My grandmother's house was a source of both joy and fear in my childhood; an unassuming white bungalow built by my great-grandfather's hands in 1915, it sat on a dead-end street in one of the more unfavorable areas of the small Texas town I traveled to with my mother on weekends for family visits, a short drive of an hour.
I would spend the school week anticipating the weekly trip as my cousin, the same age as I, lived a few houses down on the same street, and was all too happy to waste away the weekend with me playing video games, watching MTV, and joining the other kids on the street for seemingly endless games of kickball in the old church's parking lot until the street lights illuminated the dirt with an amber, incandescent glow.
But, each and every weekend that we had traveled to my grandmother's house since I can remember, a small but steadily-tightening knot would develop in the pit of my stomach the Friday before we left; a splinter in the back of my mind, just like every weekend before. A feeling of dread that I didn't want to talk about with mother, that I just wanted to forget.
But forgetting wouldn't help. The source of the fear was in knowing what my grandmother's house was. Haunted. Not haunted in the sense of fictional stories told around campfires, or an exaggerated tale nestled firmly in the unlikely realms of possibility; no, the house was infested..infected with a presence, and everybody knew it.
It was accepted lore in the family, and it was spoken of in a matter-of-fact way, just as you would discuss an uncle's heroic service in the Navy, or the story of the family's migratory trip from Kansas, and the challenges faced and overcome on the way.
My grandmother seemed almost happy about the occurrences, a sense of pride woven into her voice anytime she talked about the existence of the spirit that inhabited the house.
This particular weekend took place over the summer when I was twelve, well past the age of routinely believing in ghost stories and monsters. My greatest fears at that age, until that point, were the awaiting bullies prowling the halls at my middle school, and the inevitable copy of the year's final report card arriving in my parent's mailbox.
The car ride to the house was quiet, as always, and the tension I felt was growing at an unusual rate this time, though I wasn't sure why. My grandmother had a plethora of stories to tell, and the most recent one concerned an unwelcome inhabitant in the house..an old Native American man, who appeared out of darkened closets at night, just before you fell asleep.
She had seen the figure at least half a dozen times in the past; As the story went, it was always just before she dozed off in her bed, when the house was dark, and quiet, and always began with the high-pitched squeak of the old closet door slowly swinging open. An unmistakeable odor of smoke would precede the apparition that would appear. The old man would unhurriedly emerge, his pale eyes finding the thinnest stream of light in the room so that he was seen, just barely; he would then speak a few words in an incomprehensible Indian dialect, before disappearing into the darkness.
Her heritage was highly steeped in Indian culture, as she was three-quarters pure Cherokee herself. Many of her stories revolved around Indians and their deeply spiritual way of life. I conveniently used this fact as an excuse to regard the stories with disbelief. Maybe it was the easy path to making myself feel better, safer, less afraid. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn't.
Nevertheless, the Saturday proceeded as it always did, filled with kickball, walks to the corner store to buy penny candy, serious video game sessions, and deep, intellectual talks with my cousin about the intricacies of Prince's "Raspberry Beret", and exactly what sexually-charged symbolism was at play there.
As night drew closer, the skies darkened and the street lights bathed the broken asphalt with their orange glow, further enhancing the worrisome feeling that was still overcoming me. All of it was a reminder that soon there'd be no light left, and that terrified me, although I still didn't know why.
