From the Deaditorial Desk

A teen aged boy died in my house sometime in the late seventies.  And if you have ever been an overnight guest in my Woodbury NJ home then you have slept in the bedroom where he died.  How did you sleep?  It is a tragedy that a teen died in his sleep after suffering a concussion during a neighborhood softball game but the fact was not disclosed to us before we bought the house.  Of course we weren't told a lot of things, like the sewer backs up into the basement toilet and the upstairs shower leaks onto the living room ceiling.  My neighbor's shit floating around in my basement may not necessarily be a deal breaker but the unsettled spirit, of a prematurely dead human being, floating around my bedroom  would be.

My house cleaner (Janice) has experienced his presence.  After making the bed in the room where he died she swears there is a depression in the bedspread, as if someone just sat there, immediately after she turns her back.  She told me this before she knew of the unfortunate incident in my home.  I have never experienced any whispery voices in the middle of the night warning me to get out, because if I had, unlike that Amityville NY family, I certainly would have....gotten out.  I don't even like going into the attic alone to confirm that the 1 am scratching noise is just a family of unwanted flying squirrels.  They can chew up every floor joist, every night for all I care, because I ain't going up there to check until the sun comes up and the vampires are back in their Transylvanian crypts.

My cabin in Woodland Valley has no such  unearthly pedigree.  It was not built on an ancient Native American burial ground.  I checked.  Before I handed over my ten percent deposit.  I might not have realized the stream, running five feet from my living room doors, could one day wash away my dream home, but I did realize that the ethereal war cries of undead Indian Warriors would be enough to wash away my dreams of a peaceful retirement.  The woods can be a very creepy place to sleep.  Especially if you were raised on a steady diet of George Romero zombie movies and Boy Scout campfire stories about unwitting Webelos having their left hand ripped off by a vengeful dead Girl Scout.  There are no forests left in the Northeastern United States that aren't easily accessible to a motivated urban slasher armed with a machete and the will power to hike a few miles to the tent site of one solo camping dentist.  Even at the woods weary age of 51, I sleep with one ear always alert for the sound of a half rotted zombie foot stepping on a twig within a 30 foot radius of my camp.

One would think that a rational scientist, schooled in the irrationality of the supernatural world, could sleep peacefully under any circumstances without worry from a spectral visit at three-thirty in the morning.  A time, by the way, that I have determined to be the most remote and ripe for preternatural phenomenon to occur.  At 2 am people are still getting home from bars.  At 4 am people are beginning to waken for the early shift.  So at 3-3:30 am you are definitely on your own.  There is no way I am getting up to pee at this witching hour.  My toilet is adjacent to the shower and I happen to know, for a fact, that the shower curtain is the perfect screen for a waiting ax murderer.  And to this day I will never sleep with a closet door open in my bedroom.  Why even the animators at Pixar understand this harebrained folly.  Monsters Inc, a movie not totally divorced from reality, is a testament to the wise practice of securing all avenues of ingress to your bedroom.

Perhaps you are shocked to learn that a grounded person such as myself could be haunted by such demented demons.  Well let me ask you; would you spend the night alone, in this house?  I wouldn't.