My favorite time of year is here; as fall finally arrives, it
brings ghouls and goblins and Halloween trees.
My favorite time of year is here; as fall finally arrives, it brings ghouls and goblins and Halloween trees. As scarecrows, spiders and spooks begin to inhabit Gilroy, I wonder whether there are any real ghosts among us. What is that feeling you get sometimes, that phantom tap on the shoulder or that glimpse of something out of the corner of your eye?
As my husband and I sit side by side the first night alone together in our newly purchased home here in Gilroy (built in 1976), I hear a sound upstairs, a slight rustle and then footsteps, each very distinct: stomp, stomp, stomp, stomp. I am thinking, but there’s no one in the house … then I hear a faucet go on, the whoosh, whoosh of the water coming from the sink upstairs. Then the faucet is turned off, the steps stomp, stomp away into the distance, and it is once again silent. I don’t want to say anything about what I am hearing, but when I catch a glimpse of my husband’s face, I realize that he is hearing it too – it’s not just me! Yet we both know it is physically impossible for anyone else to be upstairs in our bathroom at that moment. That first night is the one and only time we have heard those sounds – it has never happened again. Could it be a former owner saying farewell to his home … or just an echo through the thin veil that hangs between us and another dimension (maybe we’re closer than we think) … or some sort of shared auditory delusion between my husband and I?
There’s something I love about older houses, a character and personality that newer ones haven’t had the time to acquire. It’s as if the experiences and emotions of those who have lived there are clinging to the walls long after the people have gone. The longer the building stands, the more of a personality it takes on. If you doubt this, try visiting a place like Auschwitz. It’s like walking into a room just after people have been fighting. Even though they have stopped, you can still feel the tension in the air so thick you could take out a knife and cut it into pieces.
A friend of mine just returned from visiting the beaches of Normandy, and she said the feeling of history is so strong there that she could almost literally see the thousands of troops landing on the shores to liberate Europe. When she walked out onto the beach, she got chills and her hair stood on end. There was a paratrooper in her tour group who had been there that day – he was paid $50 extra for the risk he took landing behind enemy lines.
I once explored deserted houses on the beaches of Carmel, and as I climbed into the large ballroom with a fireplace at either end, I got a mental flash of a 1920s’ scene with couples dancing the Charleston. I could see the women with their heels kicking and long strands of beads swinging. When I checked later, I found the house had been built in 1926.
I love the idea of preserving our older buildings, like City Hall downtown. We are saving a piece of our past and literally a link to the spirits of those who have gone before us, walls not simply coated in paint but overlaid with emotions of laughter, joy, hope, love, triumph and despair. We leave a bit of ourselves behind wherever we live, clinging to the walls; and that is shared with the next generation, a breath of immortality.
