I was eight the first time I saw a ghost. At least that’s the first one I knew I saw. Seventeen percent of the population claims to have seen a ghost. The rest have had hundreds of encounters and seen thousands of ghosts. They just don’t know it. I didn’t either, not to the full extent, anyway.

Not until I died.

People think old and empty buildings are the most haunted places. Abandoned prisons or asylums. Ancient churches and bone yards. No. Ghosts want to be near the living. Hell, half of them don’t even know they’re dead. You know where it’s busiest? Hospital nurseries.

New, fresh, young, energetic life is the flame that draws these old tattered moths in the most. Well before their eyes are strong enough to see their own parents, babies can see them. Clearly. Their minds are most open and they are easiest to take over.

Reincarnation isn’t what you think it is. Otherwise, where did all the souls come from before there were more dead people than alive? No. What you think of as reincarnation is a possession. A hostile takeover, if you will.

Don’t worry. As sharp as their preternatural perceptions are, baby minds are still mush. They don’t feel a thing.

That’s where the trouble comes into paradise for those spirits most willing to take this leap. If you put your handprint in cement, before it has started to cure and stand up, the impression won’t hold. The loose, wet grit will weep back up to level and you’re left with the faintest outline. A ghost of a ghost.

There’s enough of their basic framework left. This can leave behind some of the stronger traits, some flashes of memory. Deja vu? Some sense of… knowing things before you should know them? If you’ve felt that, you know what I mean and now you know what it is.

The strongest of spirits can survive almost intact. That can be maddening. Trapped in that soft and fragile vessel. No control over your limbs; not able to articulate the adult thoughts in your now infant brain. It’s like sleep paralysis. You struggle to move your body, you try to scream yourself awake.

Toddlers are a better host. Or when your six year old daughter comes up and tells you she likes you better than her last parents? That is no longer your six year old. I mean, she’s in there, but she’s just along for the ride now. The phrase “old soul” is apt.

I’m what you call a drifter. I’m not interested in going for another corporeal roller coaster ride. I observe and report. I was one of the lucky ones, because I had pierced the veil early on in my natural life. I don’t know how many previous lives are rolled up into what I conceive of as me, but I do know I don’t want back in.

And I know there’s one spirit who didn’t make it inside me.

###

“Who are you?” I could make out the darker shadow within the shadows of my room. In the corner, the shape of a man, fading in and out of the blackness. “I know you can hear me.”

“You can see me?” I felt that more than I heard it.

“Kind of, it’s dark in here.” And with that, he turned his inner light on, no longer the shape of a man, more a cloud of tiny lightning bugs. They swarmed after me, I could feel the static energy all around my body. A thousand electric ants crawled my skin. I thought of the mini Tesla Coil at the museum that makes your hair stand straight up for the souvenir photo. The ants tunneled in, a large cluster of them tried to squeeze into my eyes, I shut them tight and screamed. 

My whole body said “No!” and the bugs were gone. He was gone. But not for long. His name is Walter. He tried for a few years to groom me before giving up and becoming my de facto mentor. 

Then my best friend and then my murderer and then my victim.

###

In his last life, Walter had risen to some prominence. Having rolled in a dozen or so souls along the way, he could now traverse the veil at will. He could move and interact with objects in the corporeal. He could communicate easily with those who had the right kinds of eyes, which were mostly kids.

By the time we are teenagers, we have learned to close all that off. The best, but hardest target is the pre-teen. A mind that is open enough to mold, yet formed enough to hold the whole of Walter without dilution. We are told—as I was told one night that I woke up screaming because Walter had tried to penetrate me again—that it was a dream. Ghosts don’t exist, our own minds are built to deceive; our own eyes play tricks.

The majority of people live that way, and when they have an encounter, or they see through the veil, they deny it. 

Just the lighting, just a reflection, just the wind, just a shadow.

###

My best friend, Eric, slept over often. His parents sucked, so his home life sucked. The first time he saw Walter, I told him it was just a shadow. I told him to lay back and close his eyes and open his mind. I held a pillow over his face so he couldn’t scream as Walter entered him and took him over from the inside out.

Eric’s parents never noticed. For a while, Eric remained mostly Eric.

For about a year, my two best friends were together with me in the corporeal, as Walter ate away the rest of Eric. Once inside, Walter was too strong to resist; Eric never wanted to be here in the first place, so he didn’t fight it. He was a fresh soul and arrived confused and angry and depressed by default.

New souls often do.

Being thrust naked and afraid into a world this shitty is not something someone would ask for. But having gone through it, they often miss it and are willing to go back. They will try and try to navigate it, life after life. Addicted to living. 

Eric was not one of those.

###

I wasn’t old enough to vote or even drive when Walter killed me. Shoved me off the trestle and told everyone I fell. I made the decision not to come back on the twelve story drop down to the rocks of the dry river bed. As I left that body, Walter tried to grab me and pull me in, but I was stronger in that way than Eric was.

Walter is still among you, but when he looks at you, he sees me. I appear before him, like a cataract, and he can never see what he wants to see. I am drawn to him when he experiences the most joy, and I force myself into his vision. The detached retina of his past. The gnat that buzzes inside his ear. While in this form, he cannot traverse the veil, he cannot move objects with his mind, he cannot move to another body. He can only see what most of you cannot.

He’s tried to end it. 

I knock the pills into the sink. I move the barrel of the gun. I snap the beam he has hung the noose from. Of course, I let him kick and flail. His eyes bulge, the veins in his face throb, the smaller vessels burst. He once tried to jump off the very trestle he threw me from and I let him fall, screaming and shitting himself for eleven of the twelve stories and broke his fall at the last second.

I haunt him. I hunt him. He will live a long and unhappy life.

In the end, when he is too feeble to fight it, I will enter him and I will subsume him. The only thing more frail than an infant is an old man waiting to die. Before he leaves that body, while he is still trapped in that weak and leaky rowboat, I will take his power. I will keep his lightning bugs in a jar, deep inside me, until all of their lights go out.