ghosts, perhaps.

my parents came into town and took me out for a pre-birthday dinner celebration sunday evening. there were presents, in the form of many gift cards, and for some reason i ended up with three birthday cards from them. one from each parent and one from (i probably shouldn't admit this) their cat. they were trying to cheer me up. it worked. except the cat, when he wrote in the date of my birthday on the card, he got it wrong. he was off by four days. for some reason the cat wrote july 7, which happens to be my parents' anniversary. which, incidentally, i totally forgot about. maybe he was trying to tell me something? my mom corrected the date on my card and apologized. for the cat's mistake.

i'm not sure i should precede what i'm about to say with what i just said, because i don't think i'm lending any legitimacy to my next story, or to anything my parents say ever. anyhow.

during dinner we had a discussion about the status of the ghost in my parents' house. i always forget about it, which is probably a good thing considering it's one of those things i don't need to remember when i visit. growing up, my sister and i were scared of the master bedroom. we didn't go in there much and when we did we always ran through it because it was creepy (i still avoid it). it never occurred to me that rooms aren't supposed to make you feel like that; i just accepted it. the room only got creepier after shannon and i saw an outline of a person walking through the bathroom on several occasions. as a child i remember thinking, kids see things! i'm just imagining this! years later when we told our parents about it, they were all, yeah, we see it too. and i was like, what do you mean YOU SEE IT TOO? really, that's not an acceptable answer. normal parents aren't supposed to corroborate ghost stories, they're supposed to tell you you have an active imagination and that your house isn't haunted. at the very least they could have lied to me.

so far the only paranormal activity i'm aware of has been the bathroom ghost sightings (why the bathroom? why?) and doors opening and closing on their own. my stepbrother just visited my parents for a week and was so freaked out by the door to the guest bedroom opening by itself that he refused to sleep in there and slept on the living room couch instead. he's 39. and otherwise well adjusted.

the ghost thing isn't surprising considering our house, our entire neighborhood really, was built on an old indian reservation. i tried to research it to find out which tribe was living there and has taken up residence in our house, but there were quite a few so i'm not sure who to attribute the ghostiness to. this sounds like something out of a bad movie. a bad made-for-tv movie based on a stephen king book, like maybe pet cemetery, only with people instead of cats, and less death.