The Usual Haunts

Since we were on spring break last week, my wife and I decided to go to a haunted bed and breakfast. Now you might be wondering (as one friend asked), is the bed AND the breakfast haunted, or just the bed? Well, according to the staff, the ghost does make its presence felt at meal-times, so presumably sometimes the breakfast is haunted too. Although not the banana walnut pancakes. Although they did taste awfully good ... perhaps the secret ingredient is apparition. Anyway, the B & B is part of an old ghost town (no pun intended), and the owners bought the adjoining land to prevent some historic buildings from being demolished. It was rather odd driving through the countryside--at first, I thought everybody was dirt poor and on the verge of death (and perhaps some were), but I discovered when we went to the run-down looking haunted B & B that the dilapidated look was actually supposed to be charming and rustic. Who knew? The house was replete with stairs that were slightly tilted and almost made me fall down, along with a ceiling that ever threatened to make contact with my head. I saw they had a Jane Austen novel out--I started laughing to myself, "Ha ha, they have _Northanger Abbey_ out, Austen's satire on Gothic novels and ghost stories, how clever," only to look and see that it was _Mansfield Park_. Well, after feeling cheated and hollow inside, we went into our room. However, when the time came to leave our room, I discovered I could not find my key; my wife picked it up. Now, it is customary in a haunted house for objects mysteriously to move or disappear, so it seems awfully suspicious that the key disappeared. Clearly, the ghost was trying to keep us out of the room! Or--and perhaps even more sinisterly--it wanted to lock us in so we couldn't get it out! Of course, those skeptics amongst you who are knowledgable about my pants might point out that there's a hole in my pocket, but that's just a red herring.

My sagest piece of advice for anyone who visits a haunted bed and breakfast is not to read books about demonic possession while you are there. My wife thought it would be a great idea if, before we left, we got a nonfictional book offering a "Christian" perspective on ghosts. (It's about a couple named the Warrens; the wife claims to be clairvoyant, and they visit a lot of haunted houses.) You'd think that a title like _The Demonologist_ would signal, "high times and ghouly frolics lie not ahead," and you'd be right. The book was one of the scariest things I have ever read! One of the more cheerful passages remarked that people rarely need to fear overt demonic activity unless they have done something to "invite" that activity, like ... going to a haunted house and trying to communicate with ghosts!

Well, since there wasn't much else we could do at that point except drive home, we decided we'd stay at the room and just not "invite" the ghost. According to this particular B & B, the ghost tended to show up if you turned on the blue lamp to "invite" it, so we resolved not to turn on the blue lamp. Well, as soon as we entered our bedroom, the blue lamp was already on! So what should we do? Turn the light off? Well, according to _The Demonologist_, a doll became demon-possessed because people were paying too much attention to its ghost-related activities--so, if we were superstitious enough to turn the lamp off, that would be an invitation for the demon to possess the lamp! (A side note: the book is really interesting, but frankly, it does seem to give contradictory advice. If you notice a doll that seems to move around, you're supposed to ignore it, or else the demons come. However, another time, if you notice strange things happening but do nothing about it, the demons take that to be tacit permission and do more and more things. AAHHHHHH!!!!!) Finally, we decided that the least invitey thing would be to leave the lamp on and turn it off when it was time to go to bed.

When we went out for a night stroll, a cat joined us and followed us the whole way. According to _The Demonologist_, devils often gain an "invitation" by pretending to be something they're not (e.g. a cute little ghost girl who wants to inhabit a doll), and sometimes they pretend to be cats. So along the way, we were theorizing about how to treat the cat: it was cute, but what if it was Beelzebub, and if I said, "You're so cute, I'd like to take you home," it would say, "I have you now!" You think I'm joking, but this book is so spooky I have discovered superstitious parts of me I have never known! Finally, we decided to test the cat, and say things like, "If your delight is to serve the living God, you are cute, and we'd like to take you home," and that would keep us safe. After all, people have entertained angels unawares, and perhaps sometimes, they were guardian cats.