Proof

We have fake spiderwebs over the front door, grinning stuffed spiders hanging from the silk, and six pumpkins in varying degrees of scariness lining the steps (I was worried Halloween would bring up some disturbing imagery to the girls so soon after their Grandma's recent death, but it turns out the holiday is much too cartoonish to summon anything emotionally real). We have candy. We have costumes. We have roasted pumpkin seeds.

Adding to the flavor of the season: every kid in the neighborhood is convinced our house is haunted. I am not. I'm open to the idea of ghosts, though I've never seen one (with possibly one exception, but that's another post). But our house feels too sane, too safe, too comfortable. I will admit to visualizing a ghostly woman at the end of the hallway late at night, some nights, but I have a laughably active imagination.

The girls, blessed/cursed with similar imaginations, both say they've seen a woman walking past their bedroom doorways, in the same hallway where I imagine my own apparition.

Still, I am unconvinced. Bolstering my beliefs is the fact that ghost hunters actually investigated our house the year before we moved in. I say ghost hunters; they are a group of stoner kids that work at the Loaf N Jug down the street. But they've got ambitions, they've fashioned themselves into a team of ghostbusters, and so brought in video cameras and sound recorders, searched the house, found nothing.

No matter. Our house is 117 years old, it looks haunted. Add in the dusty attic, the Hannibal Lecter-ready basement. Who need proof? Not our kids, or our neighbor's kids. They have something much more powerful: belief.