Fearing fear itself

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

I slept in the attic. I was put up there when I was 5 and my sister was born and she took over my room. The attic is a haven in a lot of ways — I am atop my family and can hear them moving below; I have a window seat and I can look down on the world, see the kids playing kick the can, riding their banana-seated bikes down the hill, ringing their bells, and I can watch the old people leaning into each other, walking hand in hand after dinner.

I soon realize, though, that the world doesn’t look back up. No one can see me. I have just seen “Beauty and the Beast” at Wolf Trap, the performing arts center in Washington, D.C., where I have also seen “The Music Man,” “Hello Dolly” and “The Phantom Tollbooth.” I loved these productions so much that I have signed up for a drama workshop here. But when it’s my turn to improvise onstage, I giggle with so much self-consciousness, I am told by the drama instructor to get off the stage. “You need to get into your character,” she says. “Who are you going to be?” Alas, I have always, only, been myself.

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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Fearing fear itself

My lifelong pursuit of ghosts