Yesterday I returned from the city just in time to feed the horses.  As soon as I parked the car, I opened the door to the house and the dogs came tumbling out and we all started jogging up to the barn.

The horses get very excited at feeding time.  If they are in the lower field and see the dogs and me approach they come galloping up the hill and meet us at the fence:

Yesterday, however, as I approached their fence, they did their usual canter up the hill, but when they reached the top, still about 20 feet away from the barn, they all came to a slamming halt.  Then, their necks raised like giraffes, their ears pricked forward and their eyes wide with alarm, they started blowing and snorting with fright.  They were staring at a spot just above my head – at the field behind me it seemed, and suddenly they all wheeled around at once and galloped back down the hill.  I didn’t even look behind me.  I just ran into the barn, the dogs tearing in after me.  After the discussion here yesterday I was sure there was a pack of coyotes in that field, or worse – a bear.

I peered out from the barn door and looked at the field opposite and saw nothing.  The dogs were sniffing around the floor of the barn for mice.  I called Daphne outside, made her look at the field, but she was uninterested, so I knew there wasn’t a giant predator.  I filled the horses’ buckets with grain and went downstairs, to the lower level of the barn where the horses’ stalls are, and filled their buckets.  Usually this will create a stampede into the barn, but when I opened the barn door, the horses, who had tentatively wandered back up the hill, again, gaped above me in horror, and then galloped down the hill.  At this point I was thinking ghost.  There was clearly something unGodly hovering above my head that had spooked the horses.  I looked up, but all I could see was the fuzzy fringe of the fur hat that I had worn up to the barn (it’s fake fur, relax).  The hat that I sometimes wear in the city and to hockey games but never in the country.  The hat that, I now realized completely altered my silhouette for the horses and what they saw, standing in the door of the barn, was a two legged beast with a bulbous fur head.  Some kind of horse-eating manimal.

This is the hat. The photo was taken at the winter classic hockey game in Boston and I’m eating pizza, not horse, but how could my dear beasts know this?  I was unrecognizable to them in the hat.  Either that, or they were just refusing to be seen near me when I wear it, like the rest of my family.

Anyway, I took the hat off and called them. They stared at me from afar, trembling in fright.  I tried to approach, but again they wheeled away and trotted off.  I left the barn doors open, thinking they’d come in on their own once I left.  Hours later, I returned to the barn, hatless, and only then, with some very gentle coaxing, was I able to get them to come into the warm barn, out of the cold, for their supper.

The horses have confirmed what my family has been telling me since I bought that hat.  It’s scary.

But it’s so warm.

I’ve blogged before about what a spooky time of year this is, here in New England. The days are getting shorter, but our windows are still open so we can hear all sorts of madness outside, which makes some of us a little mad inside. During the last full moon, I had a terrible time sleeping. The next morning, I was talking to a friend who lives in a neighboring town, and he said that he had been sitting out on his porch until three in the morning, unable to sleep as well.

“It was the coyotes screeching that kept me up,” I said.

“Oh no, that was me,” he quickly replied. “I’m surprised my cries of anguish carried that far.”

Last night I got a little spooked again. I was standing at the back door, calling in the dogs, before I went to bed. I leave the screen door closed when I call the dogs, because I believe that the past few times we’ve had bat invasions, they flew in over my head while I was yodeling out the door for my dogs. So, last night, I was calling away, when I noticed a small piece of paper that somebody had slipped in between the screen and the frame of our screen door. It was on the outside, so I opened the door and removed the paper. On it was a name, which appeared to be Cory or Rory, and a phone number with a local prefix.

I studied the paper carefully, then looked out into the darkness, my heart racing. We live in the middle of nowhere. If a civilized person drove up the driveway, they would have left their number at the front door. You would have to come creeping out of the woods to leave your number at our back door. You would have to be a madman who came creeping out of the woods.

Who was this Rory (or Cory)?

I studied the number. There was something familiar about it. The last digits were (let’s say) 1212. I kept repeating them over and over. 1212, 1212. There was just something about the number. I remembered that you can do a reverse phone number search so, after the dogs came inside, I went to my laptop and shakily typed in the entire number. That’s when I realized who it was. It was me. That’s our number. I looked at the slip of paper, now, with my glasses on, and saw that it said, Leary, not Cory or Rory and that it was followed by our number. Then I realized that we had the screen replaced, recently, as a certain mentally challenged member of our pack leapt through it not long ago, leaving a hole that was like one of those cartoon silhouettes of her body.

Mystery solved. The screen door people had stuck our name and number on our new screen. It only took me 45 minutes (of hyperventilating inner hysteria) to solve the whole thing. Really, I should offer up my services to the Feds. There is no mystery I can’t solve, given ample time and a working computer, as long as the culprit is me.

I love to be scared, but if you don’t, I advise you not to click on this video. I found this ages ago on youtube. I was looking for “ghost” videos.”

One thing I learned when I moved up here from New York, is that EVERYBODY believes in ghost, and many have seen them in their own homes. In New York, you can ask just about anybody if they believe in ghosts and they’ll likely laugh at you. Here in CT, you can ask anybody, no matter how learned or intelligent; you can ask a nuclearphysicist if he believes in ghosts and he’ll tell you about the one that strides through his hallway every night at exactly eleven.

I’ve mentioned before that we have a ghost in our house that everybody can see or “sense” but me, which really irks me because I like to think of myself as very sensitive and not quite of this world, myself. Denis sees our ghost regularly and describes her clothing and everything, even the way she moves. I am snubbed by this entity. She won’t reveal herself to me, and that hurts a little.

So one night I wondered if I could get Denis to videotape our ghost and then I went on youtube to see if anybody has ever successfully taped a ghost. I saw some hilarious hoaxes, and then came across this, which scared me.

I think this video has been around the block a few times so I apologize if you’ve already seen it.

As many of you know, our beloved Pongo died last month. Yesterday my friend Leah picked up his ashes from the vet where we had him put to sleep. The ashes came in a small tin canister. The canister was in a bag from the pet cemetery that cremated Pongo and our other pets who have grown old and died. They always include a plaster imprint of the dog’s paw, with the dog’s name stamped in it, along with a small heart.

This pet cemetery was brought up on fraud charges years ago because they were cremating all the pets together and just filling the little canisters with anyone’s ashes. This upset many people, but I don’t really see the crime in it. We have our pets cremated because we are usually so sad and bereft, we don’t really know what else to do. Plus, we have dogs at home and I’m always afraid that no matter how deep we bury their packmate, they might dig him back up. But I never really know what to do with the ashes, so they get put up on a shelf, or in a drawer and years later, I open what looks like a cookie tin, and find the fine ash of an old friend (or at least somebody’s old friend.

But this time, included in the bag with the ashes and the paw print, there was a “Certificate of Cremation” This was a very official looking certificate, printed out on some kind of antique-looking parchment paper. On the certificate was an ominous poem that began with these lines:

“Farewell, Master, yet not farewell
Where I go, ye too shall dwell.”

I read this aloud to Denis and we wondered if it was possible that Pongo was issuing some sort of threat from beyond. The next lines were even more puzzling:

“I am gone, before your face,
A moment’s time, a little space.”

Could it be possible that Pongo’s intelligence would be so diminished by death that he would come up with that lame face/space rhyme? This was a dog who would hide food all over the house so that he could snack whenever he pleased. He was a SMART dog.

He was a terrier!

It concluded with:

“when ye come where I have stepped
ye will wonder why ye wept.”

The poem left us a little spooked and we hastily stashed the ashes in a cupboard and tried not to think of that creepy pet cemetary.

I spent the weekend in Marblehead signing books and catching up with old friends. I also met a “medium” who talks to dead people, which gave me some fodder for the book I’m working on.

There were numerous shipwrecks and pirates and witches in Marblehead’s early history, so of course there are lots of ghost stories, as pirates and witches aren’t much for keeping a low-profile in the afterlife, but instead enjoy shrieking at boats at night and, and casting lights on old cemeteries and chasing people up and down stairs.

This medium, whose name is Maria, sees ghosts everywhere, all the time, and is very casual about the whole thing. I told her that we have a ghost in our house in Connecticut, and that everybody sees and feels her fabulous other-worldly presence, except for me. Denis sees this ghost all the time. I’m really annoyed by this because I like to think of myself as a very sensitive person, but I have never noticed this ghost. Even our dog Lulu can see her, it seems. She (Lulu) stares at the exact corner of our living room, where Denis tells me he always sees this gray lady pass by, and she growls and raises her hackles in a very suspicious manner (Lulu, not the ghost). When Lulu does this, I always run over to the corner, hoping to feel a chill or a draft or the hair rise on the back of my neck, or something, but apparently I’m too obtuse. It makes me feel, I don’t know, rejected … snubbed by the supernatural.

Anyway, as I was reviewing Marblehead history, I came across the story of the “Old Spite House” which was built on Orne Street in the 1700s.

According to Wikipedia, “In 1716, Thomas Wood, a sail maker, built a home in Marblehead, Massachusetts that subsequently received the sobriquet of The Old Spite House. One theory has it that it was inhabited by two brothers who occupied different sections, wouldn’t speak to each other, and refused in spite to sell to the other.[6] In another explanation for the presently occupied, ten-foot (3 m) wide home that is just tall enough to block the view of two other houses on Orne Street, the builder was upset about his tiny share of his father’s estate and his revenge was a house to spite his older brothers’ views. The Old Spite House still is standing and occupied.”

There are a number of “spite houses,” in this country, I learned this afternoon. My personal favorite is the Richardson Spite House that was built on Lexington Avenue between 82nd and 83rd Streets in 1882. Click on the link, go ahead, it’s a great story.