Smiley by Christopher Dow I call him Smiley. Maybe he’s an it, but it looks like a he. He pays regular visits to our house, but it’s not as if we’ve ever invited him. We’d been living in our house for something less than a year before I noticed him and a couple of other uninvited guests. Actually, maybe we were the uninvited guests. The house on River Drive is fairly old, the original part built in about 1915. It was one of the first houses in the area, which was incorporated as the small town of Park Place, Texas, a few years later and subsequently annexed by the city of Houston in 1934. The original builder remains unknown to us—the signature on the oldest document in the hall of records is too faded with age to read. But the second owner—the one who added an additional room and the second floor—was Captain B, a pilot for a tugboat plying the Houston Ship Channel, and the house was known for many years as the Captain’s House. Indeed, the house is on Sims Bayou, one of the many shallow estuaries that drain into the Houston Ship Channel, which is just a couple of miles downstream. In its heyday, the house was one of the better in the area. Several weddings took place there, including that of a prominent Houston city councilman in the 1930s. But gradually, a series of owners let the house fall into disrepair, and a fire that destroyed one of the upstairs rooms seemed to spell the end. The house lay abandoned for nearly ten years until a local businesswoman purchased it for her mother to live in. The businesswoman performed basic repairs to the burned section of the house, but to no avail: Her mother didn’t like the house and wouldn’t stay there. The businesswoman then rented the house to a succession of tenants who were not kind to the old place, including a group of drug dealers who painted all the floors black. Seeing potential in the property, my wife, Julie, and I bought the house in 1994 and began the lengthy process of restoring the house—a process that still is ongoing. My two daughters—Sydney and Mariko, then eleven and ten, respectively—occupied the two upstairs bedrooms, and Julie and I took one of the downstairs bedrooms. The second downstairs bedrooms we turned into our office. This second bedroom had its own door to a side porch, but because we weren’t using the door at the time, I boarded it over with a sheet of plywood. A few months after we moved in, a friend asked us who the old man with the beard was. She’d been driving by and seen him standing behind the living room window, watching the street. We had to say, at the time, that we didn’t know, but we soon started noticing him ourselves. Both my daughters and I occasionally felt his presence in the living room and caught faint whiffs of pipe smoke, but once Sydney actually saw his faint and transparent form. And a friend named Sherri Meek, who knew nothing of the apparition, said he felt a strong presence of a seafaring man smoking a pipe and looking out the kitchen window, which overlooks the backyard and the bayou. Also, when Mariko was about fourteen, she saw our cat meowing and moving back and forth in front of one of the living room doorways, all the time looking up as if at a person who was blocking her way. I later learned that Captain B had fallen ill during his last few years and had been confined to the house. I can only surmise that he wandered around the lower floor, watching out the front window for guests and out the back at the tributary to his beloved waterway. But the Captain seemed completely oblivious to us, like a faint residue, and indeed, he has faded considerably during the twelve years we’ve lived in the house. And since I began renovations to the living room, he has nearly vanished completely. This is unlike the three other spirits that occupy our home. One of these was BD, so named because he specified those initials on the Ouija Board, not only to my daughters but to some of their friends who didn’t know about him. He seemed to be in his mid twenties. Mariko occasionally felt his touch, which was quite cold, and he occasionally would bend the flames of candles lit in both girls’ bedrooms. BD, too, began to fade after a few years, and Mariko says he’s no longer around. A more durable spirit was the little girl, whose apparent age was six or seven. This particular spirit was confined almost solely to Sydney’s room, though she occasionally entered Mariko’s. I have never seen this girl, but Sydney tells me that she is conscious of the living person occupying her space. To catch Sydney’s attention, the little girl has moved very light-weight object, scooting, for example, empty plastic bags across the floor. Apparently, this little girl is somewhat shy, and one thing is certain: She is terrified of Smiley. I first became aware of Smiley about the time I started noticing the Captain. I say “became aware,” because, at first, I didn’t actually see him. I’d be working at my computer in the office, when I’d catch a flicker of movement out of the corner of my eye, right where the boarded-up door was. This began to happen with greater frequency—maybe twice a day—enough that I started seeking a reason. And the more it happened, the more I became aware that, each time, I’d feel a presence move around behind me and out the office door, which leads into a small hallway and the rest of the house. The presence didn’t feel very nice. It had a sort of nasty, if furtive, glee about it, as if it was cognizant of my awareness and was happy to make me uncomfortable. It never paused in its passage, though, or changed its pattern of movement. It would enter through the boarded-up door, go around behind me, and then disappear through the door into the hallway. I didn’t know where it went after that. This went on for a couple of years. Not wanting to make my family uncomfortable, I didn’t mention it to the rest of them, never realizing that both my daughters had become quite aware of Smiley on their own. Then one day I was sitting at my computer, but I had not yet turned it on, so the dark screen was like a dim mirror. I caught Smiley’s furtive entrance out of the corner of my eye, but this time I did not turn to try to follow it. Instead, my eyes were riveted to the computer screen because I could actually see Smiley mirrored there, creeping around behind me and heading toward the hall door. At first glace, he looked to be a teenage boy, with a tousled shock of dark-hair, but he actually seems much older. Recently, Mariko told me that she thinks he’s more like a youthful forty or so, the effect of youth gained by his short to medium height, slight build, and the way he crept like a ghoul or haunt in a classic horror film. He was hunched over and taking exaggerated tiptoe steps, and his hands were held out like hooked claws. It was just the sort of creep that a teenage boy might use to frighten his younger sister. His mouth was pulled back in a huge, nasty grin reminiscent of the main character in the movie Mr. Sardonicus, and his dark, overly bright eyes were looking right at me! I wasn’t frightened, exactly, though a chill did run up my spine. He’d crept behind me too many times for me to be particularly disturbed, but the almost fiendish glee etched across his face did take me aback. And then he was gone through the doorway to the hall. What a nasty little fellow, I thought. He obviously delights in scaring people. A few months passed. During that time, I never saw Smiley directly, though I occasionally caught very brief glimpses of him reflected in my computer screen. Then one day, both my daughters came in and said they needed to talk to me. Had I noticed anything peculiar in the house? I told them of my experiences with Smiley and the Captain. Both were relieved that I, too, had noticed our unusual tenants. They were familiar with the Captain, and they told me about BD and the little girl in Sydney’s room. But none of the three bothered them, at least not the way Smiley did. Sydney said he would hide in the hall, and when she came through the living room and turned to go up the stairs, he’d jump out at her, his body hunched, his hands hooked, and that fiendish grin on his face—not that she could see him at those moments, but Smiley has a very strong presence. She’d hurry up the stairs, and he’d go up right after her, clutching at her with those hooked fingers. While Mariko never noticed him jumping out at her, she often felt him creeping up the stairs after her. At the top of the stairs, Mariko could hurry into her room, shut the door, and be safe, because Smiley never seemed to come in but simply hover in the doorway. But for Sydney, it was another story. Smiley would enter her room, though he seemed confined to the corner right by the door. Behind the door is a short doorway that leads into a small storage attic, and Smiley would disappear through that. Sometimes, when Sydney was in her room, she’d sense Smiley come in and pause before going into the storage attic. During those times, the little girl spirit would either cower behind Sydney, begging for protection from Smiley, or hide in Sydney’s closet. On one occasion, Sydney woke in the middle of the night and heard a sound like footsteps stomping on her floor, and then the bed began to shake back and forth. Sydney knew just who the culprit was. Even Mariko wasn’t completely safe in her room. Beginning about a year and a half ago, her bed also began shaking on occasion, and that continues to happen every few months. One night, she was talking on the phone to a friend who claims to be psychic. This friend lives in Upstate New York and has never been to Houston, much less to our home. This friend has accurately described our home, the arrangement and color of the rooms, and the placement of furniture. He even mentioned that the front door had a wreath, though it wasn’t Christmas—my wife had a decoration on the door that resembled a wreath. The friend sensed BD, but Smiley was the focus of his attention. He tried to talk to Smiley, but he said that Smiley wouldn’t talk to him and only mumbled sullenly in reply to his questions. Apparently, Smiley didn’t appreciate the attempted contact because he immediately knocked several books from the bookshelves in the upstairs hall, pounded on the bedroom doors, and made the telephone answering machine in the hall go haywire, turning it on and off and causing it to beep and play the messages at random. After comparing experiences, we agreed that the Captain. BD, and the little girl were ghosts confined to their respective spaces. Smiley, however, seems to be something else. Although he has a favorite pattern of movement through our house—he generally comes in the boarded-up door, goes around my desk and into the hall, then up the stairs and into Sydney’s room, where he disappears into the storage attic—he has been sensed elsewhere, most frequently in the side yard on the east side of the house, which is the side of the house where the boarded up door is located. Sydney also saw him reflected fairly clearly—if only momentarily—in the upstairs bathroom mirror. Her description of his appearance jibed with mine, right down to the shock of dark hair, the fiendish grin, and the hooked hands. We talked to Julie about our experiences, but she had had absolutely no inkling of Smiley’s presence or of the presence of the other three spirits. But then, her area of the office was off his usual path, and she never spent much time on the staircase or in the upstairs bedrooms or bathroom, so there was no reason for her to have encountered him. But breaking the ice and talking about Smiley made him an open topic of discussion, and oddly, his behavior became a bit less sinister, as if dampened by our frank appraisal of him. I was of the opinion that Smiley isn’t especially dangerous, though he is a nasty fellow who likes to scare people. My daughters, though, are more unsettled by him. Mariko, in particular, believes that he’d be dangerous if he could interact with us on a more physical level. And she believes that he has a certain power of suggestion and that he sometimes “whispers” to her, trying to get her to harm herself or others. This suggests that he is a more ominous character than I give him credit for, and reminds me of another similar entity that I encountered when I was in my twenties. (See “No. 10: Haunted.”) Another of Smiley’s peculiarities seems to indicate that he isn’t a ghost, but some other sort of entity. Unlike the Captain, BD, and the little girl, who seemed to be inhabitants of the house, Smiley frequently disappears for periods of time. Both my daughters have the impression that our house isn’t the only place in the neighborhood that Smiley visits—that he has a regular route that he follows beyond our property and into the surrounding neighborhood. In fact, there were long stretches during the next few years that Smiley would be entirely absent or make only occasional raids on our house. And then he’d be there in full force, making daily incursions. The idea that Smiley travels around the neighborhood remained pure speculation for several years, but a recent incident reinforced it for us. Mariko had mentioned to her boyfriend, Ronnie Freeman, that we had various spirits in our house, but she’d never described them or detailed Smiley’s behavior and movements. Recently, however, Ronnie had his own encounter with Smiley. Ronnie has developed an interest in American Indian culture and has been studying it. One night, while he was in his living room at home, he looked up to see a slight, hunched-over, dark-haired man enter through one of the doors and look right at him. The figure wore an Indian headdress and a huge, fiendish grin, and it was performing a mock Indian dance, as if satirizing Ronnie. Ronnie saw this for several seconds, then the figure vanished. Smiley hasn’t returned to Ronnie’s house since this episode—at least not so openly—but Ronnie has since sensed him at our house. The world, it would seem, is filled with various types of discorporeal entities. Some may be lingering spirits of the deceased, some shadows of the past, and some beings with awareness, will, and the ability to interact with those of us living in three-dimensional space. Whatever Smiley might be, he is an unwelcome, if relatively minor, presence in our lives, and my daughters wouldn’t mind in the least if he never returned from one of his periodic jaunts away from our home. Neither would I. From the forthcoming Book of Curiosities, by Christopher Dow. A version of this article was published in Fate, August 2006.