the baker street ghosts

(after a few weeks away i'm back in town and i will start posting regularly again in a couple days.)

back in 2009 my oldest daughter, alex, and her fiance shared their apartment in vermont with ghosts. i thought that was awfully nice of them.

the ghosts lived—if you can call it living—upstairs on the third floor in the dusty, unheated, unventilated, spider-infested attic of their duplex. where else would they live? you never hear about ghosts occupying a nice, clean kitchen or laundry room or dining room, now do you? it's always attics, cellars and closets.

when my daughter called me on the phone the morning after the night she discovered the others who also inhabited their apartment, i asked her are they nice? are they polite? respectable? as with any neighbor, if you have to have ghosts residing nearby you want ones who are relatively pleasant, who do not throw beer bottles in the yard, who are not too loud, and who absolutely don't sell drugs out of the apartment.

my daughter muttered i'll have to think about that.


honestly, her response made me just a little bit peeved.

what do you mean, you'll have to think about it?


i heard a quick release of air through not-too-pleased pursed lips heading loud and clear toward me over the phone line and then i got hit with her snappish response.


slow down. don't ask so many questions, mom. i really didn't get much sleep last night with all the noise going on directly over my head and down the attic stairs, and i'm really not in the mood.....


noises? the ghosts were noisy? that's awful. how rude! what did they do?


resigned to the fact that she'd never have any peace if she didn't fully answer my questions, she fed me the details she knows i love to savor.


let's see. at first they just spoke quietly among themselves for a while, you know, mom, like little whispery murmurings. but THEN they started creaking around up there. and THEN they decided to jiggle the attic doorknob, the one with all my marathon and other running medals hanging on it. THAT is what upset me the most, all that clattering and clinking. and another weird thing. beer bottles have been turning up in the yard lately. it's all kind of frustrating....


during the next few weeks all i could picture from alex's description was a bunch of ghosts drinking beer and having a helluva good time partying up there on baker street. i heard a few other details about my daughter's ghosts, then complete silence. she didn't want to talk about the ghosts anymore. i couldn't blame her. what else was there to say? she bought ear plugs for sleeping and went about her business. in fact, she got very busy indeed, planning her vermont country wedding and deciding where to go on a honeymoon.

one day soon after alex and her husband returned from their honeymoon i got curious. i decided to ask her if there were any new developments with her attic visitors.

no new developments, mom. the ghosts are still up there but they've been pretty quiet lately. anyway, we're hoping to buy a house. we've made an offer on one.


so the newlyweds bought a house and moved to the other side of town.

as far as we know, the ghosts still reside on baker street. if you don't believe me, go ask alex.


{this is a true story. well, everything except the part about the beer bottles....}