Blurring the Line

An Essay on the Reliability of Non-Fiction Writers

Before I left for college, my dad and I were talking about the worst pains we’d ever felt. My dad’s worst pain was when he tried to do a backflip off a hot-dog shaped water floaty and kneed himself in the face, shattering his left eye socket and displacing his left eyeball by about half an inch. My worst pain was after I fell into a fire pit and got second and third degree burns from my ankle to my knee on my right leg. The burning part didn’t even hurt that bad. My grandma will attest to the fact that I didn’t cry once that day—not when it happened, not on the way to urgent care, and not on the way home. I do remember crying, though, crying and screaming when the doctors debrided my burns a few weeks into the healing process. If you are unfamiliar with debriding, it is a process in which a doctor takes a sandpaper-like iodine swab to your open wound to scrape off all of the dead skin and dried ointments.

“Yeah, I remember that,” my dad said.

I shook my head. “I thought mom took me. I remember mom being there.”

I could picture the scene clear as day in my head. I was sitting on a teal leather table with one of those white paper sheets laid across it, and it was pushed up against the left wall. My mom stood on my right, and I sat facing the cabinets in the room, where the computer and the sink were. I remember my mom squeezing my hand but not looking at me, and the nurse—bless her soul—was crying as she tried to calm me down. Just a bit longer, she kept saying. Almost done. I even remember some other nurses opening the door to see what was wrong. They told me I had upset all of the infants and toddlers in the pediatric wing because I was screaming so loud.

“Your mom took you the first time,” my dad said, not meeting my eyes. “She made me take you every time after because she couldn’t bear to hear you scream like that.”

“What do you mean every time after?” I asked. “I only remember going once.”

“We went once a week for nearly six months.”

And just like that, I discovered I had repressed memories. A lot of them.

What else had my brain hidden from me? I thought I had a great memory. Actually, I have a photographic one. Most of my life events are neatly cataloged like a scrapbook of polaroids in my head. I remember every bit and detail of the house my family moved out of before I even turned four-years-old. And I remember sitting at the kitchen table at my fourth birthday at the new house in the maroon and yellow kitchen with my High School Musical themed cake. I never lose a game of Memory, and I don’t have to study or memorize anything because all the textbooks I read and the speeches I write and the lectures I attend are chiseled into my mind. Unfortunately, I vividly remember the embarrassing moments, too, like when I laughed so hard at a birthday party that I peed myself and spit soda out of my mouth at the same time during a game of Cards Against Humanity. A blessing or a curse, you decide, but my memory is, without a doubt, reliable.

Or, was reliable.

I think about this a lot. How many polaroids are missing from my scrapbook? How many polaroids are not accurate depictions of what happened? Or depict events that never even happened? How many have I markered on? Drawn over? Filtered? Memories are the building blocks of the human experience, and suddenly, I am doubting mine.

I have this “story'' that I tell quite frequently—or did tell, before the discovery of my fallibility—because it’s crazy, so people are interested. But now, I’m wondering if I’m just crazy. Did I make it all up in my head? It’s entirely plausible, given that the “experiences” in the story are not entirely supported by science or logic. But as I write this now, anything you read has been corroborated by the people involved. Though maybe we’re all unreliable narrators. Maybe each of us invented our own pieces of the story, and they just so happened to fit together. Maybe Amber was never real, and maybe our house was never haunted. 

My dad and his then-girlfriend, now-wife Jen bought a house in the summer of 2019. When we moved in, we discovered the usual homebuyer’s nightmare: a sloppy paint job, too little closet space, and an ever-present chull in one of the upstairs bedrooms (which just so happened to be mine). 

A little more unusual was the way the bedroom doors rattled back and forth when they were shut, like someone was trying to get in or out but didn’t know how to turn the knob. My dad explained it was just the summer wind creating little vacuums in the house because we kept the windows open most of the time.

After a few weeks, my seven-year-old brother Dylan’s toys started turning on by themselves. We’d all be sitting at the kitchen table and suddenly his remote-controlled Incredible Hulk figure would start roaring in his bedroom. “Hulk smash! Hulk smash! Hulk smash!” Faulty manufacturing, my dad said.

Another night, my dad woke up to the sounds of someone stomping up and down the stairs through the house. But Jen, who was the only other person in the house that night, was sleeping soundly next to him. So, he grabbed his gun from under the bed and cased the entire house. There was no one. No fallen objects. Nothing.

Then, on one summer morning, my dad was working in his basement office, and I was sleeping three floors above him. Well, maybe sleeping isn’t an accurate description, because I never slept well at my dad’s house. I used to shiver myself to sleep because of how cold my room was, and then I’d wake up randomly in the middle of the night with my blankets tossed halfway across the room—a phenomenon that never once occurred at my mom’s.

I woke up to my dad knocking wildly on my door, asking if he could come in. Honestly, I didn’t know the last time he knocked on my door and did something other than say it was time for breakfast and walk away, so I reluctantly sludged out of bed and met him at the door. When I opened it, he looked spooked, and I immediately knew something wasn't right. 

To give you a bit of background on my dad, he’s the bravest person I know. He mountain bikes on the most dangerous terrain, skis down the tallest, wildest mountains, and he’s in the Army. On the list of the toughest things in the world, I’d probably put him in seventh place between nano kevlar and diamonds. Seeing him spooked, rather than the deer at the wrong end of his hunting rifle, was a rare occurrence.

“I have good news, and I have bad news,” my dad said. Admittedly, he’s a bit dramatic, but I think he’s the parent I inherited my knack for storytelling from.  “Good news is, I figured out why our house feels like Skinwalker Ranch since we moved in. Bad news is, the house is haunted.”

Every hair on my arms pricked up one by one, like little pins in my skin, and I couldn’t stop blinking. My eyes were so watery, almost like I was crying without the sadness. It was like the heebie-jeebies, déjà vu, and the psychic staring effect all rolled into one.

“It’s a little girl, isn’t it?” I asked.

My dad’s face soured, the corners of his mouth tilting down. “How did you know?”

I’ll tell you the same story I told my dad that day.

During my junior and senior year of high school, I worked at a chain restaurant that only sold noodles. When I worked at the register, I used to hear a little girl call my name from the dining room. This didn’t seem strange to me, given that I had also recently been an assistant dance teacher to a few classes of five year olds. Surely, it was one of my students, or maybe someone in the restaurant shared my name. I held on to that explanation until I started hearing it after we closed each night, too. I thought I was just going crazy or hearing things or at least something more logical than being haunted by a freaking ghost, like something straight out of Hollywood horror.

My dad told me that he had heard something similar in the basement. He was working from home that day—which he did frequently, even pre-pandemic—so he had his headphones on. It sounded like someone was calling his name every few minutes, and he thought it was me at first. After five or six times, he took his headphones off so he could hear me if I needed him. The moment he started typing again, a little girl began giggling in the opposite corner of the basement.

“Do you want to play?”

My dad told her he did not want to play, then raced up all three sets of my stairs to wake me up.

“Can you come sit by me in the basement?” he asked.

“Absolutely not.”

Later that day, my dad was texting my stepmom about the incident.

Ask what her name is! Jen wrote.

I’m not talking to her again.

Maybe she’ll go away if you ask? Please?

Jen said please, so my dad started gathering the courage to ask the little girl what her name was. Before he could open his mouth to form the words, he felt a small breath on his ear.

“Amber.”

Three years later, he blames this particular experience on what the doctors have diagnosed as a “blip” in his brain, which occurred around the same time. I think it’s just easier for him to say that he’s getting old and doesn’t function the same way he used to than to admit he spoke to a ghost.

After that morning, the rest of my family started to have paranormal experiences, too. We’d all see Amber around the house in the shadows of our peripheral visions: in the reflection of picture frames, walking across doorways, but mostly in the basement, dashing from hiding place to hiding place.

The first time two of us saw her at the same time was when my dad and Gabe, my other brother, were talking in the kitchen. They were standing in front of the stairs to the den when a figure dressed in white walked out of Gabe’s room and down the other stairs. They both turned to look, then looked back at each other, even more startled at the other’s reaction.

“You saw that, too?” my dad asked.

Gabe nodded, wondering if he’d be able to sleep that night. “Did she just come out of my room?”

That’s when our stuff started disappearing.

The charger for my dad’s shaver disappeared from his bathroom kit, only to be found in a lockbox in the basement a few weeks later when we were packing for a camping trip.

Amber particularly enjoyed messing with our kitchen cabinets. A bag of chips would make its way to the fridge, or we’d find the strainer in the cereal pantry. We initially blamed Dylan for putting things back in the wrong places, but then we realized Dylan couldn’t even reach most of the cabinets in which the misplaced items usually ended up.

Around Thanksgiving, I was baking cupcakes for my friends. I cleaned off the counter to make room for the Kitchen Aid mixer, and then wiped it down to ensure total cleanliness. A bit later on, I was looking for baking soda. I found a new box, but I didn’t want to open it if there was another one already open somewhere. I asked Jen, and she confirmed that yes, there was an open box in a Ziploc bag in the pantry. So, I had another look. When I still couldn't find it, I recruited Jen to help me look for it. We pulled every item out of the pantry and replaced them one by one, then did the same under the sink. She knew that there was an open box somewhere because she had just used it that morning, but we couldn’t find it anywhere. I gave up and opened the new box, then measured out what I needed and sprinkled it in with the rest of my dry ingredients. I sealed the new box in a Ziploc bag and put it back in the pantry, and when I turned around…

There it was.

The other box of baking soda.

Sitting perfectly in front of the mixer, right where I had been standing seconds ago.

I’m not sure if Amber hid the baking soda from me on purpose, or if she grabbed it to help me bake but didn’t quite place it on the counter in time, but I cannot explain how it got there after I nearly tore apart the whole kitchen looking for it.

There are many other bizarre and unexplainable experiences that I could recount for you (like how my best friend refuses to sleep over at my house anymore because we heard someone run through the house when we were home alone, or how Amber would knock our dominoes over during family game night, or how a guest watched the dog leash lift up off of its hook and clang into the water bowl below) but I suspect this essay would become a novel.

There is, however, one final incident that I must include if you are to believe why we believe.

My dad and Jen were at a barbeque for one of their friend’s twin daughters’ high school graduation. They knew most of the people at the party, so they were mingling and catching up like middle-aged adults do when someone they didn’t know stopped them and introduced himself.

He said, “I’m a medium, and I just needed to tell you guys that I am sensing a spiritual presence around you.”

He proceeded to explain that he could feel the spirits of one mother and two children. One of the children belonged to the mother but the other did not, and neither knew that they were dead. The mother was intentionally keeping both of them in some sort of loop, holding them to this plane of half-existence because she wasn’t ready to let go. He also mentioned that the mother was more or less attached to Jen, and that all the sadness Jen had been feeling lately was actually the mother’s. Jen started crying in the middle of the graduation party.

“That’s pretty normal,” the medium said. “When you cry or shiver while you’re telling someone about your experiences, that’s a sign that what you’re saying is the truth.”

As the medium was on his way out, he stopped to say one more thing to my dad and Jen.

“I don’t normally do this, but I’m going to offer my services to you for free. There is a third child now, and something is telling me to help you.”

Since then, I can fully sleep through the night at my dad’s house. Dylan’s toys have stopped turning on by themselves, and nothing has gone missing, either. I still feel the occasional heebie-jeebies as I ascend the basement stairs, but I suspect that is only a residual fear that will wash away sooner rather than later. I hope if there really was a spirit or spirits bothering us, they have found peace.

The only thing that keeps me from checking myself into a mental hospital is that there were other people who experienced what I experienced. If I’m just crazy, then so are my dad and my stepmom and my two brothers and the medium—which, when I write it down, seems more probable than the other possibility: we were truly being haunted. For college, I moved to Savannah, Georgia, where people are much more open to the idea of ghosts than in rural southeastern Wisconsin, so the story gets a much different response. I was no longer labeled as “crazy” but rather someone in need of a handful of crystals and some sage to burn.

I suppose it’s a matter of perspective, then. You, the reader, are free to decide my truth. Tell me: have I just confirmed for you the existence of the paranormal? Or do you think me an unreliable narrator of my own life?