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Category Archives: Tales of the Unexpected

September 1, 2017
Tales of the Unexpected

Annabelle: A Ghost Story

By Sadie Stein

The other day, I went to see a movie. It was two P.M.; I was alone. The theater nearest our apartment is extremely comfortable, with large, fluffy, fully reclining seats and swinging armrests for easy canoodling. Yet the movies on the screen are never romantic. Most are big-budget fare full of CGI and superheroes and emoji. There’s rarely something I’d pay almost twenty dollars to see.

On this day, however, they were showing the latest film about the demonic doll. In fact, this latest is the prequel to the other Annabelle films; it tells the backstory of the doll’s possession. To my disappointment, it did nothing to address the question of why Annabelle resembles an especially grotesque Charlie McCarthy marionette in a Carol Burnett wig.

Doll horror movies are rarely scary, which is strange given how uncanny many people find dolls themselves. Still, they have become a tired trope. As with clowns, the idea of the doll is at this point scarier than any on-screen reality. (Besides, if you do finds dolls inherently frightening, there’s not much narrative tension to be gained from their turning evil.) But I always go to see any movie in which a doll plays the part of a murderous villain. And although I am a great defender of doll life and have never found my own dolls the least bit sinister, I will admit that one of the scariest ghost stories I’ve ever heard revolved around a doll. Read More
August 25, 2017
Tales of the Unexpected

Harry: A Ghost Story

By Sadie Stein

“Your father,” says my husband. “Your father might be the least-likely-to-see-a-ghost person I’ve ever met.” This is true. By his own admission, Papa doesn’t do whimsy.

He likes lots of people, but he is most comfortable around people like himself—which is to say, irreligious Jews, ideally from the New York metro area, from progressive backgrounds, who have become more politically conservative with age. If they love baseball, American history, and the films of François Truffaut, so much the better. When I was a little girl and asked him if he believed in God, he taught me the term agnostic, but now that I think about it, I’d say a better description of his relationship to the divine is never given it much thought. Read More
August 18, 2017
Tales of the Unexpected

Priscilla: A Ghost Story

By Sadie Stein

The most distressing of my mother’s ghost sightings took place while she was in college. Eager to get the facts right, on a recent visit I asked her—we were finishing dinner—about the exact circumstances. Had it been her freshman year? I asked.

No; her freshman year, she’d worked as a live-in au pair for an acquaintance of her father’s, a professor. My grandfather had always made it clear that if my mother chose to attend a four-year university rather than the local community college, she’d be on her own financially. He considered it an act of largesse to have helped secure her a position that furnished not only room but board. In lieu of bus fare, my mother was given a switchblade, to wield if necessary when hitchhiking down the Pacific Coast Highway.

The house where my mother went to work was not a happy one. The patriarch was a strict disciplinarian who insisted she grade the children according to a punitive demerit system. His wife (a former student) was nice but afraid of him. The children did not treat my mother with much respect; she was only seventeen. Once the parents came home to find her tied to a chair.

In her sophomore year, she went to live with another family, almost as unhappy. The husband was a philanderer and the mother—also a former student—was unstable. Their child had developmental problems. My mother does credit that period with teaching her how to make bread properly; providing the family with twice-weekly loaves was one of her tasks. She says this is when she started to develop bad migraines, and also when her hair started to go gray. Read More
August 4, 2017
Tales of the Unexpected

Sadie: A Ghost Story

By Sadie Stein

It’s not as though I’ve never had the opportunity to see a ghost. I’ve spent plenty of my life in “haunted” spaces. Besides my grandparents’ house—where, after all, a ghost had been seen—there was the 1830s former funeral parlor where one of my best childhood friends lived. Another friend, who’s very sensitive to such matters, claims that she always had an uneasy feeling in my parents’ home; I never felt a thing.

In the years since, I’ve stayed in haunted monasteries and onetime graveyards and, once, the site of a long-ago murder. In each, I slept without incident. I am writing this, in fact, from a big, old, drafty New England house full of creaks and corners. My husband is plagued in the nighttime by its inexplicable slamming doors and, once, through the window, saw the woods erupt into flame. I, of course, slept through it. I could be surrounded by a Haunted Mansion’s worth of swirling, leaping, leering spirits and presumably I wouldn’t even notice them. Read More
July 28, 2017
Tales of the Unexpected

Emily

By Sadie Stein

Auguste Renoir, In the Meadow, 1888–92, oil on canvas.

Although I have never seen a ghost, I have claimed to have seen one. This was when I was a child, and mistakenly believed this sort of lie gave me a certain obscure cachet. I wasn’t a habitual liar—I was never very good at it. In fact, as an adult I believe I can remember every lie I ever told. At the time, I was very troubled by my own wickedness. At six, I remember telling my reading group that I was going to be a flower girl in a wedding—I think there was a little boy I wanted to impress with my importance—and then, when I did end up at a rather crummy and impromptu wedding party later that summer, I grabbed a bunch of flowers off someone’s lawn, and threw them, just to make my lie true.

There was a girl on my block who was an inept and inveterate whopper-teller. Her name was Emily. She wore a lot of pink sweat suits and had a long, reddish braid. I knew she was “disturbed,” as we said in those days—something to do with her parents’ “bad divorce”—and I had been told to be nice to her, but the foolish and incessant nature of her mendacity irritated me. She’d do things like claim to have seen The Blue Lagoon and to have been in near-fatal helicopter accidents, or that her house—which I’d been to—had an improbable number of rooms. Obviously she was one of the first people I knew to say she had a mythical boyfriend. “He gave me a diamond necklace,” she told me once. “I’ll show it to you. My mom’s going to say it was from my grandma, but that’s just because she doesn’t want me dating someone older.” I did not like being taken for a fool; I despised her. We were probably eight. Read More
July 21, 2017
Tales of the Unexpected

Ellen Cooke

By Sadie Stein

Photo by Steinar Engeland.

My mother has seen more ghosts than anyone I know. I am not sure why, although I once read that there is some correlation between allergies and sensitivity to such things. Certainly my mother has worse allergies than anyone I’ve ever met, and a constitutional disinclination to seek treatment. Also, the barriers between her emotional states have always seemed unusually porous—she can switch from anger to sadness to laughter to unfettered generosity with dizzying speed and total commitment—and maybe that applies to the barriers between the living and spirit realms, too.

The first ghost my mother ever saw was her dead best friend. Although I’ve known about the sighting all my life, I don’t know very much about Ellen Cooke herself, except that she had long, straight, 1960s hair, and that she and my mom used to ride around downtown shrieking the Good, the Bad and the Ugly theme song at the top of their lungs. The car was driven by my mom’s high school boyfriend, Tom Alvarez, who would go on to become attorney general of a Great Plains state. My mother always says it was a “very innocent” relationship. Read More