No, Ghosts are Not Dead

No, Ghosts are not Dead

There is in the dark an omnipresence of something mysterious. She was compelled to go to them. The house on Burberry Street is built over the long lost cemetery. She knew there were children buried there only days apart; she suspected an infectious disease took their life. Her name is Judy Carpenter and she is a journalist and a scientist. She explores the hidden realms of the paranormal; she found their story in the attic. There was a journal that was written in 1804- the year they died. Judy took the journal from the attic of a house that was built in 1850. Only the father lived. She read about how he had to bury his entire family. Mr. Bucy found them after the emergence of typhoid fever, suffering in their deathbeds; he nursed each one. They died within days of one another. That suspicion was confirmed. Michael and Elizabeth were just children: five and seven. Their death was 1804.

Judy wrapped the letter. She wanted confirmation of the ghost stories that haunt the town; the Old Town district hosts a single traffic light at the intersection of Center and Main Street. The house of 1850 was further outside of town – the house everyone talked about. The legends say they can hear the sounds of laughter, the sounds of children playing, and the light of a spectrum of colors like an aura surrounds their bodies. The house, nestled in the Western Appalachia of Maryland, has aged but has not evolved. The artifacts inside are genuine. A blue coat of the Civil War era was left hanging in the attic. She imagined Mr. Bucy was scribing his life there possibly within the parlor where many pipes had been found. In another room there was a grand piano and in another were paintings done by the home owners; the last remaining known relative, Mr. Frederick Ricker, died in 2010 – legend says he was the uncle of the family Mr. Bucy had post 1850 on his wife’s side. His first wife, Marietta Jane Bucy died in 1809. Reasons unknown- she was not well. Judy was immersed in their story. As she toured the home she felt their energy. The parlor still smelled of fine tobacco and the room was oddly warm as if the fire had just died. She walked up the stairwell to the upstairs where there were five spacious bedrooms. The décor was vintage; antiques lined the walls. There were toys in the attic and clothing within the closets. The house was grand. The wallpaper on the walls had a golden, classic appeal. The wood was mahogany and the furniture was decorative in the main bedroom. There was a crib in one corner and stuffed bears, handmade quilts, boots and shoes and purses of the time period strewn throughout. The house sat unsold. Untouched. The history was rich and deep and Judy marveled over the past.

Her first night at the home was spent there because she located the only daughter of the estate – Carolyn Ricker … her maiden name and then she passed from breast cancer and she had said her mother also did before her. Judy held the key. She attended the funeral. Carolyn confirmed the legends. “The children from before laugh and play in that house,” she said with her last breath and her face shone that she befriended them. She was a Bucy. She loved her father and when she became a Ricker she loved her uncle from her father’s mother’s side. He died over 100 years old. Carolyn left two children the estate. But they had not been found. Judy couldn’t stay away from the home – she wondered if they could. Carolyn said her father passed of colon cancer and her uncle passed of old age. Her children were Victoria and Thomas. Her husband died ten years before her.

Alone in the house a light turned on. Over time Mr. Frederick Ricker updated the electric. An old cast iron stove sat in the kitchen. Judy did not have the wood to burn. She stayed warm in a single room and brought with her a heating unit. The lights wavered. There were footsteps in the attic. An old doll, melted in the attic, came down the stairs. Judy felt a coolness touch her neck; there was an uncle Porter who stayed in one room and an aunt Helen in another. The Bucy cemetery was visible from the window. Mr. Bucy cared deeply for them Judy felt and wondered how he felt knowing the bodies do not have the soul; their souls are rich and abundant. The red fire engine came crashing down the stairs and when Judy bolted from the bed she found a little boy there at the top of the stairs; his garments were nineteenth century and Judy was in awe of him. “Are you Michael?” Judy said and the boy slipped behind the curtain. Judy bustled up the stairs and went toward the window but the little boy was nowhere to be found. Then she heard the giggles of a little boy and a little girl that erupted into laughter – they were playing a game with her and Judy spun around – declaring she was in a game of hide and seek. “With children who died in 1804”… she began the notes in her journal, “I was not alone in the house that was built in 1850… and neither was the second Bucy family and the daughter Carolyn lived with only a few days of knowing her … her children I have not found.” She licked her finger and began to pencil more when the attic door closed and she found herself alone in that attic…”but I was not alone…” her notes continued some more.

Judy was in awe of them. “Do you know why you are still here?” She tried to reason with them but they began singing and she could hear them within the parlor. She went downstairs to find Michael playing the piano and Elizabeth singing a hymn. “They were beautiful,” she wrote some more but then she decided to sit among them and join the fun of the two healthy children who had been living in a permanent state of childhood – a blessing or a curse? She wondered. When Judy went to the kitchen she heard the slamming of the door to the stairs that led to the attic. And that’s when the voices changed and a disgruntled woman was heard who prepared a fire in the old cast iron wood burning stove. With the fire started Judy could hear the clomping of her shoes and possibly the end to a cane. “Stop making all that darn noise!” Her grumbly voice said and the laughter stopped.”Aunt Helen?” Judy said out loud and the woman must have spun around quickly. “What’s that?” She said and before Judy could answer a cat came from the kitchen and into the great hall. Aunt Helen picked up the tiny cat and put it in her blouse and went to the sewing machine – there she made the children’s clothing. She hemmed them hats and booties and Judy felt intrusive. But she stood in awe and admiration at the sight of these ghosts whose bodies were right there in the cemetery.

“The ghosts here have no awareness of death,” she scribed in her notes and when she opened the attic door she startled the woman and the children whispered for her to be quiet.

“That mean old woman doesn’t like us,” Judy heard one of them say – then it dawned on her… aunt Helen didn’t befriend them the way that Carolyn did – the second Bucy family was torn in the existence of the present and the past. “Shut up up there!” Aunt Helen wailed,” and Judy felt bad for them – “but it had to be hard on the second Mrs. Bucy…” and Judy wondered to the graves to find some unmarked considering if Aunt Helen resides there. Judy took to the attic after that – preferring to be there with the children. Their toys were scattered about when she quietly turned the light on; she noticed a cot in the corner. She stayed to study them still not knowing if their altered state of existence was a blessing or a curse. The toys belonged to Carolyn, Judy made a note, because the date of manufacture was post 1804. Elizabeth pushed the little train across the floor and Judy pushed it back – and made another note: “Why isn’t Mrs. Bucy here?” Judy became obsessed and bewildered by them. In her twenty years of studying life after death she had never interacted with such intelligence. “Uncle Porter doesn’t let us stay in his room either,” the little girl said and Judy gave it a shot … “your father built this house next to the cemetery,” she started but the children kept laughing, playing and smiling. Judy wanted to hug them. She yearned to embrace those tiny little baby ghosts if her arms would not go through them… she came to care for them at a personal level and they told her how Carolyn used to play with them and how aunt Helen would not allow her in the attic. How she would sneak them toys and how they became friends. It made sense; Carolyn had no other siblings. Her parents were divorced then and that was unusual back then – but it didn’t mean it didn’t happen. Mr. Bucy died and his ex-wife’s uncle kept the house, Fred and Helen lived there. “Seeing aunt Helen was also a vision from the past” her notes said, and Judy felt their contentions confirmed the unmarked grave belonged to Helen. His wife’s sister. Their history was muted in divorce, death and split families. Carolyn played in the attic with the only siblings she had. Aunt Helen didn’t like it. Uncle Fred seemed not to mind. So the children told her.

Judy knew they couldn’t escape from their prison. That house became all they had known. Little Elizabeth had a voice like a bell and she asked Judy to sing with her. She obliged but didn’t sound nearly as elegant. There was a blanket that Elizabeth said Carolyn had given her; she held onto it and loved it as her only gifts anyone in the family would ever give her. The children shined in Judy’s eyes and they seemed pleased with her company. Judy didn’t know how to approach the matter of death. “Do you ever play outside?” She decided to encourage them but Elizabeth told her not to scare Michael, “it’s safer inside.” She said, “Michael remembers when he got sick.”

“You had typhoid fever,” Judy was calm and casual. “My daddy took care of us,” Michael said and would not look up from his train set. Judy joined them; their energy was vibrant – they felt like magnetism to be near them. She extended her hand to touch them; an aura, like a protective bubble surrounded them; she could not penetrate that bubble. “No wonder they felt so good to be in the home…” she penciled in her notes, “living after death was a breath of fresh air compared to having typhoid fever. The children felt happy and vibrant. Exuberant.” In Judy’s mind they had never been so alive … then they came to know a sister … where divorce and death did not occur to them. She was learning more in the days she spent with Elizabeth and Michael than she had learned in the past twenty years – she yearned for this interaction. She wanted solid proof of the existence of life and death and she was getting it.

Judy bought a tape recorder and it picked up the energy vibration like a heart beating in the womb. She could hear their little voices in whispers among themselves. She flashed a camera and Michael cried. Never had he seen that before. “Don’t do that again,” the protective older sister scowled. Judy settled on using paper; on the only photo she had of them … their little faces shone as a swirling kind of blur – but an energy vibration no doubt. In the mist of her breath Michael’s eyes became transfixed – she learned he enjoyed the sweet scent of cherry. “Like candy.” He said. Her heart ached for them … it’s been years since the taste of something sweet was on their breath. She learned too that he loved apples and peaches and that he and his father would pick from the orchard. She thought about the simple pleasures in life – how simple their lives were until they got sick. Until they couldn’t breathe. She thought about their father losing both his children. Then his wife. Then another would end. “Perhaps the simple life was not so simple at all,” she wrote in her journal, “but it is best to enjoy those simple pleasures.”

Judy found an orchard on their land; the Rickers allowed the nearby farmer to use the land – what a coincidence she thought – and how does she approach such a thing? The ghosts of children spoke of peaches? Why not? Journalists are here to inform and to speak the truth.p

Her first article went to print:

The house of 1850 hosts the ghosts of children, alive in 1804

The headline went out and the locals spoke of them in bars, “I’ve known those stories for years,” one older man said, “I just never wrote them down.”

Judy had them talking. But none of them would know how marvelous it was to be in the light of the paranormal. How the energy felt at her fingertips… but she did print the images of their balls of light so they could at minimum ponder the existence of life after death. “Typhoid Fever,” is what killed them, they say of the local legend… and in the twenty-first century they speak of the nineteenth still not knowing how miraculous their lives are to experience. Judy realized the intensity of the situation would not be forever but she had an affinity for them; she had the hope that the baby she lost would be there too… somewhere that is in the life beyond the physical … in the depths of light and energy. She hoped her articles gave others hope too especially after experiencing loss. She returned home to collect a few clothes and made her way back to them. As she sat in the attic to study and observe them she could hear the rattling of pans and the lights would waver. The ghosts of aunt Helen and uncle Porter also inhabited the house. She watched as the little girl would sit by the window and the light would filter through her transparent body and she would become a spectrum of light. She thought at that moment that Elizabeth yearned for the light – she imagined she yearned for her mother. At night when she went to sleep she would occasionally be startled by them. By their sleeping. Judy opened her eyes to find the opaque face of Elizabeth peering through green eyes and feel the immensity of her energy – like a dense cloud full of sunshine. They were beautiful. Judy didn’t want to leave them but Elizabeth began to sit by the window so often Judy began to feel her life was not complete. “They are the lost souls of the past,” she wrote one morning after dreaming their mother came for them. She felt a loss then, like a loss of her premature child, and she realized then her passion for the life after became prominent to her; she was out for proof. The two children gave her the blessing of interacting with something other than her shadow; she lived alone until she met them; then she realized too that her history was consumed by loss, death and divorce. The children rekindled in her that life goes beyond physical dimension and is exuberant with the beyond. “Their bodies may be in graves,” she reiterated, “but the soul broke free of its shell; she broke free too of the entrapment in the mind – how she only thought of death until she began to study life. Life is abundant, rich and deep; to live freely is to transcend the restraints of flesh – life beyond biology may be explained in physics – perhaps one day their existence can explain it all. “To explain how they exist is another story,” she wrote, “but for now is a matter that they do exist.” Judy gained the insight that affirmed for her the belief in life after death – uniquely rooted in transcendental anomalies and parallel to the life we all have now – their life was taken too soon but they lived having known a sister they otherwise wouldn’t have known.

As Judy made her notes the front door flooded with light when opened and there were two young people standing behind her – Victoria and Thomas she assumed right away and Judy felt lost in that light because the dark kept them alive in there …. more than one hundred years past their time … in a house that was one-hundred-fifty years old and as the light flooded the home all became quiet in a house that was filled with laughter and the attic shone no sign of them because their ascension was in that moment of light when Carolyn called them to come home.

“There was a breeze that passed me,” she wrote in her notes and Judy told the legend of the house that was built in 1850 by a Mr. Bucy who buried his family one by one in a little cemetery that were etched in stone with the date as early as 1804… And Judy told of how the children stayed there to play in the attic with the new little girl they knew as their sister Carolyn. “Ghosts are not dead” the journal began and Judy spoke of her visit where the two children played, where she intersected with them and how, in the end, they would find the light beyond the dark to once again play with the sister they would have never known.