BY Carol Roper

Five years after I left, I returned to a rustic community in Northern San Diego to buy a small cottage for me and my dog to settle in for a long retirement.  

I brought my SUV to a stop at the edge of town in front of a California colonial style one level redwood house where I’d rented a room from a woman I was about to meet for the first time.

“Let the adventure begin,” I thought getting out and opening the rear door for my adopted dog, Jewel, a Rhodesian Ridgeback mix who leapt to the pavement and sniffed the driveway before finding the exact right spot to pee as I walked toward the house.

A plump English woman in her sixties with a delightful English accent greeted me at the door and invited me in. She wore practical clothes and shoes that suited her work as a licensed physical therapist. 

She introduced me to her amiable college age son with whom she shared her house and their two dogs; a terrier and the fattest Dachshund   I’d ever seen, named Sharkey for his eating habits. Her dogs and mine made instant friends.  I interpreted this as a positive sign.

We had English tea, (What else?) in the open living/dining room. The floors in the house were a neutral color tile, a necessity for dogs who don’t always make it outside in time. The walls freshly painted an off-white.

I sat on a curved, well-used beige couch in front of which was a large round glass cocktail table and beyond that on a bookshelf against the wall a large screen television facing Mary in a club chair.   

We sipped tea and ate cream cookies and Mary told me the story of how she’d acquired the house. She’d bought it from the family of a deceased woman she’d known from the town community center that she joined when she moved to the area.  I knew the center. Sundays they offered non-denominational services and I used to go for the music and uplifting message. It was my phone call to the secretary there that had told me about this rental.

Mary mentioned the name of the deceased homeowner. I didn’t recognize it.

She shared that her house purchase four years ago had been easy when banks vied for customers but now that the global real estate market crashed, her monthly payments were higher than the value of her house and banks refused to refinance it, hence her need to rent a room. 

I was sympathetic and at the same time the market crash was the incentive for my return from Colorado. I could now afford a purchase if I could find one.

After tea she showed me the kitchen, small and easy to use across from a dining area with an oval shaped antique oak table and matching chairs. A sliding door led to the rear small patio, where Mary said the dogs, “Did their business,” when neither she nor her son had time to walk them.  A dog bed in the corner of the dining room belonged to Sharkey. The terrier slept in Mary’s in bedroom.

She opened the door to the bedroom I’d rented over the telephone. It was large and recently painted a light blue and had a window on the aforementioned rear patio from which wafted the unmistakable aroma of dog droppings.  There was a decent size closet and, in the room’s, center a bare, queen size mattress and box springs. No beside tables nor lamps. I reminded myself had linens and a folding table and chair with me,

The ensuite bath however was something else. Did you ever walk into a restaurant or bar or café and grocery store and get a feeling like you should turn around and leave?  That is the way I felt when I saw the dingy yellow bathroom with its ancient toilet, a sink in a musty wood cabinet and shower with a decent size crack in its floor.

I looked at Mary with a questioning glance.

“The owner had cancer and was sick for a long time before she died,” Mary said by way of explanation. “I was going to remodel it,” she apologized.

But my attention was elsewhere. I realized I did know the woman who’d owned the house Mary had bought. I said her name.

“Ah, yes, you remembered.” 

How could I forget? She could be seen standing at the entrance to the community center every Sunday holding grocery coupons for sale; a neatly-dressed, slender woman, in her seventies with a defiant expression on what was left of her cancer scarred face. A slab of unshaped flesh hung across the center of her face where her nose had been to be shaped into a replacement nose later.   I found it a challenge to not look away.  It was a disturbing sight to me. My mother died of lung Cancer.

I’m not proud of it, but I often waited till the service began and snuck in a side door to avoid the sight of her. I sat in the back for a quick escape at the end but if I stopped for coffee and chat with neighbors, she seemed to frequently appear next to me and I was forced to greet her, while staring into her watery grey eyes and holding back the feelings of helplessness I’d had at my mother’s illness.

And here I was looking at the most intimate innards of her not yet remodeled bedroom and bath.  

It crossed my mind to get my dog and hurry out of there. I hadn’t unpacked yet. Mary could keep my deposit.  But I argued with myself to be rational.  I’d been driving for two days; it was late afternoon. (Note to self: Sometimes the irrational choice is the better one.) 

In my early life, I’d been indifferent even suspicious of those who claimed to know of a spiritual world. Many of my generation had taken up, orange robes, shaved their heads and chanted in Hindi at airports. My born-again relatives held no attraction.

An aunt once told me I had an invisible friend named, Elizabeth when I was six years old.  I had no memory of it.

But when I was thirty-five, I had a near death experience after which, for a short period, it seemed I could read people’s minds; which I can emphatically report, I didn’t enjoy one bit.

So, I consulted with a friend, a student of the supernatural, not a formal student of course, nor a scientist, she was my Weed dealer and had been with me at the time of my near demise. And a student of the supernatural, I confided my problem to her.

“Oh,” she exclaimed as if we’d just discovered a cache of silver dollars in her apartment wall.  “That’s an aural intuitive gift.”

I considered it no gift.

“More like Schizophrenia,” I replied.

“Hearing voices is a cliché diagnosis. “She was studying to be a psychotherapist. “There are different intuitive gifts, some people can see, some people feel a presence. Didn’t you once say you had an invisible friend when you were a child?

“One of my aunties told me it, but I don’t personally remember.”

“So, you’re always been able to hear the invisible,” she concluded like a TV detective. “Of course, you don’t remember. We’re taught phenomena are just your imagination. Western culture shuns it but it’s very acceptable in eastern cultures. White people have taboos against believing in anything you can’t see and prove. You don’t think we have only five senses, do you?”

I did, I really did.

“You’ve opened an extra sensory channel. We all have them.”

I wanted to know how to close that channel and be rid of what she called my, “gift.”

In order to do that she advised, “You need to develop protection so you won’t be bombarded.”

This she explained could be done by meditation or self- hypnosis. All I needed to do was envision myself surrounded and protected by a giant impenetrable rose or sun. before I went out in public and that would protect me.

It didn’t. But after a month or so my intuitive “gift” disappeared. However, it did reappear two more times.

The following day I drove to the organic store, bought a few bands of white sage and took it to Mary’s.

Lighting the sage, I placed it in a glass on the sink while I scoured the bathroom top to bottom. Then I walked the sage through the bedroom and, as neither Mary nor her son were home,the rest of the house, except their bedrooms.. I would regret those exceptions later.   

Afternoons in the house I was often alone, except for a feeling that I wasn’t.

One day as I was sitting on my folding chair and matching table in the bedroom, I felt something brush my knee. My dog did this, at times, to get my attention but I was reviewing property listings and said without looking up,

“We’ll go for a walk in a few minutes, Jewel.”

A few second later I felt the knee nudge again and looked down. My dog wasn’t near me. I turned my head to see her napping peacefully at the edge of the bed. 

The bedroom door was open, “Maybe a breeze came through?”

But I had a prickly feeling it wasn’t the wind. 

When I lived in Denver near my younger brother, one morning my house smelled of cigarette smoke.

“What he hell?” I thought. It was winter all the windows were closed. I checked outside. No was near. The odor disappeared but returned off and on for two days.  The smell reminded me of growing up in an apartment with my mother’s cigarette smoke. I constantly opened windows for fresh air. The moment after that thought, I had a sensation of my mother’s presence. Instantly I connected it to the fact that my brother, her favorite child, had recently been diagnosed with prostate cancer. It was small “not yet serious and might never be serious” the oncologist explained. My brother had a choice: “watch and wait” or have surgery. He scheduled surgery. I spoke out loud:

“He doesn’t live here,” I explained in my empty room. “His house is on Washington Street. “He’s okay. They caught it early.”

The smell of cigarette smoke disappeared. My brother was fine after surgery and still is.

The next visitation was after I’d moved to Mexico. I was finishing an exercise class wiwth a dozen other women when I smelled cigarette smoke .

“Anyone smell cigarette smoke?” No one did. I rolled up my mat and was putting it away along side other members of the class when, I heard my mother’s voice at my ear say, “I’m sorry.”

I instantly burst into tears and, before anyone could ask,”What happened?” rushed to the parking lot, jumped in my SUV and sped off. My mother and I had always had a difficult relationship. That aural message was liberating for me. And the last time I had an aural experience. 

So, I wasn’t unfamiliar with, nor alarmed, by the phantom tapping that I presumed was the previous owner. My only question was if it was just lonely, hostile or friendly?  

A short time later I was packing an overnight bag for a weekend in northern California with old friends and felt tapping on my back, I turned thinking it was Mary. Of course, no one was there.

“I’ll be moving soon, I said to what I hoped was an empty room.

Later I shared my experience with Mary while in the kitchen cooking buttered meat in a frying pan. To give credit where due, she didn’t poo-poo or dismiss me as hallucinatory. She was pleased I was settling in. 

A week passed without any intrusive events. I began to relax, take nice long walks with the dog and consider what to do with the rest of my life.

My real estate search was proving more challenging than anticipated. Not many houses were available and even though I had mortgage approval in hand, available properties were being quickly gobbled up by investors with cash. 

I wondered if I really wanted to stay in the USA, or was a foreign country a better choice?

A few weeks later, I was alone in the house and just finishing a dinner of fresh corn on the cob and salad while three dogs watched for any morsel that might fall to them. I stood,

““Nothing left,” I told them, lifting my plate with the cob on it. I took a step toward the kitchen. The cob slid to the floor and was immediately snatched by Sharkey, who ran toward the couch.

“Oh, geez!” It wasn’t my dog and I the cob might upset his stomach. Quickly, I put the plate down and hurried to retrieve the cob.  I bent to grab it out of his mouth and slipped. Aware of the close by glass table top, I twisted away and went ass over backwards, falling flat and hard onto the tiled floor. I dared not move. I thought, for sure, I’d broken something in my body and I didn’t want to find out what. Not yet.

I lay there staring up at the wood ceiling in the silent empty house. 

And from the bedroom there came the sound of a woman’s laughter.  

This was my answer to the question of whether the ghost was friendly or hostile was neither.  This ghost didn’t want me living in her house.

Very slowly I tested my body. First, carefully moving my legs, then rolling to one side, I used the couch to gradually push myself upright. My body felt like I’d been rear-ended in a car accident, an experience. Bruised but unbroken, I was grateful.  

I phoned Mary who rushed home, helped me into her car and drove me to her office for physical therapy.

As I lay on the padded massage table and she passed the ultrasound wand over my aching body; I related my experience in her house: my fall, the sound of a woman’s eerie laughter coming from the rear bedroom when I was the only living person there. .

Mary nodded without comment and it occurred to me that Mary was aware of the presence in her house. She was originally from England, a country famous, among other things, for its unexplainable phenomena, a ghost wasn’t the problem for her: I was.

When she finished treating my body she fitted me with a back support – I would have to wear it for months – and refused payment.

I slept little that night. The next morning, I packed up my belongings and told Mary I was moving to a hotel.

We agreed it was for the best. 

Ⓒ Carol Roper Dated: May 2025

Ⓒ Carol Roper Copyright 2025

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