{"id":35445,"date":"2026-06-14T11:33:56","date_gmt":"2026-06-14T16:33:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=35445"},"modified":"2026-06-14T20:54:00","modified_gmt":"2026-06-15T01:54:00","slug":"ghost-stories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=35445","title":{"rendered":"Ghost Stories"},"content":{"rendered":"

I encountered a ghost last week.<\/p>\n

My dad was in the hospital — he had an inflamed and infected gall bladder, which needed to come out, and at eighty-four surgery is not easy to recover from — and I was down in Virginia to be there.<\/p>\n

I stayed at my parents’ house. Spending all day at the hospital is hard and tiring, and in the evenings I went to the house, put on a baseball game, and went to bed early, sometimes as early as 9 o’clock. <\/p>\n

In the back, in the television room, I would hear things. The house has mice, and I expect that. The air conditioning would kick on, and that had a sound. On several occasions, I thought I heard one of my siblings coming in, but then I didn’t see anyone.<\/p>\n

It’s a house in the woods. There are sounds.<\/p>\n

Thursday night I watched the Orioles\/Mariners game on ESPN, though it would be more accurate to say that I had it on. I spent the evening looking for some paperwork that the hospital needed, and I thought I might find it.<\/p>\n

I didn’t.<\/p>\n

I found other things. Notes my sister had written and my mom had saved. A folder of cross stitch patterns my mom had drawn and never made. Historical documents about my mom’s church when she was growing up. Historical documents about her family. (I had seen these, and I took photographs of them.) Camera cards, which I put in a baggie and brought home with me so I can archive them. Two USBs of medical records, which did not have the paperwork I hoped to find.<\/p>\n

About quarter after ten, I accepted I wasn’t going to find what I needed to find, took my meds, and began turning out the lights.<\/p>\n

It gets dark<\/i>. This house is off the road, on a hill, surrounded by woods, in rural hills. Dark<\/i>. My parents would leave some lights on in the kitchen or an outdoor light, but I turned those off. The only light in the house, besides the digital clocks in various rooms, was the nightlight in the bathroom. I closed the bathroom door.<\/p>\n

Pitch black.<\/p>\n

The bedroom was next to the bathroom, and to navigate I put my arms out and kind of felt for the door frame and, once I navigated that, the antique church pew that sits at the foot of the bed.<\/p>\n

I am a well-known silly person, and I then did something that Appalachian folk wisdom tells you that you never, ever, ever<\/i> do.<\/p>\n

I whistled in the dark.<\/p>\n

It was the jaunting Hobbit motif from Howard Shore’s The Lord of the Rings<\/i> scores.<\/p>\n

I got into bed, and pulled the cover over me.<\/p>\n

It was still. It was dark.<\/p>\n

“Who is that?” came the voice of a little girl, aged about nine to eleven, from the area of the bedroom door, which I had not closed.<\/p>\n

The voice was distinct and crisp. It started. It ended. The bed didn’t make a sound that my brain somehow interpreted as speech. It couldn’t be anything else. There was silence. There was a voice. There was silence.<\/p>\n

I raised my head, looked toward the open door, saw nothing, and put my head back down.<\/p>\n

Appalachian folk wisdom says you do not whistle in the dark because something will hear you. I whistled in the dark, and a little girl heard me.<\/p>\n

I meant her no harm, she couldn’t harm me. I went to sleep untroubled. In the morning I thought I saw a shadow move where I didn’t expect one when I went to the bathroom.<\/p>\n

As it turns out, my parents’ landlord believes the house is haunted.<\/p>\n

A ghost visitation makes sense of some things that my mom talked about in her final years. She would tell me that she thought I’d driven down in the middle of the night, arriving when she was asleep, and then in the morning she would find I wasn’t there. Maybe what she was sensing in the house was the ghost.<\/p>\n

The house had been sitting empty — my dad was in the hospital for two weeks — and I wonder if the absence bothered the ghost.<\/p>\n

Then there was the night where I turned off all the lights, got into bed, and discovered that the kitchen lights were on. Maybe I had forgotten to turn them off. Or maybe the ghost was telling me, “These get left on at night.” I’m sure I forgot to turn them off.<\/p>\n

Why would I, of all people, go straight to accepting that a ghost talked to me and be completely unperturbed by that?<\/p>\n

Maybe because I visit cemeteries. Things have happened, and I’ve seen things.<\/p>\n

There is the very weird story of walking to my great-grandfather’s brother’s grave<\/a> in Loudon Park Cemetery, not even knowing that he was there, yet somehow I just meandered there, at random, on my own, and there it was.<\/p>\n

I would rather not describe what I have seen.<\/p>\n

I think our understanding of time itself is not necessarily flawed<\/i>, but it’s incomplete<\/i>, and our minds may unconsciously on occasion see the past and the future bleed through.<\/p>\n

So, here’s what I think. The ghost I encountered really wasn’t anything supernatural. She was whenever and wherever she was, she heard me whistle, and she didn’t know where it came from any more than I knew where her voice came from.<\/p>\n

I could try to invent another explanation about what I heard, but for me that’s the simplest explanation.<\/p>\n

I encountered a ghost.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I encountered a ghost last week. My dad was in the hospital — he had an inflamed and infected gall bladder, which needed to come out, and at eighty-four surgery is not easy to recover from — and I was down in Virginia to be there. I stayed at my parents’ house. Spending all dayContinue reading “Ghost Stories”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35444,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[5462,5463,213],"class_list":["post-35445","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-life","tag-appalachia","tag-ghosts","tag-virginia","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35445","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35445"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35445\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/35444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}