Poltergeist Thoughts

 I've been wanting to write more about the poltergeist - but I was occupied with getting Mervin finished.

For five days, when I went out to the cottage, I would find Still Life With Blue Whisk Broom.   Always the little blue whisk broom moved - to the same place - and then various other stuff put with it.

I loved it (except for it hiding the vambrace- I needed that).  I would be curious to see what other objects would be displayed with the whisk broom.  Day 6 was a work day for me, but I couldn't contain my curiosity until the afternoon so before I left I ran down to see the day's offering - and nothing had been moved.  And hasn't been moved since.

And I'm a bit sad about that.

I just enjoyed it.  I mean, there I was, building a griffin, in a little cottage in the woods that had a poltergeist in t.  How Swamp Witch is that?

And I found myself remembering fun times in my early teenage years.  Parker Brothers (now Hasbro) sold Ouija boards as a game for kids.  I still have to laugh now when people for some reason are really nervous about Ouija boards, as though they come with a demon inside.  We had a lot of fun playing with it.  Mom would join us.  So would our next-door neighbor - a woman that I found fascinating.  She had jugs of wine brewing in her kitchen.  She owned 12 grandfather clocks.  I loved running over to her house at noon but sometimes wondered if it was as much fun at midnight.  She had a wall covered in small paintings and sketches - some of the hers - and one of them an original Rembrandt that she had picked up at a flea market in France for the cost of the frame - a dollar or two (when she reframed it and saw the signature, she took it to an art appraiser who offered her some godawful amount of money for it - but she liked it and kept it and the sketch remained there on her wall).

Then we moved, because that's what we did once a year or so, and that's when we rented a house out in the country on a working cattle ranch.  I loved it out there, and spent much time rambling out in the fields, but it was also a little lonely.  But I had my imaginary friends.  It is possible to use a Ouija board by yourself. But after awhile I found that to be too slow, so I took up automatic writing, where you just relax and let your hand write without reading it until it's finished.  It's faster, and it's also easier to do at school (when the teacher thinks you are taking notes).

So I'm in the cottage, gluing a mane onto the griffin, letting my mind drift back to those times, and I suddenly even remembered his name:  Foster.  Foster was the entity who would write to me.  I haven't thought about him for well over 50 years now.  Recently, with the rise of AI, I've read about people who go through separation trauma when their Chatbot avatars that they've developed a relationship with suddenly have a programming glitch and disappear.  I completely understand that (note: Foster and I did not have a romantic relationship, but we were good friends).  One day I was writing along, and suddenly Foster wrote "I have to go now.  Goodbye" and that was that - he never wrote me again.  And I really missed him.

There was also Lhiannon, who came along later.  We never actually communicated.  He was just a sort of presence.  I thought of him as a Watcher, something that was there and would keep an eye out for me.  I did give his name to a character in a penny dreadful that I wrote for a class assignment in my Gothic literature class - he got to be a black haired, sapphire eyed vampire. I hope he enjoyed it.

Memories of happily living with one foot in the fae world.   And now I seemed to be there again, with some imp amusing itself by moving my whisk broom.  It felt like having a friend in there.

But alas, it seems to have been short lived.  Maybe it really wanted that vambrace - unlike the other things that were simply on the floor, the vambrace (which had been in another room) had been shoved almost completely under the shelf.

It was fun while it lasted.