Haunted objects

What creates a haunted object? What saturates something that has no soul so that it carries with it the pain of a broken heart or the violence of a death? Call it cursed, call it blessed, these items frequently bump into our lives creating phenomena that can’t be explained by the cat. Haunted cribs, chairs that doom people to horrible deaths or dolls that you thought only existed in bad movies, the mundane creates its own horror through the memories forced on it by former owners and passed on to new ones. You may think twice before hitting the next garage sale.

I have a friend that collects haunted things; it’s become an obsession for him. He travels to New Orleans and brings back authentic voodoo dolls for my children. One of these dolls he also gave to a lady who put it away in a cupboard so as to not tempt the cats as a plaything. That same night, she developed a headache and went to lie down on the couch. Upon awaking a few hours later, the doll was sitting on the table next to her head. Returning it to the cupboard, she now periodically hears scratching coming from the cabinet. She was also given babysitting duties to my friend’s haunted doll bought at an auction. The doll, while innocuous looking enough, gives everyone the creeps and was relegated to the same cupboard. Again, the scratching. I’d be setting very large mousetraps…

A painting has come into his possession, bought at an estate auction of a man who killed himself after the murder of his daughter by his wife and her subsequent suicide. An abstract of blue and red, it hangs in Al’s apartment in the living room. Since the painting arrived, he has been experiencing a multitude of incidents. Each night, between 1-2 am, he feels a weight sitting on the edge of his bed. The television switches channels by itself, objects disappear and return later into plain view. He bought a ghost along with his artwork. One of the items that has developed a wandering streak is a clown doll bought at auction, it has gone missing for weeks only to turn up again on a bookshelf. Small, cheerful and harmless, we wonder if it has anything to do with the television as well since when it’s sitting atop it, it changes channels, but it’s getting hard to tell who’s doing what in that house. Since the clown has entered the picture, Al has been subjected to phantom knockings at the door…ones that are only a few feet off the ground.

Can objects be haunted and passed down to another? Just ask anyone living in a haunted house.

A Scottish haunting

The Scottish twilight comes late in the summer, the sun refuses to set until 10pm. My American brain couldn’t make the rapid change to daylight 18 hours a day, so I spent many hours combing the village of Whithorn where I had signed on to dig up a medieval priory ruin. On this night I enjoyed a rare moment out of the rain, I seemed to be growing webs between my feet. I hopped down into the pit and carefully picked my way to the safe spots so as not to disturb the bones poking out of the soil. Darkness was settling, however, so I communed with work a bit more and started to head back. As I did, I detoured into the priory’s graveyard. Hundreds of years of residents made the small space crowded, their plots busy with multiple bones.

I had been through here many times before but this night the wind seemed different, it went still and quiet as I randomly wove through the tombstones. As I paused near my favorite, a waist-tall stone whose owner had passed in 1603, I noticed a glow coming from a site nearby. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t breathe as the glow floating by condensed into a bright shadow of a figure. I could make out the shape of a man, small and bent, his head down as he passed me. I must’ve made a sound because he stopped close by and began to raise his head. By now the darkness had come and it was consuming, I stepped back and bumped into the stone and could move no further. He raised a face smooth but old, his eyes absent. I watched as it floated across the stones to one in particular, the same shape as his but with imprints of flowers. He hovered over it for a moment and disappeared as the wind sighed in the trees above us.

Naturally I couldn’t let this pass, I checked both tombstones. The first had a carving of a satyr dancing with a skeleton, the inscription on the back read “Joseph MacInnes, 1645-1704”, the second had flowers curling over its small face, surrounding the words, “Mary MacInnes, 1650-1679.” I returned the next night bringing friends but no appearance came from our boy Joseph, now I only felt the heaviness of the oncoming rain and the force of the wind on my face. Joseph apparently likes only nice weather for courting.