Giving it a Name

A life full of haunting.

 I’m sure most people that have truly experienced the unknown, the unexplained in their lives are like me and choose to keep their stories to themselves. Not out of fear of being ridiculed or looked down upon out of disbelief because in this day and age everyone had ghost stories to tell and most loved hearing them. If like me it was because for us that have really experienced such things, there just is no explaining it, and it was so very much more than a ghost story.

For me, it was when I was pretty young that the Unexplained found a place in my life. My first experiences took place well before such stories were made known to me. This was something I felt was mine alone and I kept it as mine alone for a very long time. Later I came to find some of my family members were known as sensitives to such things as this, and I happened to be one of them. What better setting for a child to live in than a really old three story house with lots of history that fed into the why’s within those walls. A history that apparently still resided in the house I grew up in and was good at making itself known. As I grew I heard story after story from my friends and so many other people regarding hauntings that they or someone they knew had experienced.  I never cared to share my stories I think mostly because I chose to look at what I was dealing with as bad energy that just needed to be washed away.

I don’t think I was ever really scared of it.  I always had a sense or a feeling that it couldn’t physically touch me or hurt me.  It was just there to make noise, move things, harmless stuff, and occasionally show itself, usually as a blond girl about 12-years-old.  Then there was that one time when I was about 13, as I was walking over the steel grate where the oil furnace used to be, I looked down at a little blond girl standing just below me staring into my bedroom below. Yeah, that was spooky.  I called my mother over, she looked down, saw her standing there as well. We ran downstairs but there was no one there.  Upon telling this to my father when he got home, he went into telling us that a couple nights earlier he awoke to her standing at the foot of his bed. Yeah, that’s spooky.

When I was 15 we moved to a new house, and that’s when I came to find it wasn’t the house that we were living in that was haunted. Whatever it was followed us over to our new home.  This time, it had no problem with making itself known to most of my friends over the years as well.  I think the key to things never getting out of hand with it was that we never tried to make contact with it in any way. We were in the same house for a long period of time but we lived in our world and let it live in its world.  Eventually, it just faded away leaving me and my family with a lot of very interesting memories and stories we pretty much kept to ourselves.

  My young adulthood life was a pretty normal life. I got into building and remodeling houses as a career and was fortunate enough to never come across a haunted one. I thought the hauntings were gone for good, but years later I came to find I was wrong, not only about that, but I was wrong about whatever it was not being able to touch me.

At 26 I woke up one morning and felt as if something had just overtaken me and it must not have wanted me to see it for it had taken my sight. I stayed that way for two months, then one day it just let go of me and my vision cleared up perfectly within days.  The doctors could not give me a definitive answer as to the cause exactly or why I took effect of me the way it did. But I was already familiar to be haunted by the unknown without reason and found myself accepting more of the same to come.  As the years followed it was back to playing its old tricks demanding my acknowledging its presence in my life.  It would make me stumble or knock me off my balance in public showing its strength over me.  This time around it was definitely playing a physical game with me like never before, it was out to prove to me how wrong I was as to its ability to physically have control over me.

To this day, I have not given it the satisfaction of me accepting it having any control in my life, though in the last few years whatever this unknown is it is has held no punches.  It’s sits back and waits until everything is going great with me and I’m least expecting any of its surprises and then it will throw a bag over me and beats me up like a defenseless child. Still having a pretty strong structure about me from the construction work all those years, sometimes it serves as no defense against this invisible monster. In only moments I at times find I have no strength, my entire body feels as though I just rolled off of a mountain.  I don’t know what I did to get so much attention from this demon, ghost, evil spirit or bad energy, but it is definitely out to make me see how wrong I was in its ability to touch me from where it was. It can and I never see it coming.

One day not so long ago I finally reached a point in my life of accepting that this presence planned on being in my life for quite some time. That being the case, I reached the point where it being seen as the unknown was unacceptable to me and I demanded that it give me its name. As strange of a request as that may seem, I deserved to have a name to hold responsible for my torment. It agreed to my demand and the reply I got in response to this demand will echo through me for the rest of my life. I heard the haunting words given to me, “Don’t bother yourself with my full name”, it said, “just call me MS for short.”

Author's Note

A story I wrote for a writing class. One of my writing styles or my attempts to do so is in bringing a story together with opening an unexpected door in the end and leaving the reader someplace different than they thought they were going.

The hauntings in my childhood whether actual ghost or not, really happened. Stopped in late teens. I was diagnosed with MS at age 30 and it is every bit as much a person with it being haunted by the unseen as ghost ever could be. Hence the reason for the story you read here.