Welcome to Fiction Friday. All Fiction Friday Posts can be found at http://fiction-friday.com .
I am a haunted house. I don’t want to start any squabbles with the house that claims the furniture is what gets haunted. I think she did relent that houses could be haunted but it was a rare event.
I have stood on this land for several generations and I have been continuously occupied by people and spirits.
The haunting isn’t like the ghosts who come and rattle chains or go bump in the night. It is more like a spirit group.
A soul group might be the best way to explain it.
When I was first here, a family of five children and four adults lived here. There weren’t any ghosts. It wasn’t until the next to the last child had turned so old and sick and crossed over. Her family and she did not live here in adult hood. She had taken a husband when she was 17 and took up housekeeping out of town.
She came back to visit her parents and the old woman and eventually new people moved in. I never stood empty. As one family prepared to move, another came in as natural as drawing a breath.
It was about three years after the second to the youngest died that a small group of spirits dropped in.
They all lived here or knew someone who lived here. It seems they gathered on the other side, maybe they took a vote on where to meet and I was the top choice.
Let me take another run at how I came to be haunted.
A ghost is very much the same as a person who claims to be living. To me they are on the same level of being, they have different needs.
Time.
Boundaries.
Walls.
What you consider a spirit or a ghost is an impression most of the time. A clue, a fleeting notion. The warmth that quickly fades from sock footed people walking across a tile floor. The world quickly absorbs the evidence.
For you, things are solid. Yet mobile, consider the state of mater taken to its smallest part. Moving electrons bound by laws of physics you cannot see or hold. You aren’t solid in the most literal sense of the word.
Your idea of a ghost is vaporous, able to pass through what you consider solid. You accept the walls and floors and abide by them. Only in your dreams can you fall through the bed and into the kitchen below.
Ghosts are vibrating, vibrant beings who in their own right, are as solid as you and I. The more mundane, run of the mill, less evolved ghosts cling to the boundaries they knew in life. They stay within the walls and floor-ways. They bring bodies and conversation and needs. They have moods and squabbles and fun and hunger.
Time is different for them. It can go by in a blink of your eye or their five minutes or twenty minutes could be drawn out into one of your decades or lifetimes depending on the sentiments of the ghostly gathering.
While you spend a week of evenings in bed reading a novel, a generation or two of ghostly visitors may have lived out their summers and departed in a new mix.
I am like a worm hole, a trail, a safe place or some such thing that draws them in. They aren’t always the same group. They pass on, too. A ghost has a limited lifetime, only lived within their construct of time.
One group my move along and send its members one by one back into your world to live again. Sometimes they stay with their original soul group. Going back in together to become the next living generation. Some split off and have to go into the world making totally new attachments. They usually spend their next life feeling like the odd man out, the misfit, the black sheep, the loaner. They may meet up with a soulmate from their previous life, but that is rare.
The ghosts laugh among themselves saying those who do go back outside the present group have a chance they don’t have to achieve new things, grander experiences, but I’ve seen your blacksheep and loaners and it really isn’t all that.
While one group drops in to coincide with the living, there could very well be another small group or two that come in and visit one group opting to be graceful will tie things up and move to the next stop or go back to the previous stop, like rotating holidays between separated parents and children. Sometimes clashes happen the and there are skirmishes. These can impact the mood of the people living on a more solid plane.
For the most part, the ghosts or soul groups are not aware of you. They bring their own reality and solidness. Some of the newer groups do not seem to know they are on the other side, not at first, and a new person to the group can fight and fright and manifest as a sort of energy within the house.
These energies effect more sensitive people by bringing in moodiness, unrest, restlessness, unknown but very felt discontent. If the ghosts are living out this scene in slow motion the effect may very well impact a person’s mental state even to the absurd and insane. This doesn’t happen very often as you are as unaware of this as they are.
I remember one estranged spirit, ghost, came into a new group on the other side. They were just having or re-having a holiday reunion when this uninvited one fluttered in. The group tried to be nice about it. They welcomed her, tried to find out why she was alone, who she might have been the last time and a bit about whom she was looking for.
Finding your group can be very difficult if they aren’t expecting you. Remember, they have a very different concept of time that can run slow or in a flash. If your group wasn’t assembled when you crossed over then you are pretty much left to your own devises to learn the ropes and try to make a meet.
This one was a teen aged girl. Supposing she has been out there long enough to begin looking around and she showed up as a very young person is sort of a clue that in life on your side, she was very young and her crossing was unexpected.
The group offered her comfort and let her try to tell her story. She was still new enough not to be able to tell who she was or how she got there. Some of the group could tell by her clothes on the other side she would have been fairly contemporary. She was dressed warmly and they imagined she was from around here.
The girl was angry and confused and would not accept that she was a ghost. The group insisted she stay with them that maybe her group was a sort of regular to the house and would show up according to the time or type of time they were living out.
She kept everyone down beat and upset with her nature. She wept, she threw tantrums, she broke things and imprinted her general ill nature upon the group living and crossed.
They were about to evict her. She remembered she had brought herself to this side in a sudden feel sorry for yourself eat all the pills in your parent’s medicine cabinet sort of way. It was no wonder her group wasn’t there to meet her. They didn’t know to expect her.
The ghosts of the season consoled her. When they were ready to change up time and place a bit from pure boredom with the current holiday they had gathered around, she declined to go with them.
I mentioned before that a sprit or ghost does come back, it chooses a new life. It comes back as a newborn, most of the time, during the first moment or weeks of a new life. They often try to get back to their own soul group. A very complicated and tedious sort of calculations takes place for re-bodying.
Some souls come back to people who already have well grown bodies. They may choose to inhabit people who have been in comas or some kind of tragic accident. Sometimes one of them will opt into the body of a person whose mind has taken leave. It isn’t a random event but tedious none the less.
The older souls say that a new entry should stay on the far side, the ghost side for a human lifetime if at all possible, even if you came in as a child or young adult.
This stubborn forlorn girl who ate all of the pills hung around for what felt like a lifetime to her, waiting. No one came in that she knew and in another fit of rage she spirited in to a random infant without calculation.
The girl is going to be an outcast, a lone wolf, antisocial and out of touch. It might very well be why she came over to the other side so quickly an unprepared in the first place.
She is not what you would call an old soul but you might call her a free spirit. Maybe she will bond with someone this time around.
The people living here in solid form have a very new baby and I’d like to think our little miss pill popper has come back in a more solid form.
The younger brasher souls are almost always a result of someone going back too soon. Coming here too soon. It is better to live out a long and loving life on both sides of the spectrum.
Some of you don’t like the way I interchanged the words soul and spirit and ghosts. Forgive me or go bite yourself.
There are other forms of energy that inhabit this house but they do not have personalities the way we like to think of them.
They are sometimes called elemental and sometimes congered by the sprits or living. I bet you thought it was just the living that could or would even bother to conger up an elemental.
Spirits can mess around with the underworld too.
An elemental carries an energy, usually associated with water, air, fire, earth.
An example of an earth elemental has not come here, they are commonly felt as earth quakes. But floods can happen anywhere at any time in any place. Floods are easy to call. Think Noah’s ark. A flood can be as simple as a broken water pipe, over flowing toilet or as wild as a hurricane. Hurricanes are elementals of earth air and water combined, though and they don’t reach this far up.
When you think of an elemental being called it is usually an act of nature. It can be brought on by the living and the dead. Everyone gets bored and moody. I haven’t seen any elementals here, this is a fairly peaceful house. Once in a decade or so there might be a kitchen fire but those have been easily put out and purely accidental.
I suppose I have already taken up too much time and certainly someone else here has had real elementals to speak about.
Haunted House__