The Ghost Among Us

Halloween. Normally I’d be excited. Normally I like to dress up and have a spooky time. Horror movies, candy, haunted houses, and welcoming trick or treaters to my house. Normally it’s one of the highlights of my year. Normally. But not this year. Not after the accident.

It happened last January. My wife and six-year-old son were at a New Year’s party with other families that had children. The kids all played together and had a great time all night. The adults just relaxed and had a good time playing a few games. My wife had a few drinks, nothing too crazy, but I didn’t even drink champagne when the clock struck midnight. I knew that I would be driving my family home and I had been trying to cut back how much I was drinking anyway. It just seemed like the right thing to do. The other guy, however, hadn’t been as concerned. I don’t know what his life was like before the accident. Maybe he was a nice guy who worked with the homeless. Maybe he was a volunteer coach for Pee Wee football. For all I know he was Mother freaking Teresa. But I really don’t care what he was before. Now he is nothing more than a monster. A monster that took everything from me. My wife. My child. My life…

When I woke up after the accident, I found myself at least fifty feet from the car. I rushed over and tried to rescue my family from the wreckage, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t get them out. I couldn’t even touch the car door handle. As I looked inside the car, I saw my son in the back and my wife in the front. Both unconscious. I could see them both breathing, which was a relief. As I ran over to the driver’s side to try to get into the car, I saw it. Or more precisely, I saw me. I was still in the car, head draped over the steering wheel, with blood coming from my head, nose, and mouth.

I tried reaching for my phone to call 911, but, again, I couldn't. I couldn’t touch anything. My hand would either be blocked from moving something or it would pass right through it. I panicked. I hopelessly started yelling and running around the car, still trying to open it. Still trying to grab my family out of the car. Eventually, I just broke down and cried. I don't know for how long, but I just sat there with my back up against the smashed car until I heard sirens. I looked up and the police were swarming the area preparing it for the ambulance. They had a man on the ground in handcuffs who had tears streaming down his face. At that time, I didn't know who he was, but eventually, all I would feel was rage when I would think about him. At some point, I'm not sure when because this whole experience was a giant blur, the EMTs opened the car doors and passed right through me. I would eventually get used to this feeling, but this first time was just unsettling. Imagine feeling something while also not feeling something at the same time. That’s the best way I can put it.

Once the EMTs opened the doors, though, they immediately started CPR on all three of us. In a matter of moments, we were all three declared dead and put into body bags. The man who I would come to hate was taken to the hospital by the police. I overheard them saying they needed to check him out before they put in a cell for the night. They wanted to make sure he paid for his crimes without dying in his sleep from internal bleeding. 

As I watched the EMTs and police take the man away and then one by one take my family away, I couldn’t move. It was like watching a scene from a movie unfold in front of my eyes. I was part of it, but at the same time, I wasn't. What was happening? Why was this happening? Was I dreaming? Was I in a coma? Or had I actually just watched my body get taken away along with my wife and child’s? I don’t know. I still don’t really know, but it’s been nearly ten months since it happened and the man who took it all away from me still walks free. His trial came and went relatively quickly. It ended up being thrown out because of some technicalities. I’m not exactly sure why, but something happened to where his charges were dropped. I think it had something to do with the way the police arrested him and handled him after his arrest. It was a huge deal and was all over the news.

In the beginning, I followed him everywhere. I hovered over his hospital bed the couple of nights that he was there. I watched him as he huddled in a corner of the jail. Afraid that the other criminals would do something to someone who murdered a family. I was there when they set his bail. I was even there in the courtroom as he celebrated his charges getting dropped. He swore to everyone that he had learned his lesson and that he would never so much as look at a bottle of alcohol again. He committed to going to AA meetings and even said he would mentor kids who had substance abuse problems. Those, to no one's surprise, were all lies.

The first night that he was out of jail he bought a giant bottle of vodka and drank half of it by himself. Within days of being home and free of all charges, he packed up all of his belongings and left the area. Never to be heard from again. At first, I was angry and wanted to follow him to make sure he couldn’t hurt anyone else ever again, but those feelings soon subsided. I knew there was nothing I could do to change anything. I couldn’t interact with those who were still living or even grab objects, so what was the point? Ever since he’s been gone, though, I’ve felt much more at peace. So, I promised myself that today, on Halloween, I would try to enjoy myself, even if it was for a second. 

I needed something to smile at, so I went to my old neighborhood to see what festivities there were. My wife and I would always go all out on Halloween. In our yard, we would put up inflatable vampires and werewolves. We had this seven-foot-tall Frankenstein that grunted when people walked by. We would always put spider-webs in the bushes and various sizes of black spiders along with them. Last year we put together a little haunted house in our garage for our kid's kindergarten class. Nothing scary, more cute than anything. Cartoony ghosts, The Count from Sesame Street, and a little Scooby-Doo setup where the gang was taking off the mask of the bad guy at the end. We had plans to do this every year with the intention of making it increasingly scarier every year. That was the plan at least. We told other parents in the neighborhood and the parents of the kids in his class about it, so hopefully at least one of them takes up the mantle of Halloween now that we're gone. I think it's something that the kids could look forward to and would love to do every year until they grow out of it. They were only six, so they had a long way to go until they thought they were too cool for it.

As I walked down my street, I started to recognize kids as they wandered around the neighborhood in search of candy. Looking around, I saw many more houses than normal were decorated. To my surprise, our house was even decorated! How? And why? I ran through the crowd, literally through the crowd, to see what was happening. In our driveway was a ticket booth that was selling tickets for donations to charity. I recognized some of the people at the booth from my son’s class. I walked past it to our front door, which had a cartoonish monster surrounding it saying, “Enter if you dare!” Again, not too scary. More cartoonish and cute.

Walking into our old house was emotional, to say the least. Not because I was sentimental for our belongings that were there, but because the entire house had been turned into a haunted house. Or should I say the garage was still the haunted house, but the rest of the house was decorated with cartoonish spook, just like the entrance. There were spooky play places for kids to play on, kid Halloween movies, spooky music, and even a refreshment stand. What caught me off guard the most was that both my parents and my wife’s parents were standing at the refreshment station and were all dressed in Halloween garb. After a few gulps of red punch, our dads said they had to run back to the garage so they could interact, not scare mind you, the children who were going through it.

I then overheard our moms talk about what was going on. They said they wished that we were still here, but that they would never let our memory die. They had committed to putting on this haunted house for years to come and were going to follow our vision of making it spookier each year. I was able to learn that since we died, our house was given to them because in our will they were our beneficiaries, so between the four of them they decided to keep it and just rent it out to people throughout the year. With the one exception being on and around Halloween. They would block off a few weeks before Halloween every year to make sure they could decorate and make our house be the vision that we intended. I saw some of our siblings with their children as they ran around looking happy as can be. One even suggested that they would love to buy the house so they could be the ones who ran the Halloween festivities, so suffice it to say, our haunted house was not going anywhere.

I happily watched as parent and child alike ran around the cartoonishly fright-filled house and I wondered how scary it would become in the future. I somehow knew that I would never be able to see anything past today. I don't know why I felt that way, but something told me that this was it. I would soon be going… home. I didn't know where that was or what that meant, but I knew that it would be happening soon.

Happier than I had ever been as a ghost, I walked out of the house with my head held high and a smile on my face. In the crowd, I heard a familiar voice. I ignored it at first because this was not the first time that it had happened, but I couldn’t ignore it for long. I soon started to look around for it. I was in awe when I saw her. When I saw them. My wife and son were calling my name and as soon as we saw each other we ran towards one another into a giant family-sized hug. We then joined hands and walked down the street, never looking back, knowing our haunted house and Halloween visions were intact.