Last night, after Matthew had been put to bed, Emily came downstairs to put his milk back in the fridge. I had just finished with the dishes and a few odds and ends in the basement and was at first confused when she asked if I’d gone outside. No, I told her, I’d been at the kitchen sink and down in the laundry room and, why, what’s up? Emily replied that she knew, i.e. had a clear memory of, turning the light above the back steps off, but it was turned on again. There is no other switch. Only one explanation, I said; it must be the ghost.

I was only half-joking. A few years ago, we had returned home from a weekend away to find a lone shoe square in the middle of the guest bedroom floor. It was one of Emily’s, and not one that was in the standard rotation. The shoe was not there when we left. I know this because I’m like a goldfish; I will expand to fill any space that’s available to me. When there are no guests, the guest room becomes my walk in closet, walk in hamper, and horizontal clothes-lay-out area. I’m in there a lot. I would have noticed the shoe. Moreover, its match was found under the bed inside one of those low-profile Tupperware bins that hadn’t been pulled out in years. I couldn’t explain it then, and still can’t today. I’m not saying my house is haunted. That would be silly. But maybe I am saying I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that it is.

When I was younger, if you were feeling generous you’d call me credulous. My sister and my cousins called me gullible. And they were right. I could be made to believe lots of things (ok, fine, everything) because I wanted to believe. I was drawn to those ideas, those realities that were bigger, more nebulous, and harder to understand. Those things that make you feel like you’re circling around a greater truth and are close, maddeningly so, to breaking through.

That credulousness was nurtured by my cousin Jo, seven years my senior, but always willing to let me jump in her car and race off to see if we could find the Snallygaster, the Snarly Yow, the black dog, the phantom hitchhiker, the spirits of Antietam or Gettysburg, or the soldiers who would roll your car up hill like they rolled their cannons in the 1860’s. We never found any of those, but along the way I did have a couple of experiences that I still can’t explain and, rationally, I’m sure were fueled by my –ahem- credulousness. In Zittlestown, I could see the alleged blood stain that can be cleaned off but will always reappear. I felt cold, and dizzy, and out of sorts the whole time I was in that house. In Sharpsburg, I looked through the back window of a 19th-century house and could picture, as clear as day, a woman in period dress looking out and looking terrified. It was only later I learned that the occupant of the house, a mother, had stood watch at those windows during the Battle of Antietam, fearful that the violence would find its way to her doorstep.

Is any of that true, objectively speaking? My back porch light, the shoe with a mind of its own, Western Maryland’s cryptids, spooks, haunts, and specters? Who knows. Probably not. But we create our realities, don’t we? The meaning we find in the world is that which we give it, right? If that’s the case, then I think I’d like to go right on being a person of credulity. I think the recipe to my well being includes a sense of wonder, a desire to connect to larger truths, and the excitement needed to figure it all out.

Humans are drawn to the unknown, to those things that we can’t fully explain. Gullible or no, credulous or skeptical, it’s what makes us explorers.

It’s one of the things that makes me, me.