My Own True Ghost Story

Okay, here’s the one true story I have about ghosts:

I was twenty-five years old when my dad Michael died of cancer, and because my parents are divorced and my dad never re-married, my sister and I inherited his house. My dad was an idiosyncratic man––there was duct tape all through his house covering speaker and electrical wiring that he’d jerry-rigged so he could listen to music and turn the TVs on and off all just how he liked it. He would have long dinner parties and play the music really loud as he washed the dishes in his kitchen, which was covered with joke postcards and Far Side comics he taped up over hideous purple and green jungle wallpaper that by the time he died was almost 30 years old. He treated that wallpaper like a joke––he treated almost everything in life as a joke, but if that makes him sound like he was relaxed, I’ve given you the wrong impression.

My dad was seriously concerned with things being done in very orderly, particular ways that only he understood––he cared deeply about the kinds of pen he liked to write with, the order he turned on his computer equipment, the very exact method he had for taking out the trash. He couldn’t stand to see things messed up and, generally, the people messing it up were my sister and me. He loved us more than anything, though, so he never got angry, just exasperated and, mostly, since we didn’t live with him, he did everything for himself.

The day after he died, every fuse in the kitchen blew when we tried so much as to turn on the coffee maker. We never got the VCR working again. The duct tape came down when we tore the wallpaper off the kitchen walls so we could paint and rent the house, and though the stereo components remained stacked in the living room, we never again were able to get the music to play in all the rooms of the house.

For years, we rented the house during the winters, and visited in the summers. It was a one-story, rambling ranch and I always felt like I could smell my father in it when I first got there, or hear his step just around the corner. Always, I had a sense that as one thing after another in the house broke down, my father would have been tsk-tsking at our irresponsible management of his property.

In May, about five years after he died, I came home from a weekend away to get several messages from my sister. These messages told the story of a near-disaster up at Dad’s house.

Here was message one: Our tenant Maggie was calling to say the toilet in the bathroom at my dad’s house was leaking. It wasn’t a big leak, so she’d put a bucket under the leak and called Roto-Rooter to have them come at the end of the weekend.

About a half hour later, my sister got a second call. Maggie had discovered a large leak in the basement. It was going to cost over $200 to have Roto-Rooter fix the leak. They were working on it as she spoke––was it okay to pay?

And then a third call, and this was the doozy. When Maggie had called Roto-Rooter to ask about the original small leak in the toilet, they’d told her they had already got a call. Now, Maggie lives alone, and no one else was in the house. “A call about 200 the Knolls?” she asked. (200 the Knolls was my Dad’s address.)

“Yes,” said the dispatcher. “We’re on our way.”

“For the toilet leak?” Maggie asked.

“No,” said the dispatcher. “The leak in the basement.”

“What leak in the basement?” Maggie asked.

“The one you called about.” The dispatcher was starting to sound a little annoyed.

Maggie put the phone down, opened the basement door, took two steps down the stairs, and saw gallons of water gushing forth from a burst pipe. “Oh,” she said. “That leak.” It took her a moment to get beyond the shock that accompanies a discovery of water inside your house––there were already two inches collected on the floor. Finally Maggie asked, “But how did you know?”

And the dispatcher answered, “You called it in. From this number.”

“This number?”

“Yes,” she said. “It was a man on the phone.” She checked her records. “A man named Michael Bell.”

OK. Whoah. Michael Bell. Well, that’s my dead dad.

Later, the Roto-Rooter repairman assured Maggie that it is actually quite common for dead homeowners to call in burst pipes, especially in houses where a husband has managed all the repairs and has left his wife alone, and clueless.

But my sister and I were in shock at the news that our dad had reached out from beyond the grave. We used every skeptical angle we could to find the hitch in the story, but we could not.

Finally, my husband asked, “Of all the ways that he could contact you, why would he choose to do it this way, via Roto-Rooter? Wouldn’t he want to send you guys a message of love?”

My sister and I looked at each other and we just knew. “I have a hard time believing in ghosts,” I said. “I have a hard time believing that dead men are constantly contacting Roto-Rooter to help out the widows they left behind. But if the question is, ‘Do I believe that if my dad wanted to reach out from the beyond, he’d be agitated enough about a burst pipe in the basement that no one knew was there?’ the answer is, ‘Absolutely. That isn’t something I believe. That is something I know.’”