by Sheldon Agonson (May 2026)
What is a ghost? I have wondered ere now. We talk about them. We know what one looks like: figure in a sheet, a guy who’s see-through, wailing and clanging shackles; the whole bit. But that’s not what I saw. Did I see a ghost? In a way, I didn’t really see anything, but I don’t know another word for what I … I guess I felt it.
Teddy still says he doesn’t believe in ghosts, but afterwards, he always took the long way home from school. We were arguing about what to get. We’d pooled our nickels and pennies at the stand, but Teddy wanted “The Lone Ranger.” I said I was tired of cowboys, but before I could suggest “Dick Tracy,” Kyle cut in about something called “The Vault of Horror.” Some naked dame was running from Dracula on the cover while zombies were grabbing at her heels. I sort of lost track of the conversation when I saw her.
My reverie was broken by my friends’ rising voices. Teddy was saying something like:
“My dad says there ain’t no such thing as ghosts.”
“Yes, there are!” Kyle held firm. “I seen ’em.”
“No you ain’t.”
“I have
“Haven’t!”
“Have!”
“Where?” I broke in.
“Where?” mocked Teddy. “Nowhere, ’cause they ain’t real.”
Well, one thing led to another, and we left the poor pulp merchant, leaning there with his elbows on the counter and his chin in his hands, without exchanging our shiny coins for any of the three comics under consideration. If he had heard any of what we were planning to do, or if he had paid our conversation any attention at all, he gave no sign as we pedaled away, empty-handed, from his stand of glossy treasures.
There was a house in the neighborhood. I won’t say which one. It’s occupied now, though there were many occupants who moved in and out throughout our childhood. The place, though, seems fairly settled now, and I don’t want to put a rumor out there that could hurt the present owners.
We all knew why the house was empty then, a scandal our parents were rather tight-lipped about. It is a common enough story today. I passed a newsstand at lunch this week and saw the latest headlines of gossipmongers proclaiming the salacious tales from the courtroom. What she did, what he did, and you look at them on the silver screen and can’t help but admire their beauty. If you watch the news, you know that the word itself is shouted loud enough for any child to hear. Still, it’s just one of those things, at least to my generation, that you just don’t say.
Who would own the house was still being settled, or how Solomon would divide it, and in the interim, no one owned it or lived there. It stood along the street arrayed with the others, looking just like the others; not like the others, an empty shadow, like a missing tooth in a smile, the first signs of rot. What made that cookie-cutter house different from all the duplicates surrounding it? A story? Or was it that the story wasn’t and never would be told? The lips parted, but the sentence died in the throat.
It was easy enough to crawl through a window, and neither of us pushed Kyle about his story of leaving his baseball glove here before … but that was his story, his reason for sneaking back in here originally. I suspect, though, that he had rather hoped Mr. Smith had left some of the magazines Mrs. Smith made such a fuss about.
I remember, one time, he had shown me; put his hand on my shoulder and said he had more inside. I was in a rage then, unable to blink, my eyes captured by the glossy page. I was a storm of fear and desire, but something about his touch felt wrong. That creepy feeling I had then, and a memory of the strange trepidation in his voice, walked with us as we stepped into the dark house that was no longer his; no longer a home.
We were whispering:
“Where did you see it?” I asked.
“The baby’s room,” he said.
“They didn’t have a baby,” Teddy said.
Whether or not they had a baby, Kyle led us to the baby’s room: painted sky blue with artful wisps of clouds along the walls, a white cradle in the corner, a new teddy bear abandoned on the floor, but otherwise empty; it was full of emptiness. So full, you had to push your way in.
We kept a silence in that room. There was no room for words, or that’s how I felt. I couldn’t help it. It was like getting the breath knocked out of you. I don’t know how Kyle and Ted felt exactly, but we were all struck dumb just the same.
Then, with the three of us standing there gaping, that’s when the door closed. We heard it closing, and I don’t think any of us could have turned around; I was so frightened, I couldn’t move. But then, like a starter’s pistol, the click of the latch set us off.
We spun on our heels and saw what we had heard, that white door shut with the shining knob gleaming as a dusty beam of light settled on it through a brokenness in the blinds. Kyle was crouched behind the two of us, as if hiding from it. Teddy just stood slack-jawed and shivering.
I was the one who finally opened the door. I don’t think Teddy could. It would have meant acknowledging what had happened. I sometimes wish I didn’t.
It was—what was it? It was a door. It was a doorknob. No different than any other. From the same store of all our doors and doorknobs and locks. Why is it, opening this door, I have such a hard time recalling. I want to pass over it. My hand almost feels numb just thinking about touching that bright, brass protrusion.
I almost wanted resistance, I think. If the door had refused to open, there would be an end of it. There would be the story. A ghost locked us in. Ambiguity haunts me more than any ghost, and the certainty of my friends, Kyle’s wild ramblings, Teddy’s demurring denials, trouble me more than the possibilities of either.
The door opened like any other door unto the hallway we had just come through. It was the same hallway, and no, I cannot say I know that it changed. Like the empty house we had snuck into, there was nothing different about it from any other hallway save for what was in it. I couldn’t see anything different.
“Come on,” I said, and stepped out of the room.
I didn’t see anything, but there was something there, something on the threshold, something I felt in the passing between, something I could not see. It was cold. No man in a sheet, no transparent figure, no shadow in the corner of my eye. It was emotion, intuition, a sense of presence—or almost the opposite, the emptiness of a person who wasn’t there, a deep and bitter emptiness.
We all felt something. I remember turning around. It felt like there was someone at my back, some hand placed on my shoulder. So I saw, this one thing I did see: I watched Teddy and Kyle both jump when they followed me through. We stood silently in its clinging miasma, like bugs on sticky paper, waiting.
A noise, a common sound, rafters creaking in the evening, broke the spell and sent us screaming for our bikes. Oh relief! Fear was a pleasure then. Fear was alive, was heart and blood and throbbing life! Oh pedal, pedal, pedal; we did not care, just away, just to move again out of our frozen terror.
I do not remember another sunset so beautiful, and when I think on the pleasantness of childhood, I think of Kyle and Teddy and me breathless on our bicycles, riding pell-mell into the sun, into the red, fiery sky. I do not think of why. I try not to think of why now. I did not think of the why even then; just that bittersweetness, that closing of childhood, that beginning of the ending. Then, days lasted years; nowadays, years pass like days.
I don’t know what a ghost is, but, whatever we saw, I can never forget; each day, it seems, the world grows more and more like that empty house and empty room.
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Sheldon Agonson (a nom-de-plume) started a serious attempt at writing in 2017, challenging himself to post on his blog every day, and, with a few exceptions (currently two), he has fulfilled his own challenge. In 2020, he received his bachelor’s degree in Bible and Theology, and by that time realized that, whatever else he would do in life, it was written that he had to write.
A few of his short stories have escaped the boundaries of his blog: Brother & Blurryface were both featured in the Futurist Letters, and Ghosted was published on Faith K. Moore’s website as the winner of her ghost story contest. He has self-published a collection of his short stories on Amazon: While the Elephants Danced. Save for Lenten fasts, Dr. Agonson can be best accosted via Twitter @SAgonson.
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