green-eyed monster at the white palace

if these walls could talk. can you imagine what they would say? i can. or at least i would like to try. there were too many people around for me to hear their whispers. but how i longed to. 

look at that crown. it's the white palace's crown. or rather, an old fancy oven that used to heat the room. i fairly swooned just seeing it. 

and there was a not-quite dead piano. i love me a dead piano ever since photographing one in an old mansion along the volga river ever so long ago. 

i almost forgot to look at the art, and in all honestly, it wasn't really that interesting. what was interesting were the bones of this house. i'm not generally an envious person, but damn, did i feel regret that we didn't try to buy this place when it was for sale. it would have been a house worthy of a never-ending house project. 

just look at those bannisters! they had removed any way up to them, but i found myself wanting to find a way to climb up and look around. three stories, four including the basement below. and yes, it's just the bare walls, but oh, what walls they are.

this brick floor. and the possibilities. and again, the stories it could tell. i am so jealous of the young couple who owns it. they live in another little house on the property, as obviously, this isn't liveable and will take a monumental amount of work and money to fix, but still. 

that piano again. sigh. at the very least, our weaving group must do an exhibition here. i can see long, gauzy, colorful swaths of woven fabric draping those walls. now that is art that would be worthy of the space. but oh, how i would love to be the one to fix it up and live there. if only to commune with the ghosts that must be there. maybe they're even tickling the keys of that piano now, as night falls, after all the excitement of all those people walking through today. 

reflections of the shadows within

it's raining and i wanted to capture a photo to depict this wet day. as i was snapping this big bowl of stones, i noticed my own shadow in them, distorted by the surfaces and the rain. i had the hood of my raincoat up, and thought the shadow looked quite monster-ish. it's fitting since i'm reading peter ackroyd's the house of doctor dee, a novel based on the real john dee (a 16th century alchemist). there are a lot of shadows, ghosts and monsters in the book, so perhaps i'm just seeing them everywhere. the atmosphere of the book is wonderfully dark (also fitting for a rainy day). it seems to be out of print as copies are £99 on amazon, so check your library.

in addition to making you see monsters and shadows everywhere (or monsters in your shadows), it will also make you want to go to london. immediately. it's like london is one of the characters in the book, with a life of its own, going on underneath the people that populate its streets. it's wonderful in an ominous sort of way.

my recent encounters with a compulsive liar have me thinking about the shadows we all have within. i wonder a lot about her shadows, the ones driving her to tell so many lies. i think at the bottom of it, she knows she's in way over her head, but has so built her identity on where she is and what she does that she can't face the thought of it all coming crashing down. so she lies. and frankly makes it ever more likely that it's going to come crashing down. because the lies are easy to disprove at every turn and they are piling up. but she hides those shadows quite well by having a bubbly and winning personality. but i predict that the lies will catch up with her. probably sooner, rather than later. and it's so unnecessary. i feel a bit sorry for her, really.

sometimes the shadows are just baggage that we carry with us and it breaks open once in awhile. or shows very clearly to others, even if it doesn't to ourselves. i actually had to photograph my buddy the troglodyte this week and funnily enough, he chose himself to pose with a sculpture of suitcases that's on display in town. it made photographing him so easy because i don't think he saw himself the delicious irony of it - that his photo puts his baggage on display for all to see. my photos of him underline it perfectly. and that makes me rather happy in an admittedly petty and mean way.

most of the time tho', i think that no one else can truly know the shadows we carry within. no one else can know what's really going on inside of exactly me - how i feel, what i think and the whys and wherefores. sometimes i think that even i can't really know it - it's too complex and elusive. i guess that's what makes it all the more interesting to catch a reflection of the shadow within. 

do you believe in ghosts?

they say this house is haunted. nobody's lived in it for a couple of years, but it looks pretty ready to move into. there's furniture, quilts on the beds and it's generally what we'd call hyggeligt in denmark. but they say that come about 1:30 a.m., there is a scream in the upstairs bedroom.

that's the window to the room in question. did i catch a sun flare or is it the light of a ghost?

we went over one afternoon after a glass of courage known as a gin & tonic. the girls downloaded ghost detector apps and we asked a lot of questions, but didn't get any answers, nor did our detectors detect anything. apparently there are two sorts of ghosts - ones you can interact with and ones that are more of an imprint on a place - endlessly repeating the same event, like an echo. this ghost is thought to be that sort. they say a little girl died in the room and perhaps the scream is that of her mother in despair.

in daylight, the house looks so innocent and inviting. we talked about staying there, but it never worked out. there was one evening where i could have gone over by myself, but in the dark, that idea was less appealing. i would have gone with a group.

there's something delicious about the idea of a ghost. some hint that this plane of consciousness isn't all there is (i'm sure it's not). but i'll admit i also felt a bit creeped out at the prospect of going over over by myself. ghosts seem like something that should be faced with others by your side. i do wish our house had one, but alas, i haven't felt a thing.

how do you feel about ghosts?

haunted lake

a few days before christmas, sabin and i were walking around down on the lake. she didn't know it yet at that point, but we were all getting skates for christmas, so i wanted to check out the quality of the ice. out in the middle we came across some fresh tracks in the snow - they resembled a small horse hoof with a funny sort of A-shaped shoe on it (imagine that the top of the A was rounded). there was even a bit of unfamiliar-looking poo in the snow - it wasn't horse poo and it wasn't deer poo, but something sort of in between.  several centimeters of snow covered the entire surface of the lake and these tracks were very visible. what was strange was that they were only there in the middle and didn't seem to have led from one shore to the other, tho' in that snow, they should have.

sabin and i got to talking about ghosts and we kind of spooked ourselves a little bit in that delicious way that you can spook yourself when it's starting to get dark and you're a bit far from the house. we hurried towards in the house, laughing and trying not to really be scared.

another day, while skating, i pointed to a dark figure at the other end of the lake and asked husband if he could see someone down there. he said it did rather look like a person. eventually, we skated down to the other end and convinced ourselves it had just been a shadow we'd seen amongst the frozen, snow-covered reeds by the edge of the lake.

yet another day, it was again getting dark and sabin and i headed back to the house, our skates slung over our shoulders. sabin asked me if i had coughed, but i hadn't. she said she'd distinctly heard a cough behind her, like an animal had coughed. but we looked around and there was nothing there.

in every case, it has been the most deliciously spooky feeling...the kind that makes you feel your senses are heightened and you are just more alert, tho' you are also aware you could run just that little bit faster than usual. if you had to.

today, sabin and three of her friends went down to the lake to skate. it's a bit grey and dark out today and snow is falling occasionally. about an hour after they headed out, the four girls came bursting in the back door, red-cheeked and out of breath. they'd been down on the lake and one of them distinctly heard a growl behind her, like an angry dog. but when they turned, there was nothing there.

another of the girls saw several dark figures running across the lake in the distance. they were indistinct, but in a hurry. and the girls were sure it wasn't just some deer, which are quite plentiful in the area. they got scared and headed back for the house. at the back of the shelter belt, there's an old refrigerator container and in the waning wintery afternoon light the girls were convinced they saw silvery eyes glowing at them from near the container. and by that time, they were pretty scared.

i invited them into the warm kitchen to get out of their snowpants and scarves and hats and i made them a big batch of popcorn and hot cocoa that seemed to dispel the fear of ghosts. they were soon laughing and talking and playing top model and all fears were forgotten.

but a haunted lake is quite a thrilling prospect, isn't it?

haunted

are there ghosts among us?

since moving to an old house (it was built in 1898), we find ourselves in conversations with people about haunted houses. despite actually hoping this house is haunted, it hasn't thus far shown any sign of it, unless that sense of irritation i sometimes feel overwhelmed by when i'm working in the kitchen isn't caused by missing my smeg stove and refrigerator from the old house but by a dissatisfied spirit instead. maybe one who, like me, has good taste in kitchen appliances.

there's a guy in the neighborhood who told me about one evening when he was watching t.v. and felt a weight on his shoulder. he thought the dog had come up behind him and laid his chin there, but when he turned, the dog wasn't there. the same dog raises its hackles and growls at thin air, so he's pretty sure that his house is haunted. he says occasionally all of the pictures on the wall are suddenly hanging crooked. i love such stories, they give me goosebumps in a very good way.

we had friends to dinner last evening and they live in an old farmhouse as well. they've traced the origins of their place to 1600-something and in one of the barns found evidence of a stone floor from that original building. their project is even bigger than ours and they actually think our kitchen is nice in comparison to the condition of theirs. (i haven't seen theirs yet, but find it hard to imagine how bad it must be if ours looks good in comparison).

the first night they slept in their house last summer, they had a strong feeling that they were unwelcome. it freaked them out so much they actually got up in the middle of the night and drove back to their old apartment to sleep. regularly, they wake up in the night and the humidity has shot up to 75%, from a normal 60%. they actually got a humidity detector (what's one of those called?) and documented it. they wake up from it and then within minutes it dissipates and goes back down to the normal 60%. they've tried to trace it to the furnace and such, but can't find any physical reason for the humidity swing (and they're both engineers, so they should be able to). one night, after it happened, they could hear their dog down at the bottom of the stairs, wagging his tail and greeting someone, as if it was one of them going down the stairs. they regularly hear footsteps overhead when they're watching t.v. and have combed the attic, looking for evidence of an animal, but there is none.

they also have both seen a blueish male figure passing through a wall and crossing the room. the lights flicker when he's there. they took a closer look at the wall where he passes through and realized that there had once been a door there but it is now covered up. they were both in the room and they turned to one another and one said, "did you see.." "...the blue man," finished the other. they had both individually seen him and not said anything.

i get the most delicious creepy sense when talking about such things. i get completely covered in goosebumps, but i feel it in a very thrilling way and i don't feel frightened by it. in all honesty, i totally have ghost envy. i want one too, but i 'm not sure you can wish your way to one.

husband and i laid awake talking about it last night (that's what you get for drinking coffee at 11 p.m.). husband, thinks it's flashes of access to another dimension. one that we don't normally see or feel. we recently saw the others, a 2001 film with nicole kidman (who i normally hate), where you realize at the end that she and her children and the servants are dead and still living in a big house that a family has moved into. it's a well-done film and raises that question of whether when we die we just move to another plane, but still hang out in the surroundings where we were. if so, think of the layers upon layers in an old house. i do wish i had access to the ones here.

ghosts in the machine

i just read a very thought-provoking post on spirits. and of course, it got me thinking...the feeling that there are spirits around me is one i've had occasionally over the years. and i've often wondered if it could be possible that some residual force of a life couldn't remain in the air around us. i mean, why not?

years ago, i lived in california and some friends i had there insisted that there was a benign ghost living in their house. of course, this seemed like a very southern california thing to think in the late 80s and perhaps it was. but i came to believe it when their little grandson, who was only 3, perfectly described old mr. benson's blue cardigan.  the boy wasn't afraid of what he saw and maybe he saw it because he was just more open and could see something that the adults around had closed their more rational eyes to.

* * *

some cultures are more afraid of the spirit world than others. i heard a story from a ship's captain about a ukrainian pilot who came onboard near odessa, said good morning, asked for a cup of coffee and then proceeded to drop dead right there on the bridge. it was his heart and there was nothing that could be done. in the weeks afterwards, the filipino second officer who had the 12-4 a.m. watch, kept calling the captain and asking small questions that he should have been able to take care of himself. the captain finally sat him down and got out of him that he was afraid the ghost of the pilot was there on the bridge and he was uncomfortable there alone in the wee hours of the night. the captain resolved the issue by saying, "i'm sure he's not here, because i haven't seen him and if he'd been here, he would have had to come and see me first." but, he also took the young filipino officer seriously and in the next port invited a priest onboard to cleanse and bless the bridge and put the young man's mind (and perhaps the ukrainian pilot's spirit) at rest.

* * *

there is a small castle in denmark, dragsholm slot, which claims to have several ghosts. a grey lady is one who is frequently seen by guests in a certain room. i've been there several times and have done my best to see the ghost, but have never managed to see anything (tho' we once thought we had photographic evidence, which later turned out to be dust particles on the lens). i did, however, late at night in the jagtstue (hunting room), a very masculine room, where we were holding a workshop, get a rather creepy feeling--the hairs raised on the back of my neck and i went all goosebumps and i felt a distinct chill in the air. it was an uncomfortable spirit encounter, and i left the room as quickly as i could, seeking out the company of others. but i imagine one can have happy ones as well.

* * *

not long after my grandmother died after a long and disheartening bout with alzheimer's, i had a very vivid dream about her. we sat together, having tea and cookies. the light was very warm and she was assuring me that everything was all right. i awoke feeling a strong feeling of warmth in my core. i feel certain that the dream was a happy encounter with her spirit.

* * *

we had a cat called fitch. he was a black persian and dumber than the proverbial box of rocks, but a mild mannered, sweet cat. he couldn't take care of his fur properly and we were too busy to chase him down and comb him regularly (he ran at the mere sight of the comb). he never took to his litterbox properly and, in general, wasn't a nice cat to have around the house. he eventually died. there have been several times since, when i swear i both saw and heard him down at our back door. even sabin has heard the scratching sounds and swears she caught sight of him. 

i'm not sure we can ever truly know, but it's an interesting thing to ponder...