Todd (8:17)
I get an envelope in the mail. There's probably easily 100, 150 different photographs in there. Most of them were people that I would recognize in my family. My mother, she had been driving up from Massachusetts to rural New Hampshire to get my grandmother's house prepared. For selling. She was going through boxes, getting items together, packing things away, and she came across, like, a stack of old black and white photographs. I was flipping through all these photographs, and then probably midway down through the pack, I got to one photograph where my grandmother's standing next to this guy. He's got his arm around her. He's very tall and thin. He's got, like, a flannel shirt and jeans. There's also another photograph of him in World War II army attire. I saw the photograph, and immediately I felt this kind of sickening feeling in my stomach. I knew I had seen this person before, but I couldn't quite remember the person's name. And there was something about this person that gave me a lot of anxiety. I call my mom up, and we're. We're talking about the logistics of the move. We're talking about who's going to get what pieces of furniture, that sort of thing. And I. I asked her about this. Who is this person? And I describe him. There's. It's a tall, kind of slender man. And she said, oh, that's your Uncle Charlie. It was almost like some sort of trigger. I started having, like. Almost like a flood of memories about this person. When I was maybe nine years old, we used to go and visit my grandparents on a regular basis. I'd say probably once a month. Their property was kind of in the middle of the New Hampshire woods. Not a whole lot to do around there. There was a creek nearby, and I would walk up into the creek and see how far up in the creek I could go. And there was a bit of a clearing nearby, and I would take a kite and fly kites. One of the things that I remember playing with a lot was this small red ball. It was a small red ball with, like, a face painted on it. There was a barn in the back of the house, and I must have spent hours just playing with this ball, just bouncing it. There was a bedroom that I had to myself upstairs, A small bedroom with a bed pushed up against the wall. There was a large picture window. And outside that window was a huge oak tree. And it seemed like the windows were always open. There was always a breeze flowing through the house. There was always cooking smells. So I remember one night in particular, I had gone to bed, and I woke up to see that the door was open. I always left that closed. And I thought, you know, maybe my mom just came in. Maybe my grandmother checked on me or something. I fell back asleep. It couldn't have been more than. I don't know, maybe 15 minutes later, I started hearing this kind of humming noise. This deep kind of high, low, high, low humming noise coming from downstairs. I could hear it was a man's voice. And I knew there were no other men in the house. So I thought maybe the television was on. Try to fall back asleep the best I can. But it took a while. When I woke up again, I looked, and at the end of the bed, there's a man sitting there. He was sitting with his feet flat on the floor and his legs together and his hands on his knees. And he wasn't looking at me and said he was looking directly out the window. I'm completely confused. I'm thinking, who is this person? He has a very gaunt face, but a young face at the same time. Deep set eyes, thinning hair, very high cheekbones. The first thing that comes into my head is maybe someone stopped by after I went to bed and I just didn't know about it. There were always family members coming and going. So it didn't really surprise me that there would be other people in the house that I didn't necessarily know all the time. So he's looking out the window, and that's when I could hear him talking. And the sun wasn't up. Very quietly was so light, I couldn't really understand the words that he was saying. I just hear kind of a mumbling. I asked him who he was, and I didn't get any sort of answer. He was just talking, and he wasn't necessarily having a conversation with me. He was just sitting at the edge of the bed, just staring out the window. The whole situation just seemed very odd to me. But I built up the courage to say, please stop. I'm trying to sleep. And immediately he stopped talking. But he just remained completely still sitting at the end of the bed. I didn't know what else to say to make him leave. So I rolled over and tried to fall back asleep. And probably an hour later, I woke up and there was nobody at the end of the bed again. The next morning, I went downstairs and my grandmother was in the kitchen. She was preparing breakfast. I asked her, who was the man that was in my bedroom last night? And I remember her stopping and just pausing, not necessarily looking at me. And she said, that was Uncle Charlie. And I said, well, who's Uncle Charlie? Where did he go? She just said, he's not here anymore. I knew that she had a brother that was named Charlie. So I kind of put that together to understand that this was who this person was. The next night, I Went to bed. I fell asleep pretty quickly. In the middle of the night, I woke up and I rolled over in bed and I see him sitting there again. His feet on the floor and his hands on his. On his lap. And his gaze is outside the window, transfixed, like there was something out there. I'm laying there and I'm thinking, he's here again. I don't know who this person is. I've never seen him before. I'm just going to tell him to go away and to leave me alone. And just as I'm about ready to say something, he started. Sun wasn't up, mumbling, and there was fog. Just like last night. I was wandering through a field. Had been there for a while. And I start to listen a little more carefully, and I'm starting to pick up on certain words and certain phrases. And I realize that he's actually telling a story. There are explosions everywhere. He's talking about this friend that he's with, and they're in a hole. And I start to realize he's talking about a war. He was telling me how his friend stood up and got his head above ground and was immediately shot and fell to the ground right in front of him. And then, almost as a train of thought, he went immediately to another story of another friend. His friend was wounded, and he grabbed the man's hand and started trying to pull him to safety. And all of a sudden, the body got very light and he looked and half of his friend was gone. I can still see his mouth. It was absolutely terrifying. I asked him, I said, please stop. I don't want to hear anymore. And he actually stopped talking. But he was still sitting at the end of the bed, just staring out the window, which wasn't any more comforting to me. So like the night before, I just rolled over and I covered my head with a blanket and I tried to go back to sleep. When I finally woke up again and looked, he was gone. Over the course of maybe three years, I would see Charlie. It didn't always happen. Every single time I would go visit my grandmother at her house, but it was always in the summertime months. That's when Charlie would come and visit in the middle of the night. I would never feel Charlie come into the room. I would never feel him sitting at the edge of the bed. It was always this very silent, everywhere presence. He would tell stories about from his parachute, paratroopers blown off course and hanging from the trees. He would tell stories about how hungry he was, how badly his feet hurt, and how the farmland Smelled like gunpowder. His voice would kind of come and go and it would be understandable for a while, and then it would go back to kind of a mumbling. So I never quite understood what he was talking about. I asked my grandmother a number of times more about Charlie, and I tried to get some more answers out of her, but she was very skillful at changing the subject. And as a kid, he was just another family member that was coming into the room and telling me stories. So I just kind of stopped asking questions anymore about it and who this person was. Once I got to be in my teenage years, things got too busy and I wasn't visiting as much. And over the course of time, it's just one of those things that I kind of forgotten it actually happened until I saw this picture again. So I'm on the phone with my mom and I say, okay, then who's Uncle Charlie? Who is this person? Because I remember this person, and he would basically scare the heck out of me. She pauses on the other end of the phone and says, there's no way you met Charlie because He died in 1946, decades before you were ever born. I nearly dropped the phone out of my hand. My mom says, Charlie was your grandmother's older brother in World War II. He was over in France and spent most of his time in France. He came back from the war and I believe he died just a couple years after that. I just couldn't believe it. I didn't understand. All the thoughts were running through my head, you know, well, then why was he there? My mom, she basically wrote it off to me being a kid with an overactive imagination. But I know that what I experienced was true. And it happened so frequently that there had to have been something. At this time. I knew that the house was going to be sold. They were going to be putting it on the market within a couple weeks. I thought I could go back, spend the night, I could help out with moving boxes, moving furniture. And at the same time, it was an opportunity for me to be in my grandmother's house one last time before it got sold. So I bought a plane ticket, jumped on a flight to New Hampshire and got a rental car. It's about a two hour drive up to the house. When I arrived at the house, the sun had already kind of started to go down a little bit. I parked the car and the first thing I notice is how, how much the house has kind of fallen into disrepair. There's paint peeling off the sideboard and some of the floorboards of the front Porch had kind of rotted through. I walked up to the front door, it was unlocked, and I went inside. Most of the furniture had already been taken for an estate sale. The movers were scheduled to come the following day. So most of the other items had been boxed up and they were stacked neatly and kind of pressed up against the wall. That's when I noticed that red ball that I played with when I was a young child. It was just in the middle of the floor. I had forgotten how much I played with that ball. I picked it up and it was all cracked from age. And I put it on top of one of the packing boxes in the middle of the living room. I went upstairs on the second floor, saw the room where my grandmother used to stay and where I used to stay upstairs as well. Luckily, I found a mattress. I pushed the mattress onto the floor and basically had my bed for the night. It was about 9:00 in the evening. I closed the door to the bedroom, I laid down and I brought a book with me. And basically I read till I fell asleep. About two hours later, I was laying in bed and I woke up to notice that the door had been opened. My first thought was that the house was old and it probably swung open on its own. But I wasn't quite so sure. I couldn't fall back asleep. I could see the oak tree that was right outside the window. And that oak tree looked exactly as it did when I was 8 years old. Almost for like a split second. I was eight years old again. That's when I started hearing that humming sound. This high, low, this. And it would kind of alternate a little bit. My body just completely freezes. I would hear these noises every time I would see Charlie. I started to think, well, maybe that's an appliance or something in the kitchen. Maybe this whole time I'm just making this whole thing up until I start hearing the sounds of footsteps in the room below me. I know I'm alone in the house. I know there's nobody else there. But I hear the footsteps and they're walking in circles. It sounds like. And then what sounds like boxes kind of being shoved off to the side. I get this, like, tingling sensation, like, all through me. The hairs on the back of my neck are going up. And then there's this very powerful smell of dirt. A very rich, earthy, wet kind of smell. It filled the room. And I turn and I look at the end of the bed and there's someone sitting at the end of the bed, just as I had remembered Him. I could see his hands sitting on his knees. And I recognized how enormous his hands were. They just massive, massive hands. And I could see his face. I could see his jawline. I could see his nose. The moon allowed all this to be seen. He's not saying a word. I was completely shocked. Here it was, after all this time, and I'm seeing the same person that was at the end of the bed when I was a kid. At this point, I realize I'm not eight years old anymore. I'm going to do something about this. And I reach down and I find my cell phone. And I turned on the light and I shined it toward him, and there's nobody there. I'm not sure what to do at this point. I'm not even moving a muscle. I'm just laying in bed, and I see that red rubber ball that I'd played with so much as a kid come rolling down the hall. It was almost like a starter's pistol went off. Every single muscle in my body just moved. I just need to get out of the house. I jumped up out of bed. I went down the steps. I get to the front living room, and all the boxes, they were all scattered around. I turned and looked behind me, and in the kitchen, all the drawers were pushed open. All the doors were wide open. I kept running. I got to the front door. In the corner of the room, kind of in the corner of my eye, I thought I saw a person standing there, pressed up against kind of the. Where the two walls come together. I got out to the car. The doors were unlocked. But then that's when I realized I left my wallet, my keys, everything I left up in the room. But I am not going back in that house. I spent the rest of the night in the car, in the front seat, waiting for dawn to happen, waiting for the sun to come up. Once the sun came up, I very slowly went back to the house. And I walked inside the living room. And all the drawers in the kitchen were closed. The boxes were just as they were, almost as if nothing at all had ever happened. I looked for that red ball. I went upstairs. I went into the same room where I had last seen it. There was no sign of it. The moving truck came up the drive, and the rest of the day was just filled with chaos, with movers and boxes and packing. And I stood there for a while trying to figure out, did I dream this whole thing. I'm pretty sure my grandma saw Uncle Charlie, too. Even though she never admitted it, she knew who this person was. And told me his name. Maybe the reason that she never really said a whole lot about it was that she just didn't want to scare me further. They always say that people kind of have, like, unfinished business or the ones that wind up showing up and presenting themselves. And maybe that's just what it was. Maybe he had seen so many things during the war and he just wanted someone to listen and someone to hear these stories. The house went on the market and it never sold. Very few people came to look at the house. It was so remote that I think that probably dissuaded people from being interested in it. So my mother decided to move from Massachusetts up to the house. And now we take our kids up there and they sleep in the same room. I'm waiting for that day that one of them comes down and says that there was someone sitting at the edge of the bed. I certainly don't want that to happen, but I'm almost expecting it.
