I (Think) I Want To Believe

By Jesse Roth

The concept of ghosts has always been one of those ideas I’ve wanted to buy into, but logic and practicality always seem to get in the way. Even as a child, I was usually able to explain away the strange sights and occurrences I would see or hear, usually with a mix of relief and slight disappointment.

“The Brown Lady”
Photo from
Ghost Stories and Pictures

That creepy, bulbous-headed alien staring at me in bed while he sat perched on my windowsill? Simply my large Big Bird stuffed animal wearing a wide-brimmed hat, its odd build playing perfectly with the shadows and my vivid, alien-filled imagination after seeing Independence Day that evening.

All those nights as an adult when my TV “shut off” in the middle of the night, sans an automatic shutoff setting? The times I had a roommate, I thought they were just equal parts annoyed and stealthy, sneaking in to stop the noise long after I had passed out. The times I lived alone, I thought maybe I’d just rolled over onto the remote in the right spot, though some that I’d tell the story to seemed to think someone else, someone otherworldly, was watching over me at a time in my life where I would barely take care of myself.

As my stories are hardly the material on which beliefs are founded, I always wanted to seek out other possibilities, other “proof” that there might just be something to this whole “ghost” phenomenon others spoke of with such belief. Though I found the “classics” of my childhood such as “Bloody Mary” and the somewhat local “Gray Man” of Pawleys Island, South Carolina a little hard to buy into, there was always one set of stories I would try desperately to believe.

My mother has always believed in ghosts and, over the years, built a small collection of tales to share over beers or while watching shows about unexplained phenomenon. Her stories (with an exception or two) always involved people we knew in very realistic and practically mundane situations. Most took place at our old house in North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, though one or two sightings have traveled to my parents’ current residence. With some of the stories, I would try to provide my mother with a more practical explanation to dispel the ghost theory.

One such event was her account of detecting the very distinct scent of Mennen aftershave in a room of our old house sometime after the death of her father. I told her of playing with the old (but still full) bottles of his aftershave around the house, though she seems to think the timing of these two events does not correlate (and my own memory is too vague to point to any specific dates).

A story involving her deceased grandmother waking her with gentle cries of “Chrissy, dear, wake up!” as she came dangerously close to being late for work seemed more the stuff of dreams, or possibly a “ghost” working in conjunction with my Maryland TV monitor. Other tales appeared to be rooted more in common memory of images and not our own family stories, such as the muscular and loin-clothed Native American descending our staircase, and the dreams of walking through Digby Gap and Bay of Fundy as a child. Though we do have family from nearby New Brunswick (and, according to my mother, the slightest bit of Native ancestry), I would still tell myself that her visions were more the result of reading and watching such scenes on television and less the genetic memory that, she claims, is “passed through our eggs” with each generation.

For all of my suspicions regarding my mother’s stories, however, there is one that I’ve always held up as the exception: that one story that maybe, just maybe proves that some of us can see ghosts. It occurred when I was around two years old and my parents were mourning the loss of a neighbor and good friend of ours. Like my parents, he was older but had recently become a new father. He had also been stricken with a horrible cancer that took him away before he had a chance to watch his baby son grow up. My father attended the memorial service along with other neighbors and mutual friends. As I was still too young to attend such events, my mother stayed home to take care of me.

The Queen’s House ghost
Photo from
Ghost Stories and Pictures

The day of the memorial was a typically beautiful fall afternoon in the South. While the ceremony was taking place elsewhere in town, my mom happened to look out onto our front porch and see a rather familiar yet startling sight. There was our recently departed neighbor, smiling and looking at my mother. Decked out in the flannel shirt and jeans that were de rigueur to his wardrobe, he resembled more the man my mother knew and loved as a friend, rather than the man that had wasted away from a horrible disease in the months prior. Though his image said nothing, my mother believes that his mere presence was a final goodbye to her since she was unable to attend his service. She also saw it as a reminder from him to watch over his young widow and son as they navigated a difficult road in the years ahead.

Whenever I hear this story, the practical parts of my mind start to drift over to the idea that my mom wanted to see her friend, in his best form, one more time, that she produced the image from her own memory in an effort to be at peace with a rather difficult situation. But then there’s the dreamer side, each time trumping my practicality and telling my mind that, “Hey, maybe she did see a ghost.” The truth is, though I may never be able to really “see” a ghost in the way others have claimed to, I am open to the idea that my mother and others are just more receptive to such visits. For every story that I am willing to dismiss through logical explanation, there will always be the stories that will be simply be too good or too touching, to be explained away by reality.

For more spooky ghost stories and photos, check out Ghost Stories and Pictures.