My Ghost Story.

I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and the area I lived in was not entirely a pleasant place, but when you grow up that way, it becomes very normal to you. We had old school bikers, pimps, hustlers, pushers, crooked noses, and leg breakers, all right here for your convenience. None of them bothered me, or scared me, they were just the people in the neighborhood, it was how life was.

The place down the way however, was quite a bit different.

Anywhere you go, there is THAT place. That place people point towards. That place that you always hear stories about. That place where this, or that, happened. That place.

The place down the way was not that place. It was the other place. The place people did not look at. The place people did not talk about. The place you knew to avoid, even though no one told you to. The place with the chill during August. The ghost place.

When I was younger, any walking that was done near this house, was done on the opposite side of the street. It was something that was done. No one said to cross the street. No one pointed toward the house. Everyone just crossed to the other side of the street well before reaching it.

The off yellow and brown house was one of the old style, two story homes, plus a basement, that had the hatch in the back of the home for loading coal into the basement for the winter months. A porch along the front of the house, with the squared off windows, and the roof that came together from the four corners of the house and sloped sharply upwards to form that flat top that had the wrought iron pickets around the top, like they guarded the chimney.

A long drive passed a side door on the left of the house, and led to a detached garage that sat at the back of the property, while a large, gnarled tree, towered in the backyard, its dead limbs visible from the street. One unavoidable fact of the property. Among the long dead grass of the lawn, were the cats. Cats of different breeds and colors, were always found on the property. Theirs meows, and hisses, could not be ignored as you quickened your pace from the other side of the street.

Of the cats, two stood out from the others. One black as night, the other, white as snow. They never meowed, or hissed. Instead, they sat on the rails of the front porch, watching the street around the house like some, odd sentinels.

When I was leaving Cleveland for what I understood to be the last time, another guy from the neighborhood dared me to knock on the door of the house. Understand that I was that guy. The one that would do anything, someone else was to afraid to do, but this? This was insanity? No one went near the house.

Now, up until that time, I had only ever heard mention of the house by someone, once. Once, and once only, in my entire life, before being shushed among gestures of crossing the chest. The only mention had not been of the house itself. It had been, what I guessed to be, the owner of the house. A superstitious whisper between the pharmacist that owned the corner store, and the deli owner. The superstitious whisper stuck with me, because of the odd words used. The Old Woman’s Land.

It was not the way someone talks of another owning property. It was the talk of something darker. A claim. A right. A matter of fact. It was spoken in such a way that suggested that even the word land, was different. Like it was something, elsewhere.

I remember walking across the street as the other guys in the neighborhood watched, some unable to believe that I was actually heading toward the home. I remember the feeling as I reached the middle of the street. A sudden chill washed over me, as if the house knew of my intention, and sent a warning, trying to change my mind. As I slowly stepped toward the sidewalk, I remember how the chill seemed to deepen, becoming colder the closer I got. I was nervous. My heart starting to pound as I continued, but as I moved, the chill suddenly did not seem as disturbing as what occurred next.

When my foot hit the sidewalk in front of the house, the chill ceased, and the cats, the ever present cats, stood as one. All at once, they half ran to the back of the property, and disappeared into the alleyways behind the property.

As I stepped onto the driveway, my heart went into overdrive, pounding like I had been in a marathon. I felt the fear rise in me as I walked toward the door on the side of the house, and nearly bolted. I had very little fear, even when I was younger, but something about this place, felt deeply wrong. The superstition of the place, the cats, all of it, was one thing, but this feeling was different. It felt wrong. On a level that I could only describe as instinctual.

I swallowed hard and made a direct line toward the door, quickening my pace. I wanted this done. I wanted to leave this place. I needed, to leave this place, so I made the last few steps toward the door. I glanced back to the other guys. The look of shock on their faces was almost worth the heart pounding feeling I was having. Almost.

I looked back at the side door as I took the last step I needed to be able to knock, and raised my hand slightly, to do just that, but I did not knock. Instead, I took another step. My heart was pounding so hard, that my chest was hurting, but I could not stop myself at this point. I needed to see.

The door was one of those that had the window with the thin curtain in it, and I remember being able to see through it. I could see a piano. The black shape stood out against everything else in the room. It was a large open room with furniture covered in white sheets that had gone gray from the dust. Couches, chairs, bookcase, all of it, covered with sheets, except that piano.

The wood floors had a thin layer of dust on them, I could tell that, even through the closed sheer curtain, no one had been here for a very long time. I glanced back at the guys to smile. I was here. I raised my hand again to knock and when I turned back to the window, that was when I saw the old woman looking back at me through the curtain.

She was maybe five foot five, with a slightly hunched stance. She had long, stringy thin, gray hair that reached past her shoulders. She stared at me through the curtain, with cataract filled, cloudy white eyes, and she raised her hand slowly as I stared at her, my heart nearly exploding out of my chest. As her hand lifted, I saw long, yellowed nails, each at least a good six inches, that curled downward, back toward the her hand. Then she smiled.

I saw her teeth were dark, and had been filed into sharp points, her tongue sliding behind them. I watched as she curled her hand slightly, held it in the air for a moment, then made a slow knocking motion in the air in front of her. It was then that I realized that I could still see the piano behind her. Her head snapped forward suddenly and I fell away from the window, crashing down on the driveway and started scrambling away from the door as the old woman smiled at me from the window.

I stopped moving when I saw the cats, the white and the black one sitting next to the door, looking up toward the window. As one, they each turned their heads toward me and hissed. The sound that came, was not that of a cat, and the best way I can describe it, is that of a scream of a dying horse.

That was it. My feet were under me, and I was moving. I noticed that when I reached the end of the driveway, the other guys had already started running. It didn’t matter. I passed all of them. I felt this, chill, grazing the back of my neck as I ran. I knew who it was. It was her, and I did not stop running, for fear that she would grab me.

I never knocked on the door. The guys in the neighborhood never said anything about what happened that day. They never said anything about it at all. They didn’t need to, we all knew. The Old Woman, haunted my dreams for years, her face appearing in puddles, mirrors, and the edge of my vision, in every nightmare I had after that day.

Years later, when I returned to Cleveland for a visit of sorts, I went back to that place. I had planned to stand across the street and look again, but what I found surprised me. The house was gone. The land was not developed, nothing had replaced it, it was simply gone. No house. No remains of a foundation that I could tell, it was just gone. I could feel her though. Tied to the land, or something. Some kind of, residual presence there.

When I turned to leave a homeless man watched me. Smiling at me, he said, “She knows”. When I tried talking to the man he became silent, refusing to say anything more, or even look at me.

I tried to define what I had experienced over the years, sometimes thinking that, there is no way that actually happened. A dream perhaps that felt too real. I try to think this, but then I am honest with myself again, and I know what had happened was not imagined.

Some of you may think that because I want to be a writer, that I am telling you a tale. Something to get you stirred up. I am not. This is my ghost story. This is also where I tell you it became something else many years later.

When writing, the emphasis on the power of research cannot be over stated. You have to know what you are writing about, so that even if you do not want to follow the standard method of something, you have to know about it so you can change it from the normal versions.

One day, while researching something, I turned a page in the book I was looking at, and slammed it closed so fast, it slid off the table. I sat there for a full minute trying to get my breathing under control again, before looking down at the book on the floor. The book was lying on the floor, opened to the page I had just slammed shut, and a picture stared back at me. It was her. The Old Woman. And she had a name. There is power in a name.

The name disturbs me, because I see it in use more now a days. I had never heard, or seen the name before reading it in that book. In mythology and legends, there is a power of three. Three gods, to take one name, like Morgan, or the Witches in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

This one had three names also. Three sisters, all with the same name. The Old Woman.

You can believe me or not, that is your choice. I know what I saw. And now, I know her name.

Baba Yaga.

I do not know which sister it was though, and it raises a question with me…

Does she know my name?

My ghost story. Enjoy what you do.