When I first came to live in the Boston area, I took a room in a rooming house in Brookline. I was on the top floor, along with Joe, an octogenarian who liked to tell stories of his youth, when he traipsed across Canada with Arthur Fiedler. Joe annoyed the landlady by getting it into his head that he wanted to play his cornet late at night, waking everybody up. Another fellow roomer was Jerry, a mellow young guy (about as old as I) who came from the western part of the state. I think he was there to make enough money to go back to his home town and get married. Jerry was the one who saw the ghost. The remaining room was occupied by a guy with a substance abuse problem.

One night I happened to be in Jerry's room watching "Night Gallery," a horror anthology that Rod Serling hosted in the early 1970s. Maybe the episode we had just watched was about ghosts, because Jerry said, out of the blue, "You know, I've been visited by a ghost the last few nights."

Jerry wasn't prone to lying. He just wasn't. I wasn't prone to saying that ghosts couldn't exist, because several of my family members had demonstrated an ability to receive communications from the beyond. There was the grandmother who heard her father calling for help one night. When she got to his house (which was next door), he had just died, and his widow said he had not made a sound. My mother always sensed when something was terribly wrong. I even had a strange episode when, out of the blue, I wondered what it was like to be dead. I couldn't have known that a cousin was planning his suicide at that moment. My mother, 30 miles away, was convinced that something terrible was about to happen to the boy's mother. I had also had friends in school who lived in a haunted house. They even knew the name of the ghost: Mrs. Pope. Old houses can have all sorts of strange happening inside.

So, I knew that things happen which can't be explained. I'd have been the last person to pooh-pooh Jerry's statement. "What was the ghost like?" I asked him.

"Pleasant and reassuring," he said. "This floor [the top floor] was for the servants in the days when houses like this relied on servants." There was even a separate servants' staircase that led to this floor. "She was probably trying to make sure everything was all right with me."

Jerry didn't mention the ghosts again, and I put it out of my mind until one day when I looked in the communal refrigerator and saw that some of my food was missing. Did ghosts remove people's food from refrigerators? I was on a strict budget, and I worried about replacing the missing food. The guy with the substance abuse issues saw me panicking and confessed that he had eaten it. Apparently some of the stuff he took gave him a fierce appetite. He promised not to do it again, but his memory was not very good. This happened several more times, and I was ready to move.

It was one thing for ghosts and mysterious disappearances to crop up in TV shows by Rod Serling, but I was just a grad student working on a shoestring budget. None of the residents had much wiggle room. The landlady had to evict at least one roomer per year, usually because of alcoholism.

Fortunately, a short time later an apartment on the first floor opened up, and I moved down there. A short time later I heard that the guy who had taken my food had died of an overdose. This was also upsetting, because he was fairly young, like my cousin. I suppose his ghost may still be haunting the top floor. Is the servant ghost still wandering the top floor? Is Joe's ghost still playing his cornet? Chances are, many of the ghosts were alcoholics in life, and any one of which could still be lurking somewhere in the crevices, doing strange mischief. The house had generations of roomers before and after my stay there, so there could be hordes of them.

I left there almost 45 years ago. The place is not a rooming house any more. God knows what the new residents are putting up with. If any of the ghosts put in an appearance, I hope it's Joe. The place has great acoustics for brass music, and heaven knows the world could use a break from the worries that beset us all!

Paulh

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