When I was a child, I watched my grandmother levitate a table.
This was the woman who give my sister and me a Ouija board as a birthday gift. A devout Catholic whose faith in the occult was just as strong. In my grandmother’s mind, God and ghosts weren’t opposing forces but ingredients in the same recipe. Sometimes malignant, sometimes benign and always real.
When my sister and I were very young, we’d ask her to explain her tarot cards to us. She always used her cards at a folding card table. It had a red vinyl top and white steel legs as thin as the wooden dowels we used to prop up the tomato plants. The three of us would sit around the table, my sister and I with our feet dangling above the floor, and listen to stories about The Fool, The Chariot and so on. I can still see her small, veined hands rapidly sliding the cards in a great heap and hear the sound of them gliding across the vinyl.
At one point I heard the word “Seance” and came to know its meaning. I also knew that a seance was something that my grandmother knew how to do. My next memory is incomplete but what I can recall is clear.
We were sitting in the living room and my grandmother was alone at the card table. Her eyes were closed and she was sliding her hands across the vinyl as she did with the Tarot cards. The room was quiet except for the swish of her sliding palms. Then the table popped up into the air and fell back down. It popped up again and fell back down. This went on for a minute or two.
Then the table popped up and stayed up. Her hands slid wildly and the table undulated as if it were riding the waves of a violent sea. It leapt and dove, rose and fell. All the while, my grandmother’s hands made great circles across its surface.
That’s the last I remember of that scene, though I don’t know if that’s because it ended there or because my sister and I were led away. Later, my grandmother would tell us that “other hands” were moving that table, not hers.
Today, I have an irrational fear of those other hands. Yes, I’m a grown adult. I attended college and graduate school. I have a wife and two wonderful kids. I consider myself to be a man of reason.
But, when I go to sleep, I’ve got to walk 12 or 15 feet from the light switch to my bed. Every night as I move through the dark, I feel the cool air against my ankles. I become very aware of the protruding bones in my feet and the very thin layer of skin that protects them. As I get closer to the bed and finally step up into it, I cringe. Ever so slightly, but I cringe.
I expect a hand, cold and bone white, to reach out from underneath the bed and grab my bony ankle. Grab it and just hold it there, if only to let me feel the pressure and the cold of its grip. As a rational adult, I know this will never happen.
But if it ever does, I won’t be surprised one bit.