We sometimes have a warped sense of right and wrong, especially when we are young. What follows is a story where my parents were right and I was not seeing it through my young eyes. I was only feeling the discomfort of my own hurt feelings and lack of maturity.

Seeing Ghosts

I was upset about something my parents had said or done to me and as I was not the perfect son, I plotted a “pay back plan.” I can’t remember what they had done to me, but can I remember what I did to them. In my fertile imagination, I had thought of a “brilliant” way to get even.

The bedroom for my brother Ken and I was upstairs. It had a window that opened onto the roof of a side porch of our house and we had access to the roof. From the porch roof we had an easy path to the main roof of the house. It would make a good platform to launch my attack.

My revenge involved using a pillow case, and a short length of clothes line. They would be at the heart of my revenge. I stuffed some tee shirts into one of the pillow case corners and then tied the clothes line around the case to hold the stiffing inside. It formed about a ten inch ball at the one end.

I carried it out the window and up onto the house roof.  I knew my mom and dad were sitting inside the house just below. They were behind a large picture window and where they were sitting to watch the television, they could also see out the window.

I quietly walked to the edge of the roof and swung the “ghost” in a long arc. It was almost uncanny how a pillow case could look ghostlike. The weight of the ball “head” pulled the rest of the covering behind. The “ghost’s tail” fluttering like mad made the ghost seem real and as though it was actually flying.

I wasn’t sure that my mom and dad had seen my Casper creation with its tail fluttering and made the mistake of swooping him past the window the second time. That was my downfall. No, I didn’t fall the twelve feet to the ground, but it did expose the weakness in my plan. I didn’t have an accomplice to let me know what was happening inside.

I should have stopped with the second swoop of my swooping specter, but because of the “weakness” I allowed the passing phantom to make its final voyage before disassembling it. By the end of the “spirit’s” swoop, my parents were in the yard and looking up. I was caught red handed standing on the edge of the roof. The scowls on their faces told me I was in more trouble. My mom yelled, “Get down off that roof before you fall, young man!”

When I came inside I was banned to my room to disassemble my specter and no television for the rest of the day. That meant no Adventure Time, no Rodney and Knish, no Three Stooges, and no Little Rascals. It was a death sentence. I was doomed, but somehow I managed to live through it.

Several days later my mom was talking to me about the incident, she said, “You know, I didn’t believe in ghosts, but when I saw with my own eyes a ghost flying by the window, well… I didn’t know what to think.”