The Ghost & I

I love anything paranormal. That is not to say I believe in everything reported as being paranormal but I would like to. I’ve had a few experiences of my own which some might chalk up to coincidence, but I don’t believe in coincidences and never have. There are just some things that happen which have no explanations, such as the banana that fell from the sky on my windshield one morning.

I never should have spoken of it at work. I had so many people laughing, I thought the building might collapse, but the truth is, I really did have a banana fall from the sky and splat on the windshield of my car. I was driving along, early in the morning, minding my own business on my way to work, there was no one on the road either ahead of or behind me, my radio was playing something country-western, and just like that - splat! A banana landed in front of my face and exploded across the windshield like some alien goop. Actually that could very well be the answer: aliens. It could have been litter from some high-flying spacecraft. There is no reason to think aliens wouldn’t enjoy an occasional banana.

I have read every Stephen King and Dean Koontz novel to date and I am a great fan of certain psychics and most things dealing with the afterlife. I also suppose that somewhere, way out in that infinite void of outer space there are most certainly other forms of life. It would be terribly vain of us to believe we are the only thinking beings in that vast, endless whatever-it-is. I can only hope that wherever and whoever they are, they have more common sense than those of us on planet Earth. So, if I were put to the point I would have to say that I do, sort of, believe in aliens.

I draw the line at UFO’s, however. Here is my theory: wouldn’t you think that if a life form that was smart enough to span eons of time and space to cruise around over our earth, spying on us or gathering information by sucking us up into their spaceships and giving us rectal probes, they would have the brains to leave the lights off on their space ships? Come on now. If I were sneaking around in someone else’s neighborhood, I would not be dumb enough to leave all my cars lights on! It just doesn’t make sense. So if any extraterrestrials are reading this, tell your next group of space traveling aliens to turn off the lights on their ships so as not to get our UFO watchers all riled up again!

With this in mind, I must comment on the night my son and daughter announced to me that they had seen a UFO floating over Big Bear Valley. This was something my tarantula-loving son, Kris, might dream up to catch my attention, but for my sensible, grounded daughter, Wendy, it seemed a bit out of character.

And yet there they were, standing side by side at the top of the living room stairs telling me about the UFO they witnessed just a little while before. Colored lights, they said, moving around some big, dark thing that was floating over the mountains and then it just lifted up and sort of vanished.

I kept waiting for one of them to crack and start laughing, but neither did. They kept staring at me with their big, blue, innocent eyes as wide and honest as could be imagined.

“Really, Mom!” Kris insisted, while Wendy kept nodding frantically.

“A UFO,” I stated, not wanting to urge them on.

“Well, it was something!” Kris protested. He always got extremely frustrated when he was telling me the truth and I was not buying it. The problem was, Kris was so good at fabricating life in general that I was always in a state of suspicion. Wendy, however, was a different story.

Not that she never fibbed, because she did, but she was just not very good at it. I could spot her in a lie from a mile away. Her forehead would crinkle and her eyes would dart around the room in every direction but at me. I would almost feel sorry for her - but not quite. Which was why I found myself teetering on the brink of belief in the UFO that night. Wendy was not exhibiting the Fib-Posture, which meant she had certainly witnessed something, or honestly believed she had. It was a puzzlement.

I went out onto our porch and scanned the dark sky but saw nothing except for stars and an occasional high-flying airplane light. Kris was too exasperated to be patient with me,
“Geeeze, Mom, we told you it vanished! It’s not still up there, for cripe sake!”

Wendy pointed to the northeast, “It went that way, Mom,” she assured me. There was a note of nervousness in her voice, another sure sign of honesty. But a UFO? Over Big Bear?

I did my best to be patient without humoring them too much. Obviously my two children had been smoking their dirty socks again. I didn’t want to intensify their hallucination by offering them any suggestions or answers so I let it drop, hoping that by morning their excitement, and the story that went with it, would fade.

As things sometimes go, my hopes were realized and both Wendy and Kristopher went off to school the following morning with no further mention of the UFO. As far as I could ascertain, neither of them had been taken up into a spaceship during the night, there were no signs of probes or biopsies, and they were acting relatively normal. I use the term “normal” with caution because two pre-teens are rarely normal. They fight, squabble, argue, fuss and fume, and that is all very normal, so I guess the following morning was as normal as ever.

When I got to work, however, I had about a dozen people ask me if I had seen “The Lights” last night? The Lights?

At this point in my life I was working at the local newspaper and aside from the reporters, who are prone to fantasy in any news-media setting, the people I work with there were very stable, intelligent folk. If they were mentioning The Lights, I began to think maybe my two offspring had not been hallucinating after all. It gave me a glimmer of hope.

“Lights? Really?” I asked naively.

Janie was one of the advertising folks at the newspaper. She gave me a wink and rolled her eyes, as if to say, “Don’t get hooked!” but Janie was hard to convince of anything so I shifted my attention to one of the long-time office people, Stan. He was quick to oblige.

“Yeah,lights over the lake. They disappeared over Sugarloaf. Some people are saying it was a UFO.”

I asked Stan if he had seen them?

“Yup, sure did. Looked like a big cigar with Christmas lights hangin’ on the sides.” Stan replied as he lit the bowl of one of his pipes. (He spent 90 percent of his time lighting his pipes and only about 10 percent actually smoking them.)

“Do you think it was a UFO?” I asked.

Stan laughed out loud at that, “What the Hell would a UFO be doing over Big Bear Lake? No aliens could ever be that bored!”

From there on out the conversation turned into a smuddle of voices sharing their opinions on the subject, but I was lost in my own thoughts. Stan had a point. Why would someone who had just traveled a gazillion light years to check out Earth spend any of their time cruising over Big Bear Lake? There was nothing of any interest to be found there, no secret military bases or weapons of mass destruction and no one in Big Bear had ever done anything worth alien inspection, except maybe Hawaiian Frank. And then we get back to my previous point of thought on the subject of UFO’s. What’s with the shining, colored lights? Colored lights and stealth do not go together

The mystery was never solved but it did catch my attention and I was willing to accept the possibility. That’s me: open-minded to the end! And so, years later when I was working in the jail and someone told me about the jail Ghost, I was willing to learn all about it...