Rachel had a quick death - Traumatic aortic rupture in her sleep. She flinched slightly, grabbed her chest and gasped, but not loud enough to wake her husband, Brett, who woke up the next morning with his arms wrapped around her cold and rigid body.
The next few weeks were hard for Brett. He stopped shaving. Barely left the house. Quit his job. He sunk into a deep depression very few could understand from the outside looking in. It was hard to watch my friend of 20 years change so suddenly from an outgoing and charismatic man to a shell of person in a such a short time.
I’d made the necessary but also standard promises to him before and after the funeral, “If you need someone to talk to let me know” and “I’ll be here for you if you ever need anything”, but we all know those are just pretty words said on ugly days. No one takes them seriously.
I decided to make an effort to help Brett. I offered to let him stay in my house rent-free indefinitely.
He was hemorrhaging money without a job so I figured he could sell his place, move in with me and take all the time he needed to let himself heal before getting back up on his feet. Plus, I couldn’t imagine what he was going through, waking up and going to sleep every night in the same bed you where woke up next to your wife with her pale skin and blue lips. Seemed the least I could do was give him a break from that torture.
To my surprise he accepted and he was moved in a week later.
Immediately I realized things were worse than I had imagined. Brett could barely hold a conversation without drifting off and staring into random corners of the room. I’d go to bed at night and leave him on the couch watching TV only to find him there the next morning, red-eyed and staring blankly at whatever image the television put in front of him. He stank. He was messy. He rarely offered to help around the house, but he was also my best friend and I had to help him.
I never married so I don’t think I’ll ever truly understand the trauma he went through, but I do know people grieve in different ways and I do know that depression is a nasty bitch that can completely change a person. I’ve seen it happen. Like I said, depression can be hard to judge from the outside looking in, but it truly changes you. It rewires your brain. You start to doubt yourself. You stop trusting people. You stop looking on the sunny side of things because what’s the point in getting your hopes up. I’ll be damned if I was going to let Brett keep sliding downhill. Not in my house.
Is intervention the correct word when its only two people? I guess it was more of a heart-to-heart.
Anyway, I sat him down and told him that I loved him and I hated to see him like this. I told him I wanted to help him get better and I’d be willing to pay for a therapist for him to help him get through the next few weeks.
“Get through the next few weeks,” Brett said quietly, almost to himself as if I wasn’t even there.
“Yeah man”, I replied, “Lets get you through this tunnel and out into the light on the other side.”
“Other side,” Brett whispered to himself.
“Brett? Buddy? You into this?” I lightly tapped him elbow to get his attention and he snapped back to the present from where ever he had drifted off to.
“Yeah, I’ll try. But I don’t think I’ll ever forget. Rachel will always be with me”
“I know bud”
Two weeks later things were improving. I stopped finding him on my couch in the early mornings where I had left him. We could hold conversations again and would banter back and forth like the good old days. Brett was shaving, laughing, and leaving the house to go on long runs. My friend was back.
One Saturday morning I woke up early and came down stairs to the smell of coffee. I poured a cup, sat on the couch and watched the news when Brett came down the stairs.
“Morning Mike!” He said to me, “Oh you made coffee, nice!” He walked over and poured himself a cup and sat down next me on the couch, “Whatcha watching?”
The confused look on my face must have betrayed me.
“Hey, you okay?” Brett asked, setting his mug down on the coffee table, “You know, if you need to talk, I have the number for a good therapist you could talk to” he said with a grin.
“I didn’t make that coffee,” I said to him.
“Ok” he said, getting up from the couch and whistling as he walked up the stairs to take a shower.
I smiled. I hadn’t seen him this happy in months.
In college Brett’s idea of a funny joke was always a little gaslight-y and creepy. He’d sneak onto my computer when I wasn’t looking and write some stupid little message like ‘IM WATCHING YOU’ then act all surprised when I found it. One time, while spending the night with a lady friend he creeped out of bed while she was asleep and hung her teddy bear by the ceiling fan cord like some grim suicide attempt then crawled back into bed with her only to be woken up by her screams the next morning. He was a real sicko and I loved him for it.
Another week or so passed and I noticed Brett was helping out with chores more and more. I’d come home from work and the dishes would be clean, my laundry would be folded on my bed and the house would have this faint, but familiar, flowery sort of smell to it. I don’t know what cleaner he was using, maybe some sort of Febreze spray, but it was nice and I wasn’t going to complain about a live-in maid service.
The honeymoon phase didn’t last long. I’d hear Brett pacing around at night having animated conversations with someone and I’d walk downstairs to find him sitting at the kitchen table with his phone still upstairs. He’d start to disassociate again during conversations like he would when he first moved into the house with me and I’d have to clap my hands to get him to snap out of it.
One night I came home to him sitting in the dark at the kitchen table so I flipped on a few lights and saw he was crying. I pulled up a chair next to him. “You alright?”
Brett was silent for a long time, keeping his teary eyes on the table in front of him and wringing his hands like he was trying to get feeling back in them. I told him I understood if he didn’t want to talk and I stood up to go take a shower when he spoke.
“I still see Rachel all the time,” the tears started to flow again, his voice breaking every few words, “She follows me around. I’ll see her peeking at me from around corners or under beds,” his eyes met mine for the first time that night, “she stands in my closet at night”
I didn’t know what to say. What are you supposed to say in a situation like that? I don’t believe you? Tell the therapist I’m paying for? How about - tough titties buddy, gunna have to get over it some time or another. Does that sound good?
“Are you afraid of her?” is what I ended up asking him.
“No”
Knowing what I know now, I probably should have gotten some more information out of him at that point, but the situation was just too awkward for me. At this point his backslide was more annoying to me than anything. I’d opened my doors to my friend, paid for his therapist, was the only shoulder he had to cry on for months and now he’s going to backslide? I wanted my life back. I love Brett, but I wanted him out of the house.
I smoothed things over as much as I could with the typical phrases people use in these situations. ‘you can always talk to me’ and “She’s in a better place now” and the obligatory ‘we’ll get through this’ and then I went up to bed.
But things started to get weird.
I’d hear footsteps at night and doors closing only to find Brett passed out on the couch in front of a static-y television. I’d come downstairs in the morning to a freshly brewed pot of coffee with Brett still asleep on the couch, but what really scared me, what made me finally believe him was seeing her. I saw Rachel in his closet just like he said he did.
Curiosity had gotten the best of me and one night as I listened to Brett snore the night away on the living room couch, I crept up the stairs and into his room. I kept the lights off and sat at the foot of his bed and just listening. I tried to put myself in his frame of mind as I scanned the room looking for whatever shadows he might be misinterpreting.
That’s when I saw her. Deep in the recess of the closet her small pale face emerged ever so slightly from the darkness. She didn’t move, she didn’t speak, she simply stared at me from the darkness with pained eyes and blue lips. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, she didn’t look ‘ghostly’ she wasn’t see through or ‘floating’ it looked like she was just sitting there curled up on the floor of the closet waiting for someone to come and help her up, to save her from the pain she was feeling.
I slowly stood up and took a step towards the closet. I’m not sure what I was thinking at that point – if this was real and I could help her or if I was going to take a better look in the closet to see if my eyes were playing tricks on me, which ever it was, I never made it to the closet.
I took one more step and right in front of my outstretched hand the closet door slammed shut, sealing the specter of Rachel inside. Her screams filled the room and the closet door shook as she pounded the door from the inside. I was frozen in horror; my mouth went dry. My brain was flooded with too many questions at once to even begin to think of my next step. The bedroom lights turned on and the pounding on the closet door stopped. Brett was standing in the doorway.
“You saw her too, didn’t you?”
Brett and I talked about Rachel for hours the next day and we decided the best thing to do would be to let her know that she is (was?) loved. Brett wanted to ‘invite’ her for dinner the next evening so that is what we did.
I cooked up a lasagna and plated 3 plates at the kitchen table. I sat at one head of the table and Brett sat at the other, the 3rd plate was set between us. As we sat for dinner Brett announced, ‘Rachel, dinner’s ready!”. We both sat there for a few minutes in silence wondering what, if anything, might happen. Eventually hunger won over and we both dug into the food in front of us.
A loud screeching broke the silence and we both sat dumbfounded and watched as the chair in front of the 3rd plate pulled itself out, then scooted itself back in, as if someone had just sat down to eat with us.
Brett continued to eat in silence while I had lost my appetite completely and pushed my plate away. I spent most of that dinner alternating my gaze between the empty spot between us and then to Brett, searching desperately for any sign that this was one of his pranks. He could have easily pushed that chair out and pulled in back in with his foot under the table. I almost said something about it, when I noticed the 3rd plate – the food on it was half eaten. It was just gone. Brett couldn’t have faked that.
After dinner I made Brett take a walk with me around the neighborhood. I didn’t want whatever was in the house to listen to us, besides I think we both needed some fresh air at that point.
I told him how I felt about the situation, which was that I thought it was fucked up, unhealthy for either of us and we needed to find a way to get the spirit of his wife to move on. Brett, of course, was very much against this. He thought it was wonderful that his wife wanted to stay near him, even in death. I understand where he was coming from but in the end, it was my house and I had already made my decision.
Just before we ended our walk back at the house I asked Brett one more question, “Have you ever managed to touch her?”
“No,” he replied, “If she’s in the hallway or something she disappears fairly quickly, and when she’s in the closet the door slams before I can reach her.” He paused for a moment as if weighing the decision to speak, then he said, “She does speak to me sometimes.”
“What does she say?”
“She says she’s waiting for me. She says its beautiful where she is.”
The next day I spent hours scouring the internet for medium/psychics/priests anyone who might be able cleanse my house of Rachel’s spirit. Of course, I did all of this without letting Brett know. If he found out I was trying to get his wife’s spirit out of my house I don’t know what he’d be liable to do. The man was unstable.
Eventually I found one – a woman named Gilly. I just had to find a way to get Brett out of the house long enough for Gilly to come in and work her magic.
Over the next few days, I peppered Brett with questions. About the ghost, his schedule, the job hunt, more about the ghost. I needed much information as I could get so I could pass the information along to Gilly who I had been emailing with trying to set a game plan.
Finally, we had a date. Brett would be going out for the day with Rachel’s family to catch up. I had at least 4 hours.
Gilly showed up at my door 15 minutes after Brett left. As soon as she stepped over the threshold into my house she paused and put a hand to her chest. “Oh yeah,” she said, “You got something here”
I was amazing at how similar this was to having an exterminator over for bugs.
She walked through the house pausing in each room to see if she picked up on any paranormal energy. When she reached Brett’s room she gasped.
“There is something in here. It’s different than what I was sensing when I first walked in. It’s much…larger than I thought,” She was staring into the closet where I had seen Rachel, her eyes wide.
“Can you get it out?” I asked.
“I can try”
I’m not sure what she did, I spent most of the time on the couch watching TV while she was performing her rituals in Brett’s room, but she was gone within an hour.
Brett came home in a chipper mood later that night after getting some much-needed time with Rachel’s family. He had always been very close them, even when him and Rachel were still dating. I prayed he hadn’t told them about his experiences.
Within a few days Brett started to deteriorate again. He was dirty, barely washed and never slept.
When I asked what had happened, he told me, “I don’t see her anymore.” Tears were welling up in his eyes, “She said she would always be there for me, that she would wait for me.”
Not know what the protocol was when your friend stopped seeing his wife’s ghost I decided to try and say something to motivate him to get his life back together.
“Maybe it’s her sign that its time to move on,” I winced at my word choice, “We won’t forget her, but maybe she wants you to move past the grieving process and start your life back up again.” I was flailing. The therapist I paid for definitely didn’t seem to be doing a great job.
Brett stood up from the couch, “You’re right, it is time I moved on.” He gave me a huge, “Thanks for everything, man. I really mean it. You’ve been a true friend” Then he walked into his room and closed the door.
For once, I felt like maybe I said the right thing.
I knocked on Brett’s door around 6pm the next day. I hadn’t seen or heard from him the entire day which was unusual. I got no reply. I tried the door knob and found it was unlocked.
I found Brett, blue in the face, hanging by his belt on the ceiling fan. There was a note on the bed.
The note Read:
I’m sorry you had to be the one to find me like this. I meant what I said last night about you being a great friend. I wish nothing but the best for you and I hate to cause you this trouble, but its time for me to move on. Rachel is waiting for me. She told me herself.
I know we can come back. Rachel told me. When I figure it out, I’ll leave you a sign to let you know I’m okay.
Love you, man.
The next few days were a blur. The police interviews, the funeral, the endless questions from Brett’s family. I burned the note, I thought it was best no one saw it except for me.
I started to fall into a depression, I couldn’t help but feel like I had something to do with this. Maybe I wasn’t as supportive as I should have been, maybe I pushed him too hard too early, maybe I shouldn’t have called that damn psychic.
About a week later things slowed down again for me. It was strange being alone in this quiet house after having Brett with me for so long. I walked into Brett’s old room, sat on his bed and ruminated on the last few months. I said a quick prayer for Brett and Rachel and stood up to leave the room when I noticed a sheet of paper on the nightstand next to the bed.
I walked over and picked it up. It read:
I made a mistake. It wasn’t Rachel. You should leave the house.
Love you, man.
A long, slow creak filled the room and looked up to see the closet door slowly swing itself open. I stared into the dark closet for a second before noticing a pair of shoes sticking out from under the racks of Brett’s hanging clothes.
As if waiting for me to notice the shoes as the cue, the racks of clothes spread themselves apart and revealed a horrible looking man behind them.
An evil face, with pale skin, crooked teeth and black holes where the eyes should be emerged from between two shirts like he was playing peek-a-boo with me. The man broke into booming laughter.
I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t move. I was too terrified to think.
The man behind the shirts pulled something out of his back pocket and affixed it to his face. It was a crude mask of a woman. He snapped his fingers and in the blink of an eye he became Rachel, blue lips and all. He started laughing again, only this time it was with Rachel’s voice.
I broke in a run out of the house.
The last thing I heard before bursting from the front door was Rachel’s voice. She said, “I’ll take your soul next.”
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