The Sensitive and the Coffee-Can Ghost

From the first feeling that something was following her to the realization that the moon did not follow, but led, Mary had known she was different. Whatever the thing was that made her able to be a voyeur in the world beyond and exist-quite happily-in the world of the living, was a mystery. Her mother had had this thing and her daughters shared the ability too, but no one had ever defined it as a gift or demon curse, it had simply come to be called “the sensitive.”

Mary’s experience with the sensitive began when she was thirteen and it scared her so-badly that she would not talk about it with anyone. Later, after having her children, she began to experience more frequent encounters with the sensitive, and it had changed. While the first experience was a silent vision, the second and third were much more physical and seemed to need her to do something for them but she didn’t understand what, or how she could help.

To understand what the sensitive was and what it was doing to her, Mary had to re-examine the first experience. She began by thinking about the night of the first encounter. It had been a sad time filled with grief and loss. She was in a strange place. Not a place she hadn’t known, but a place that was unfamiliar to her through years of absence and growth. The last time she had been in that particular house she was much younger and the residents were still alive. Since that time, there had been a pall over the house and a beloved relative had died by his own hand. Indeed, he had died in the room, in which she slept, and it was the vision of him that she had seen in the wee-hours of the morning. He had not spoken and the vision was more of a flash than actual sighting of a ghost and yet, it was very real for those few seconds that it appeared before her.

Afterward, she chalked it up as a dream and went back to the average-craziness of being a teenage girl in the mid-seventies. Life moved forward with two marriages and four children when the second visitation and awareness of the sensitive occurred. Again, it was the middle of the night-that he appeared-as she had one of those awful dreams where you awaken but you’re not awake. So you try to wake up only to discover that you’re still asleep, and the dream cycles on until you’re finally able to bring about some sense of consciousness. She had seen him so-clearly that the next morning while talking to an older neighbor, she could describe the man in great detail, even down to the stripes and squares on his shirt. The neighbor had gasped and insisted, “You’ve seen him. You’ve seen him. He killed himself in that house, you know? It’s been several years now, but he killed himself in that house, in that room, and you’ve seen him.”

Mary’s reaction to the neighbor’s sudden outburst was to deny that anything about the dream could be real. She decided to let it go until that evening when her husband came home from work. She told him about the dream and what the neighbor had said, and he began to talk about his experience with the apparition. He explained, “I’ve seen him too. The clothes you describe and the size and weight of the man. It must be the same guy. I dreamed that I chased him away from the door and over a hill, one night. And I’ve dreamed about him since.”

Mary decided to ask the neighbor more about the man and the house. The neighbor told her about the second bathroom, in the house, and that it had not always been there. She explained that the closet with the bricked up fireplace and the front room had all been one big area of the house. She described the morning that her neighbors had found the man hanging from the ceiling in front of the fireplace. She went into more detail and told Mary all she knew, “There was some kind of tragedy or scandal involving the man. He had been a loner, keeping to himself, and when they found him it might have been days, even longer, that he had been dead. There was no note. There was nothing, just the body hanging there bloated from death and decomposing.”

All this new information did little to dispel the fears that were building in Mary’s mind about the house and having her small children so near an apparition with such a sordid-past. She talked to her husband and they agreed to begin searching for a new house to rent. In the meantime, they decided to keep the doors to the closet closed and keep the children away from it. They changed up the bedrooms. Moving the children as far away as possible, and taking the room where the death had occurred for their bedroom.

Time moved on and twelve years had passed when the sensitive revisited Mary. The family had lived in several different houses by this time and Mary’s two youngest children were in their teens. The two older children were married and living away from home when the coffee-can ghost made himself known. The coffee-can ghost was an angry ghost with a somewhat strange way of showing his anger.

When the family moved into the house the elderly couple that owned it had said nothing about the suicide, or the situation surrounding the man’s life, so there was nothing to indicate a spirit might be present. In fact, the family was unaware of anything the first six months they lived in the house, but one night the ghost decided to announce his presence. Mary and her husband were watching television in the living room and their two teenage children were in their bedrooms watching their televisions. Suddenly, as though the air had lifted it, a 3-pound can of coffee flew into the living room and stopped mid-air, falling to the floor upright with the lid still on it and its contents intact. The couple sat there dazed for a moment or two, and then Mary went to see if one of the children had thrown the coffee can.

She walked into the kitchen expecting to see one of her children standing in the room laughing and knowing they had scared their parents, but the room was empty. She went to her son’s room. He lay on his couch snoring and the television blaring. She opened her daughter’s bedroom door and the girl was on her bed, covered from head to toe, with her earphones and CD player on and her television blaring. She walked to the side of her daughter’s bed and demanded to know what she was thinking by throwing a coffee can in the living room, but the girl only stared at her mother. “Mom, I’ve been in here. I don’t know what you’re talking about, are you nuts?” she asked.

Mary told her daughter to come with her and she woke her son, telling them both that they had better explain why the coffee can was in the floor of the living room. Of course, neither child could explain it, because they hadn’t done anything and the matter was eventually allowed to drop off the radar.

The last year in the family’s life had been a troublesome one. The home that they had rented for two years, burned in the early morning hours, and left them with a half-life and nowhere to keep their two dogs. They moved into an apartment and the dogs went to stay with a relative, so this new house had been a new beginning for the family and their pets. As luck would have it, Murphy’s Law came into play and the larger of the two Chow-Huskies fell ill. She had given birth to still-born puppies and the milk in her teats was spoiled. The family took up the chore of feeding the three puppies that survived, and nursing the dog back to health.

The dog was a beautiful white with black and cinnamon colored patches, and eyes so-light that they looked like water. A few times over the years, one or another of their children’s friends would remark that the dog scared them. The dog did seem to look into a person’s soul, and perhaps there was a touch of the sensitive within her, too. She was a great watch dog, because she didn’t bark unless there was a reason; danger, someone on the property, or as with the fire, when she smelled the smoke. She had a particular noise that she made when she sensed something in a person that she didn’t feel was right, and she would begin to growl low and very guttural. It would be this sound that signaled that there was something about the house that wasn’t right.

It had snowed and the dog was too sick to take care of herself, so she had been brought inside and was lying on the kitchen floor when Mary noticed the dog’s eyes following something above her. Mary knew it couldn’t be a fly or spider, because it was dead winter and the dog’s eyes weren’t flicking about wildly. Instead, they were steadily following something as though the object of her attention were pacing in front of her. She began the low-guttural growl and tried to stand up. Mary went to her side sitting down next to her with the intention of comforting the dog. The dog would have none of it and began to wiggle and squirm, still trying to stand and fight the thing that no one else could see. Suddenly, as though kicked, the dog slumped backward and whined.

As Mary began to stroke the dog’s coat, the dog reacted as though she were a frightened puppy. She buried her head in Mary’s side and they remained in that position until the dog went to sleep. Mary slept in the living room that night, and although the dog was terribly weak and sick, she had managed to drag her body next to the couch at some point. Mary almost stepped on the dog when she got up the next morning and as she went to the kitchen to make coffee, she noticed the dog sat watching her closely, as though attempting to protect her with a steady gaze. When the dog had recovered, she was put back outside and never seemed to want to come in the house again.

The next strange thing that happened was a pack of cigarettes that disappeared from the house; however, with time and a few investigative tactics on Mary’s part, it was discovered that one of her son’s friends had taken the missing cigarettes. Several months later, as the dog grew healthier and the friend was warned not to take cigarettes, there was another more-worrisome incident. The children were at school and Mary was alone in the house. It had been a quiet and fruitful day as all the house work was finished and she settled down with a book. She was on the third chapter when her daughter’s radio-alarm clock began to play music throughout the house.

“Dang girl,” Mary said aloud, “she probably misread the a.m. and p.m. settings again.” She went to the girl’s room and turned the radio-clock off. Five minutes later, the radio-clock was playing music again, and she thought it was odd, but rationalized that anything with electricity can develop a short over a period of time. She turned the radio-clock off again and sat down with her book. She hadn’t read two sentences when the radio-clock went off again. This time she went to the bedroom, unplugged the radio-clock, and closed the door, before returning to the living room and her book. She read almost a half a page before the radio-clock began to play music, scaring Mary senseless. How on earth could the radio-clock play without electricity, she wondered?

She walked slowly down the hall, and began to open the door even-more slowly, only to discover that the radio-clock had been plugged back into the wall. She closed the door and backed away from the room. Backing all the way down the hall until she reached the living room where she sat, almost paralyzed with fear, until her children came home.

She and the children walked down hall noticing that there was no sound coming from the room, and her daughter asked, “Mom, why isn’t the radio playing?” When she opened the door, the plug lay on the floor behind the nightstand as though it had never been touched.

The coffee-can ghost would continue to play a part in the antics that the family experienced in the house until his story was told to them by a young neighbor as they sat eating supper one night. He, too, had committed suicide. There had been a horrible scandal involving young boys and the man-a police officer-ended his life before the full-impact of what had happened could be told. The young neighbor had asked, “Didn’t the owner tell you about it?” Mary only shook her head and didn’t ask any more questions. Experience had taught her that the less she knew, the better off the family would be and the longer they could stay in the house without being totally terrified of the ghost.

The sensitive did not end with the coffee-can ghost. Mary and her new husband live with the Shadow Man, and a dark apparition that resembles an opossum. The opossum comes and goes, at will, and occasionally hisses like their cat. The Shadow Man only appears from time-to-time and the couple feels that he may be a part of the past or the future. The Shadow Man never speaks, and he doesn’t really seem to notice Mary or her husband, he just passes through the room or stands in the hallway. Sometimes, late at night, when Mary is restless and cannot sleep, she’ll go to the kitchen for something to drink or eat, and she feels him standing in the hallway, staring without seeing. She’s not afraid of him because a ghost cannot hurt the sensitive.

Though there were several years between ghostly encounters, Mary should have known that the houses were haunted from the start. Haunted houses have a very cold-feeling to them, almost as if they warn the prospective renter or buyer to stay out. Over the years, the sensitive in Mary, had visited several houses that made her want to run as fast as she could away from them. The sensitive lives between two worlds; one that knows the future and the past, and one that is oblivious to everything but the present. The sensitive will draw away from those that cause an uneasy feeling. They avoid entering old and notoriously haunted houses, and they can tell the future with just one touch of the hand to another person’s arm. Strangely, the sensitive is frightened to tell the person what lies ahead of them in life, because of an underlying fear that the “Telling” can cause something to happen that might not, otherwise.

The sensitive is neither a curse nor a gift; it is just a piece of the soul that is linked between two worlds. When the line between them becomes blurred and allows the future, past, present, and the people from all three worlds to collide, it’s an explosion of fear and wonder for the people it possesses.


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