Staying in a Haunted House

I flew off to Chicago a few days ago in order to keep my sickly mother company at a rehab center. I am the only person staying at the house where my immediate family moved in 1976. It has a great many memories.

This house is haunted. It’s faint, but I feel my dad’s presence here. I remember my mother saying that his ghost touched her shoulder, and since coming here on this trip I’ve been hoping I’d have that powerful a ghostly encounter.

Once I heard a cat meow, though it has been over a year since the last cat lived here. A couple times I heard the slight clinking of a dog’s tags. For a few seconds, I thought a dog was greeting me at the door; it was a shadow and a dog-like energy. Cats and dogs lived in this house for decades, but not anymore.

Serendipitous Background Music

In a coffee shop today, I was revising a chapter of my gothic novel The Hauntings of Claverton Castle, because my novel critique group had recently given me feedback.

I was working on a scene involving Mr. Prendregast, a grumpy man in his late fifties who puts down his daughter all too frequently. Meanwhile in the coffee shop, the Beatles song about “such a mean old man” started playing.