The Zodiac Schmodiac Story Cycle

The Ghost Who Tried to Love Me

The months passed and these kinds of things would happen from time to time but never consistently or in any kind of pattern. One night one of her classmates brought a boy to the apartment after their date. They were sitting in her room with the door closed when all the lights in the apartment started to flicker and then went out. The boy helped them to find the fuse box and change the master fuse, then left for the night. The next week when he came back the same thing happened. Two weeks later when he tried to kiss the girl in her room the light bulb exploded and cut his arm. At this point all of the roommates were starting to get scared and talking about ghosts. One of the girls said she had an aunt who was a fortune teller and could see spirits, so they asked her to come over and tell them what to do. After the aunt asked for a fee (because the third eye needs some money to lubricate its vision), she told them that as soon as she had walked into the apartment she saw the ghost of a teenage girl. The girl watched them all talk, and whenever one of them spoke about a boy the ghost's fists would clench and she looked angry. The aunt told them she would do some research and get back to them. She came back a few days later and said that a girl had committed suicide in their house 20 years earlier after her boyfriend had broken up with her. The aunt's final advice? Don't bring any boys home and the ghost would be happy to share the house with them. The rest of the time my student was in university they didn't bring any boys into the house and there were no more problems with the ghost. 

What a lame story, right? Spurned ghost on an eternal quest to keep female students chaste. Not exactly the stuff of horror novels.

Some other students told stories of seeing lights or waking up in the night and not being able to move. Most stories ended with an appeal to Buddha and an eventual release. For the most part they seemed like poorly strung together groups of coincidences, but the students believed them. Whatever, I usually thought.

~~~

Around that time I started to take my own students and opened a small school myself. I rented a spot in an office building and had a couple of classes of elementary school children that would come and learn English after school. It didn't take long before I had enough students that I needed an assistant to help me with paperword and coordinating with parents and students. Brenda was recommended to me by a friend that knew I was looking for help and we started to go out to dinner a few times a week not long after. 

I was living in a cheap apartment not far from a hospital back then, one that I rented for really cheap. When I told people how low the rent was they always seemed amazed that I had found such a great deal and asked me how much the roof leaked. (The roof was fine.) I wasn't spending much time there because of my growing classes and my time out with Brenda. We started to date seriously, going out every night after class ended and spending weekends together at her place. (See mom, sowing my wild oats!) Months went by and I was happy with the relationship, happy with the classes and happy with the money we were making. We started to talk about getting married, but weren't in any rush. 

One weekend the water in her building was out and so we decided to spend Saturday night at my apartment watching a movie. We were cuddling on the couch, enjoying the movie and the good company when the light and fan over the stove suddenly turned on. I got up to see what the problem was and found that both of the switches had been pressed on. Strange. I went back to the couch and was about to sit down when the both came back on again. The switches I had just turned off had been turned on again. My student's story of exploding light bulbs jumped into my mind, and I firmly tossed it out with a good laugh. I unplugged the electical chord and we enjoyed the rest of the movie uninterrupted. 

That night as I lay in the dark waiting for sleep to come I thought about ghosts. Most of what I thought made me laugh, visions of Casper floating in my kitchen, struggling to get the button pressed as beads of translucet sweat ran down his cheeks. The light and fan were probably made in China, nothing else that the landlord furnished the apartment was good quality, I'm sure the kitchen stuff had to be cheap as well. I drifted off with the vision of Casper struggling to get the chord plugged back in so he could turn the light on and interrupt my movie again. Ghosts!