My Ghost Story: The Yellow Room (Hello, Poppa) by Michael Cristiano

This Halloween, Curiosity Quills authors are spreading the spookiness by sharing their own personal paranormal experiences. Get haunted with these bone-chilling blogs, or post your own! #myghoststory.

We called my maternal grandpa Poppa and he died in 2001 when I was ten years old. His death was sudden: into the hospital one day and then gone the next. No one saw it coming and he was relatively young, just shy of his 67^th birthday.

The death was hard on us: my immediate family was devastated, my extended family was devastated, and my Grandma was never quite the same. But even though he had departed from us, he didn’t necessarily go away. Following his death, we began to see signs that he was still around.

The day of his funeral, my father and I sat outside the church just after the service. I was especially upset. Poppa had been my best friend. I would skip school and pretend to be sick just to hang out with him. While I was sitting there, I felt something flutter by my ear. I looked up and saw that a butterfly circled me and my father and then swept across the parking lot to the remainder of my family. It went up to each family member and finally to my Grandma, where it lingered the longest.

A butterfly, you say. I’m supposed to be convinced of your ghost story by a little butterfly? Well, those butterflies didn’t go away, not around my house or the house of my family in the months to follow. They lingered near the windows and around the parked cars, greeting us whenever we went outside.

Other strange things began to happen around my house too. I woke up once in the middle of the night and went to the bathroom. From where my room was, it was easy to see the landing and the stairs. Though it may have been my overactive imagination (I’m a writer, remember?), I saw a shadow at the bottom of the stairs. As I ran from it, as overactive 10-year-olds do, I barricaded myself in my room and turned on my light. I calmed myself and just as I did, I heard a noise: a thud not far away. I looked into the corner of the room where a picture of my Poppa and me usually stood on my desk.  It had fallen over onto the floor.

The photo that fell over in my bedroom. My Poppa and me at my first communion, circa 1998.

Most creepy of all, my mom and my aunt went to a psychic as a way to get some closure. According to my mom, the psychic guessed that my grandfather had passed before either mentioned it, but she also went on to say something else. I normally don’t believe in psychic abilities, but even this surprised me. The psychic told my mom that my Poppa was still around—in fact, he was in our house.

“He’s in the yellow room,” the psychic said.

“Yellow room?” My mom asked. “We don’t have any room painted that color.”

But apparently we did. The psychic was adamant. My mom went home confused and with a little less closure than she wanted. In any case, she went on with her life, slowly overcoming the loss of her father and returning to normality. One day, my mother sat in the study working on one of her freelance writing projects. She turned on the lamp beside her, the sun setting as she worked well into the evening. When her eye caught sight of the wall behind the computer screen, she put her hand to her mouth.

Though the walls were white, the fabric of the lampshade was a light gold. It illuminated the room and shone on the walls. My mom was sitting in the yellow room.

Years passed and the butterflies went away and sure, I was still running from shadows, but they were largely fueled by raging hormones and high school jitters. One day, I was home alone studying for my grade nine English exam. We had just gotten a dog, a beagle-basset hound cross named Tessie. During my cramming, the dog started barking. She only ever did when someone was at the door but when I went downstairs, there was no one there. Instead, I found her in front of an antique chair in the study that Poppa had given my parents, sitting and barking and wagging her tail.

I turned on the lamp.

Hello, Poppa.

—–

Links to other stories:

J.E. Anckorn

Samantha Dunaway Bryant

Katie Hamstead Teller

This story can also be found on Curiosity Quills’ website here.

My Plight With Demons (And Not the Metaphorical Ones)

That time of year is coming again, so bring on the creepiness! First topic: Demonic Possession.

Whoa there, this is not going to be a Satanic post. I’m not going to talk about sacrificing goats or promising your first-born child or selling your soul for whichever power would make your life easier. What I will talk about though is how they scare the crap out of me.

Trust me, they’re not always this cute.

So here we go. Gahh, even writing this post gives me the creeps. First of all, I love horror movies. Honestly, I would much rather watch a good horror flick than anything else, and the longer the impact, the better. But demon movies? I’ll watch simply because I can’t resist, but they occupy a special category in my psyche called things-that-make-me-shit-my-pants.

And the ironic part? I’m an atheist, so the fact that they scare me so much seems ridiculous, right? But for me, that just puts the paranormal in a peculiar place in my life. I may not have a religion, but that doesn’t have any baring on ghosts and boogeymen and *gasp* demons.

So after years of being scared of these movies, I wanted to find out why these things scare me so much. Aside from the obvious visual effects, why is it that a demon movie keeps me awake at night? What is it about them that has me terrified to fetch soup from my cold cellar and to sleep in my house alone?

Control. I think it’s all about control.

Let me explain:

For your basic ghost story, the solutions seem simple enough. If I found my house haunted by a vengeful spirit who was treated terribly in life, I would move. If I stumbled upon a cursed doll or video tape or mirror, I would be giving that thing away (for Christmas, if necessary. No take-back-sies). But if I found my body occupied by some supernatural being that caused me to speak in tongues, levitate, and thrash around? Well, I don’t know what I’d do.

But that got me thinking. In the modern day, a person is in a constant struggle to maintain control their life. We find ourselves losing control of what we buy and how we buy it. We find ourselves losing control of what our governments say and do. We find ourselves losing control of our own livelihoods and career aspirations, especially in an economy as rough as this one. In fact, there are times when I’ve found myself feeling like I have little control over my day-to-day life.

And this relates to demonic possession? Well, assuming it could happen (and I don’t really think it could, but let’s pretend), I would have no control of my words, my actions or even my thoughts. I would quite literally be out of control. No one could stop me, except potentially a priest, and even then, I’ve watched enough movies to know that doesn’t always work.

I think demons scare me so much because they would strip away my self-determination — they would take over my body and do what they want with it. And I think this resonates through historic depictions too. In ancient times, demons would possess people and make them do terrible things, or so accounts say.

To me, demons symbolize the ultimate loss of control and that’s terrifying.