my husband, but I couldn’t move. Momo had grown silent. The night was silent and still, and the moon shone brightly. I braced myself for whatever was about to happen.

When the man was finally close to my face, he spoke softly, “Never hide behind a man”

He spoke ominously. His voice reverberating through the entire room. I had been expecting violence. I had been expecting being attacked. I had been expecting being tormented all night. I hadn’t been expecting an admonishment.

He must have noticed my surprise, for he added with a deep voice, “Don’t you recognize me? Or should I look older?”

As he said those words, strands of dark smoke swirled around him, and he started to age. His blonde hair turned gray, and wrinkles sprouted on his face. His straw hat, previously a Titanium white, turned a light ochre. And then, a fresh breeze carrying the scent of mint hit me in the face. I recognized him.

He was my grandfather.

My grandfather died a few months before my husband was kidnapped by the FARC. He had always been the strongest male figure in my life after my dad left home when I was little. He was my father in a sense. But he was very old already when I was born, and I had never seen pictures of him looking young. Thus, I didn’t recognize his figure as a young man.

He spoke again, “I see that you’ve calmed down”

My voice, which until then had been trapped inside my throat, finally came out. First softly like a strand of water, and then strongly like an old river.

“Why are you here? Is it really you?”, was all I could ask.

“I think that what you should really start asking yourself is what are you hiding”

My heart skipped. I thought of the spiritist cleanse I was hiding from my husband. I thought of the bits of conversation with my sister I had hidden from him too.

My grandfather sat on my bed and said, “There are things that you’re hiding even from yourself. You haven’t been yourself in ages. Your life has been revolving around your husband’s. This is not who I taught you to be. You are hiding things from yourself. Never hide behind a man. When was the last time that you made something because you enjoyed it? When was the last time you decided something for yourself?”

In the past five years, after my husband’s hostage, my life had been revolving around his. At first, I poured all my strength and resources to rescue him. I contacted all the authorities. I spoke about the FARC at news conferences to raise awareness. I quit my job and collaborated with the rescue teams. I traveled to Colombia to retrace his path. I was there to receive him when he was released. I then helped him reinsert himself back to his previous life. I changed my line of work and then helped him find a new job through some of my new clients. I was there for him when he went through his therapy. I was there for him when he woke up screaming at night, scared that someone was slitting his throat. I only focused on being there for him. I had only focused on being a good wife. I only focused on making him happy to make him forget the horrors of his past.

As if being able to read my thoughts, he added, “And has he been grateful for all what you’ve done? Does he see you?”

I remained silent at first and thought about this for some seconds. Then I answered.

“It’s been hard for him. He has gone through a lot of very traumatic things. And I’ve been a good wife”

“Those were four months out of a year more than five years ago. If I’m here, and you can see me, it’s because you’re hiding things. And you’ve been walking on eggshells. You need to decide if you choose to be able to see the world of the living, or if you want to see my world. You’re hiding things from him and you’re hiding things from yourself. You’re even hiding from your family. Maybe there are things that you don’t want to see. But you need to live. You need to be free. And you need to be seen. I’ll keep coming every night to sit on your bed. One day, you’ll stop seeing me. That day, you’ll know you’re happy”

Once he finished talking, he disappeared, enveloped in swirls of smoke. The shadows formed a tall column, which sprang and jumped to a corner of my room. The shadows sat still in a corner.

Momo slept placidly beside me, and I played with his soft fur for a while, looking at the distant outline of my husband. Moonlight shone through our windows, and the shadows of my grandfather kept looking at me from a corner of the room. I wondered how many more nights we would share the same realm.