Communications From the Other Side. Anthony Quinata
doorknob, the noise stopped. I walked out into the living room, and there was the vacuum, plugged into the wall, in the middle of the floor!”
I wanted to hear if anything else happened in the house, but I started to feel guilty about leaving Roque all alone to work on the shed. When we finished, my mother and I got in our car and went home. We didn’t say a word to each other about what Jeanne had told us, but my interest in ghosts had just been rekindled, and it would soon burst into a full blown obsession.
Tropical storms and typhoons are a part of life on Guam, and every once in a while a storm would approach the island that would have people boarding up their windows, or if you lived in military housing, putting up metal storm shutters. Once, when just such a storm was coming, a few friends of mine and I decided to have a “storm shutter party.” We went to each other’s home and put shutters in the windows.
The last house we did was for a girl named Patty. A straight “A” student, Patty was not known for making stories up to get attention, but what happened that day certainly got mine. After we had finished putting up the shutters on the windows of Patty’s home, she told us that she had made sandwiches for us to eat and to help ourselves while she went upstairs to take a shower.
Twenty minutes later we were all standing in the kitchen, the sandwiches gone, talking, waiting for Patty to come back downstairs. Suddenly, we heard a blood curdling scream coming from upstairs. We found Patty in her room, trembling and crying uncontrollably.
When she finally calmed down enough to talk to us, we asked her what had happened. She told us that after she took a shower, she was in her room standing in front of the mirror brushing her hair. She could see her bedroom window and how the shutter enabled her to see the reflection of her room in the window. Then she noticed something that scared the living daylights out of her.
“I was brushing my hair when I noticed a movement out of the corner of my eye. I looked in the mirror, and I could see a young girl with long blonde hair, wearing a white T-shirt and blue jeans reflected in the window. She looked as though she was looking directly at me, and she had her right hand in the air, above her head, as though she were holding something in her hand.”
“What was she holding?” we asked her. “Was it a knife?”
“I don’t know,” Patty said. “Her hand was cut off by the edge of the window. I turned around to look for her, but there was nobody there. When I looked back in the window, she was walking towards me and her hand was coming down, almost as if she was holding a knife and was going to stab me. That’s when I started screaming.”
Several months later I asked Patty about that day and if she now believed in ghosts because of what she saw. “Honestly, Anthony,” she told me. “I just don’t know. Now I think it was just all my imagination, that’s all.” That’s all she would say about what had happened from that day forward.
Even though I didn’t experience what she saw personally, I knew she had seen a ghost. When I found her in her room, she was too terrified for it to be just her imagination. She had seen a ghost. I might have seen taotaomona, but to me, they weren’t really ghosts. They were my ancestors, guardians of the island.
In my mind, I could explain the taotaomona. I wanted to see, and experience, something I couldn’t explain. I wanted to see something like what Patty saw. I wanted to see a “real” ghost.
“Do you know any ghost stories?” was a question I began asking everyone I met. I just couldn’t get enough of them, and on Guam, there were a lot of them. Once my grandfather passed away, my father retired from the Navy after twentytwo years of service, and we moved back to the States.
While I was on Guam, it seemed like most of the people who lived there, including those who weren’t native to the island, took the existence of ghosts as a matter of fact. Perhaps it’s because there isn’t a square inch of the island that hasn’t been soaked in blood from all the wars fought on the island, starting with the Spanish-Chamoru war fought between 1671 and 1695 and ending so far with the battles between the Japanese and American armed forces for control of the island during World War II.
When we moved back to the States, though, whenever I asked if anyone knew of any haunted houses or had experienced anything supernatural, I typically received a look that said, “Do you really believe in ghosts?” It reminded me of the time I grew up in Indiana, so I became more careful of whom I asked.
I had a wander lust in my 20s, so I moved around a lot. Around 1983, I lived in Salt Lake City for about seven months. I met a couple of women, Karma and Peggy, who shared a trailer home. As I got to know them better, I asked, “Do you know of any true ghost stories or haunted houses?”
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.