Mike didn’t like Stinky Ghost. Ok, that’s a lie. Mike didn’t believe in Stinky Ghost and every time I talked about him, he was visibly uncomfortable. He never thought it was funny to talk about Stinky Ghost, whereas, I felt like I had to tell the story since the house smelled so unpleasant. I didn’t want people to think that I was a bad housekeeper. Really, the house smelled like this when we moved in.

I had started smelling men’s aftershave. It wasn’t Mike’s scent. He wears my favorites, but this stuff smelled like Old Spice. It smelled like another man’s aftershave. I figured it was Stinky Ghost trying to clean up his image. I would have preferred Polo or maybe Drakkar Noir, but Old Spice was tons better than smelly sweat socks.

One evening, I smelled the Old Spice again. I asked Mike if he had done anything with any of the aftershaves that he has. I thought that maybe one of his older items had gone bad and changed its scent, but he said he hadn’t touched anything. I was in the bathroom and he was in the bedroom. I said, “It must be Stinky Ghost. I’m going to have to call him Sexy Ghost if he keeps this up.” I could tell that Mike didn’t like what I said, so I back pedaled, “Well, Stinky Ghost was too fat to be a Sexy Ghost.” At that moment, the electric toothbrush fell on my head. Mike didn’t enjoy my mirth at the idea of Stinky Ghost making the electric toothbrush falling on my head because I called him fat.

The smells came and went all summer. Sweat socks, Old Spice and even one day, I smelled lavender soap. It smelled like that kind of French milled soap that makes me sneeze and I was sneezing furiously that day. I called out, “Stinky Ghost, I don’t know what you bathed in, but I’m allergic to it so go take a shower or something.” The smell of cheap lavender soap left and my sneezing subsided.

One day, Mike called me in the middle of the day. It was obvious to me that he hadn’t slept much and might even be calling me in the half-awake state that leaves me confused at the end of our conversations.

“What’s the matter? Why aren’t you asleep?” I asked him.

“I’ve been trying to sleep, but the phone kept ringing.”

“Who’s calling you?”

“It wasn’t my phone. It was the phone in the basement.”

I was quiet on the other end of the line. When we moved to this home, we decided that we weren’t going to have a land line phone at this house, just our mobile phones. We didn’t need a home phone. It hadn’t been connected. We had washed our hands of Qwest and gladly paid the last bill. Mike continued through my silence.

“The brown phone in the basement. Remember seeing it down there? It was ringing.”

I remembered the brown phone. It was an ancient rotary wall phone attached to one of the support beams downstairs in the unfinished basement. It was near the washer and dryer. I had noticed that it had been hardwired in, which explained why the owner hadn’t removed it.

“Yeah, I remember it. Did you answer it?”

“Yeah and the people kept asking for Kevin. It scared the hell out of me.”

“Mike, that phone isn’t supposed to work. It hasn’t been connected. Maybe it’s still hooked up from the previous residents.”

“No, his name was Mike. These guys wanted Kevin.”

“It’s a Ghost Phone. Stinky Ghost’s name is Kevin! Did you ask them what year it was?”

Mike and I laughed about the Ghost Phone. He ended up taking it off the hook so that he could sleep. The phone company must have mixed up the lines somehow and things got sent to our house instead of wherever they were supposed to be. A few days later, we returned the handset to its rightful place and it has never rung again.

Pick Me! » Stinky Ghost (Part 1 of 3)

Pick Me! » Stinky Ghost (Part 3 of 3)