The Ghost of Captain Morgan

A story about getting drunk near a haunted house

Almost every town has a building that's haunted. It might be an old school house, a boarded up residential home, or an abandoned mental institution. There are two similarities between all places where haunting is said to occur. One is that something painful happened there, the idea is that pain can lodge itself in the memory of a building, the same way it lodges itself in the memory of a person. The stories always follow a basic format. "That old library is haunted, three kids were murdered in its basement.” One may ask why three children were murdered in the library, or question a library as an ideal place for murder because of its strict policy on keeping quiet. But chances are, regardless of your incredulous questions, the next time you step in that library, you'll feel an extra chill in the air, or hear a creak in the distance where no person could have made the noise, or hear the faint screaming of children with a faint shushing of a librarian who died in the same building but of natural causes.

The second thing I've noticed is a little more vague but just as consistent, the places that are said to be haunted tend to be personal to the town itself. Homes, schools, slaughter houses, repertory theaters. I think this is because ghosts and spirits are personal. We like to imagine that we have souls that live beyond our bodies, and when we think about the afterlife, we like to consider our souls inhabiting a place that has spirit itself. I've asked many people about the haunted places in their hometowns, and I still have never heard of a haunted Walmart or a haunted McDonald's, unless those buildings used to house an establishment with a soul. Then, much like the human dead, the deceased business will haunt the new corporate establishment that occupies its frame.

The haunted place in my neighborhood was a home. Unlike many haunted homes, which tend to exist on the outskirts of town, this one was in the middle of my neighborhood, prime real estate. There was a hilarious feature to my street where, even though there were less than 100 residents, the main street led into a roundabout that branched into three even less populated streets. The roundabout was so infrequently used that us neighborhood kids would play in the roundabout, climbing the large boulder in its center and yelling things at cars that would pass. This sounds unsafe, but no one would dare drive above 15 miles an hour or they would receive phone calls or even visits from neighborhood parents, knocking on their doors and politely asking them to slow down. That's how small my world was.

The haunted house was facing the roundabout. There were three other houses around the roundabout, but we all knew who lived in those, no one knew who lived in the fourth, so it was speculated that no one lived there. So why did a light flicker on and off in the uppermost room of the house so frequently? My dad brought this up to me once when we were driving home at night after watching a minor league baseball game.

"You see that?" He said, while I was in the passenger seat half asleep. "I swear there's someone in there, but you never see a car in the driveway."

Maybe it's because the idea that the place was haunted was put in my head by a parental figure, but it stuck with me all the way through high school, up to the first night I ever got drunk, and that liquor gave me the courage to confront the ghost.

"Danny boy!" My friend Mac used to say, as he walked into my house unannounced. Mac and I agreed we could walk into each other's homes at any time without knocking. This was a lovely, innocent gesture that eventually led to me walking in on his dad masterbating in front of their family computer in their kitchen.

Mac played a huge part in my life. He was cool by every metric, he was funny and a good athlete, and back then, that was every metric to me. Mac had brought me out from being a recluse to actually going to parties, talking to people, and even getting closer than 8 feet away from a woman. It was my sophomore year, and when Mac came over, I thought the night would go like most other nights that year. We would eat almost all the food in the refrigerator and watch a SyFy original movie. If you've never seen them, before SyFy original movies lost their way, they would pump out feature films at a rate that seemed almost hourly. The films should be about a CGI creature terrorising actors that either just got out of porn or were on their way to getting into porn. My favorites were the ones where two CGI creatures had to fight each other, like Mega Shark Vs. Giant Octopus. Those films required long scenes of CGI battles where you could almost feel the animator giving up midway through. Often, they would use the same cut of the Mega Shark biting Giant Octopus 5 different times in the movie. I've always respected someone whose work reflects how much they're getting paid.

This night was different. There was a new girl who moved into the neighborhood. Her name was Christy, and like all girls, she was interested in Mac. Many of my early interactions with girls involved young women who were interested in Mac, and due to my proximity, would entertain my existence.

The transition out of adolescence was slow for me. I was a lonely kid, and in my loneliness, I receded into my own imagination. If there were drugs or booze around when I was 12, I would have receded into them, but I was lucky. Most of my formative experiences happened in my own head. I never got in a fistfight, but I imagined pummeling any classmate who would slight me in the hallway or comment on my weight. I didn't experience success in sports, but in my head I was soaring through the air and dunking on kids in grades far above mine. I didn't speak to girls, let alone date one, but when I stared out the window instead of paying attention to the classes I was falling desperately behind in, I was a mid-pubescent casanova. I was pulled from my daydreams and into the real world around the age of fifteen. Fantasies of sports were replaced by several sprained ankles and concussions on the football field. Fantasy of fights was replaced by my witnessing real fights, and realizing a spinning roundhouse kick might be harder to pull off than I imagined, and fantasizing about girls was replaced with their actual proximity to me. Luckily, the night Mac came over was well before my first attempt at a sexual experience, which was so painfully negative it's almost difficult to recall, and ended in the girl I was with, who was 3 years older than me, saying, "I've had better."

Girls were still novel at this point, and Mac had invited two to my house.

"My mom is home dude." I protested feebly. I knew whenever Mac got an idea, he was going to follow through on it.

"We'll go in the basement, come on, Chrissy has a hot friend for you," Mac replied. I remember that's exactly what he said because it felt so funny to me, a friend "for you" like she was being offered in a medieval exchange of farmland. I still wonder what her end of the conversation looked like. Chrissy takes her to the side and goes, "Please, I desperately want to hook up with Mac, just distract his weird friend."

In an hour, they were there, in my basement, drinking Captain Morgan straight from the bottle and dancing. I decided to sit the dancing part out, but accepted Captain Morgan, not wanting to make these girls think I was a 16-year-old boy who didn't like the taste of straight rum. I imagined myself as a tough, swarthy drinker who could stomach anything in a bottle, and once again my imagination collided with reality like a crash test dummy in a Fiat. The room began to spin as I watched Mac take a huge pull from the bottle while they danced. Chrissy in front of him, her friend, Macy, behind him. They were hammered, and I was hammered in a different way. Everyone knows if you drink while dancing, the alcohol shoots straight to the pleasure center of your brain and causes a rush of endorphins, but if you drink while you're sitting down, the booze pools in the part of your brain that causes you to ruminate.

"Dan!" Mac would call from the dance floor, "come on, Macy wants to dance with you."

"I'm good, I'm not much for dancing." I would reply, in the weird, vaguely southern way I would speak when I was nervous. Eventually they danced themselves out, and Crissy needed to go home. Mac lived in the other direction, so I offered to walk the girls back to Chrissy's place. If you're a real bummer at parties the least you can do is try and render yourself useful.

Walking while drunk for the first time felt like what I assume Buzz Aldrin felt the first time he was walking on the moon. It was exhilarating, the lubrication in my joints turning me into a new, much cooler person. Booze has worked on me like that maybe three times in my life, all three left me with an understanding of why people become alcoholics. To feel that sort of slack, uninhibited fluidity might be worth never seeing your kids again.

The girls and I started down the dark road, untouched by street lights. They chatted among themselves and I tried to stay quiet. That was until we were at the halfway point, heading into the roundabout. That's when I said, "Wait, stop!"

They did, worried there was something wrong, when they turned around, they saw me staring at the light in the haunted house.

"What are you doing?" Chrissy asked.

"That light, sometimes it's on, and sometimes it's not, but no one goes in and out of the house."

"So?" She replied, shortly. "Let's keep going.

‘So?’ I thought as we continued walking. ‘So? So who's up there? So is there a spirit that lives in the sporadically illuminated bedroom? So what if you were to go in there?’ I was silent for the rest of the walk. They side-hugged me goodbye and I started my way back, unsure why I was now filled with a little boil of anger, maybe the booze was turning on me. I walked maybe ten yards before I got a brilliant idea to change my mood, I could run home. I was wearing my running shoes, and it was cross country season so I was in great shape, and now that alcohol is coursing through my adolescent veins, I'll probably run even better.

I took off, my feet picking up and falling beneath me, I felt like the roadrunner in the Wile E. Coyote cartoons, my legs working furiously beneath me, while my upper body was unaffected. I still remember the sense of freedom in my body. It felt like if I wanted to, I could run a marathon without getting out of breath. The dark road fell beneath me like the belt of a treadmill. The dark tree branches, like arms, reached out to grab me, but I was too fast for them. All the discomfort I had from the "party" was whisked away and replaced by the pure sensation of joy for my own body. I pulled up after about a half mile when I saw the roundabout. It felt less like I was walking, more like I was being pulled, right towards the haunted house.

So? I thought again, as I made my way up the driveway. So? So. So, so, so. So here we go.

Halfway down the driveway I stopped. I had never been this close to the building that harbored a terrible fantasy throughout my childhood. I saw the light was coming from a standing lamp on a nightstand. Because of my angle, I couldn't see what was on the nightstand. I decided, in the drunken haze of my mind, I would move forward, see once and for all what my adolescent mind had been constructing fantasies around all these years, and maybe kill that part of me that still clung to imagination rather than real life. That's when I saw her. I was looking up at the window, when a dark figure, with long hair rose from beneath the window sill. It may have been the fact that the figure was backlit, but the figure seemed to have no face, and where the face should have been, there was a darkness like a night with no stars. I turned and ran again, this time faster. I wish officials from the South Shore track and field commission were there to see me. I think I cleared 800 meters in a minute flat. When I got to my house, images of the head rising into view behind the window that captured so much of my childhood imagination flashed in my mind. For the first time, I locked the front door behind me.

I wish I had more time to ruminate on what I saw, but a new, more pressing issue presented itself. I rushed to the bathroom and vomited for a good long 10 minutes straight. It turns out there's a reason why running drunk isn't a widely known pastime. Sure, it feels great in the moment, but you’re incurring a debt on your body that will be collected in huge painful heaves. When I felt I was done, I went to bed, thinking the whole matter of drinking and ghosts was behind me. I was wrong.

I woke up at 11 am that Saturday morning, with my dad standing in my doorway. That was strange because my parents were divorced and I was at my moms house.

"Dad?" I said, with a hoarseness in my voice from the previous night's sickness.

"Heard you were drinking, son."

It turns out that when your mom hears music from the basement until 2 A.M. and then hears you throwing up at 3 A.M, she doesn't need a criminal law degree to understand what's happening. She called my dad, thinking the man who had been through years of AA would have a better grasp on what was going on with me. He knew this was a freak occurrence; one of the benefits of being a loser is you are given the benefit of the doubt. Having a drinking problem was just too cool for me.

My dad did take the time to describe his own issues with alcohol, stemming from drinking from middle school until adulthood. It turns out there was another ghost around, and not one of the cool fun kind of ghosts that turns a light on in an abandoned home and pops its head up to scare you. In adulthood, the specters of childhood turn real. I learned that the ghost of booze and drugs and anger had haunted my dad for years. He might as well have had a flashlight under his chin while he told me how hard it was to kick his habits. Ghost stories, no matter how exaggerated, generally serve a purpose. After that night, I didn't get drunk other than on special occasions, and I never approached a haunted house again.