My lifelong pursuit of ghosts

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 21:00:00 +0000

I really want to see a ghost. It wasn’t always that way. Growing up in a very large, over 200-year-old house in Katonah, N.Y., I spent my childhood running through dark rooms praying I wouldn’t see — or hear — a ghost. For the 20 years my family lived there, things were fairly quiet. We had radiators in our room and in those very rare occasions when the heat came on, the sound of it was not unlike a poltergeist or an exorcism. And it was a very messy house so there was no telling if things had been moved or were missing, stuff got lost all the time, but it hardly felt any different than losing the one sock in the dryer. Katonah Woods, near our home, was supposedly haunted by the ghosts of Native American Chief Katonah and his wife, Mustato, who had been killed along with their child in a very bad storm. I knew this because when I was in kindergarten, I was sleeping over at my friend Patricia’s house (she lived on the still-dirt Katonah’s Wood Road). She told me in a very haunting voice that Mustato and the baby were in the teepee and the high winds of a thunderstorm blew them down a hill and Chief Katonah, in despair, threw himself after them … but on the full moon, they would walk … among the trees of Katonah Woods. I got up from her room, told her mother to call my mother to come get me. I was going home. And I would never walk to her house again, not even when I was in high school. (She tried backpedaling and saying the ghosts wouldn’t let people see them. Too. Late.)

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My lifelong pursuit of ghosts