When we moved from blogger to wordpress three years ago, we lost some readers. So I was delighted when I ran across a link to Jama Genie’s blog while I was going through some of my old notes. I went to her blog and left a comment about how great it was to find her again. Today, she dropped by for a visit and left this fascinating story about a trickster ghost.
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I’ve never understood the meaning of “trickster” either until I read this post. Thanks! That said, my perception of the Trickster has always been similar to the one you describe in connection with your father’s death. A few weeks ago, though, I had an encounter with the version of Trickster that isn’t so comforting… I had to go to an out-of-state funeral on a Saturday which required renting a car with unlimited mileage. What the heck, I said. I have to keep the car all weekend, might as well take advantage of those unlimited miles and make a road trip out of it.
My first stop was a 2-day visit with an 87-yr-old legally-blind friend I only knew online and through phone calls. I was to drive her to church Sunday morning, and she wanted to be there early, so I set my trusty travel alarm for the crack of dawn. As soon as I got out of bed, I turned it off and clearly remember placing it in a side pocket of my soft-side vanity case, which I then zippered shut. I don’t wear a watch and the legally-blind have no reason to keep regular clocks on the bedside table, so I opened the vanity case to look at the travel alarm, but it wasn’t there! Or anywhere else in the room! My friend’s response: “Mizz Fisher”, whom I would later learn was the previous tenant who’d lived in the apartment for 17 years before she died, but apparently had never left.
Weird things had happened while her son had been packing up her things. My friend felt cold spots in the kitchen. She’d find a cabinet door, that she couldn’t possibly reach without standing on a chair, wide open of a morning. Being blind, she naturally put certain things in certain places, but a special rosary went missing for several days until a sighted friend found it in a dish at the other end of the occasional table where my friend kept it. All Mizz Fisher’s doing, they decided. I suspect she was attracted to my travel alarm because it had a colorful dragon sticker on a silver background on the cover.
After church and brunch, I turned the room upside down again and emptied my luggage on the bed, and the clock was still missing. Then my friend and I left to visit a couple of area cemeteries and were gone several hours. On our return, I sat on the side of the bed farthest from my friend’s treadmill machine. Something shiny on the treadmill caught my eye. Yep, it was the travel clock, but sitting topside up, perfectly aligned with the edge of the rubber tread! Definitely placed there, not even close to where it would’ve landed had it slipped out of the vanity case or I’d dropped it without noticing.
I’m usually quite comfortable in residences with a “leftover” occupant, but the idea that an invisible entity was present that could remove an object from the inside pocket of a closed piece of luggage totally freaked me out, and that night I barely slept! At one point I heard a kitchen faucet handle turn and water hit the stainless steel sink. An hour or so later, it was the squeak of a cabinet door opening. Both times my friend was snoring away in a room across the hall. Trickster? Oh, yes! A playful trickster? Not MY definition of “playful”!
The Trickster and a ghost that plays tricks on you is two entirely different things in my book,the Trickster does things to make you think about life a little deeper,whereas a ghost that plays tricks on you is just being a jerk trying to creep you out.
Then again maybe the Trickster was saying it’s time you got some exercise routines into your life,or maybe that your life is on a treadmill and going nowhere and it’s time to wake up ?-)
Maybe ghosts can be tricksters.
This ghost, though, did seem to just want to creep her out.
I agree with Darren. This seems to be more of some sort of entity as opposed to a ‘Trickster’ happening. Nevertheless it would spook me!
Great story……and I can see how disconcerting it must have been.
Years ago I lived in a famously haunted house in Putney, Vermont, except that I didn’t know it was haunted when I moved in. I never felt the energy was bad there (John Irving wrote “Garp” there, and it had had numerous creative people live there) ……. but strange things happened. My roomate and I often heard the front door (in the summer) open, and someone walked up the stairs and walked around the kitchen. An antique pendulum clock I owned would suddenly start ticking but much faster than normal, and go for a few hours. Once I found a necklace with a very thin chain, one I had intended to take the knots out of, placed in a perfect spiral in a small box on my dresser (and all the knots were gone).
I’ve always wondered what the history of that house was…………what’s most strange to consider is why someone would hang around? My sense of the phenomena was just that whoever it was occasionally wanted our attention. Maybe it’s boring being a ghost……………
Wow, Irving and Garp? In a place like that, you have to wonder if the ghosts are those of the characters that were created there!
I wonder…boredom as a ghost.