I have always hated the basement of the house I grew up in.   

My two older sisters have similar feelings for the basement.  Even before I was born, and my mother purchased a piano that resides to this day in the living room, my big sisters would have to venture down to the basement to practice their piano lessons on the old piano mom had grown up playing.  They tell me that they would go down together to keep each other company (what I think they really meant was to guard/protect each other), but often-times, whoever played first would bolt and abandon the other sister to practice alone.   

The house is not particularly old - it was built less than 50 years ago by my father and grandfather as our family home in what used to be a waste-land near what had been farmland.  The area of North Jersey where the house stands has been inhabited by Europeans since the 1600s and by Native Americans before that, but to my knowledge nothing truly tragic has taken place there to leave restless spirits behind. 

As far as basements go, this one should really not be particularly frightening.  It was as large as the house above it, and the majority of it was finished to serve as an area for entertaining as large as the kitchen, dining, and living rooms above, as well as a finished office for my father located under my parent’s bedroom.  The remaining basement area was unfinished and functioned as a workshop for my father and also contained the ubiquitous hot water heaters and furnace which just so happened to be under my own bedroom.  It was in this room I had my own brush with the paranormal as a child. 

At the foot of the basement stairs you could turn right and enter my father’s office.  Turn left, and you’d be in the large finished portion.  Directly behind and under the stairs was a closet my mother used to store home-canned goods, and to the right of it a set of shelves containing years of National Geographic magazines.  If you’d turn around while standing in front of the closet and the shelves, you would face the old piano and to the left of it a small bathroom.  To your left was the doorway into the workshop and through that doorway, again to the left, was the second entrance into the office.  Straight ahead, but on the left wall of this large room was a chalkboard.  My father had hung this up as entertainment for all of us kids.  It was as large as a basic school chalkboard and it did get a lot of use. 

One summer’s day, my best friend P, her older sister D and I convinced my mom that we should be allowed to play school in the basement – we were probably around 10 years old.  Normally, if the weather was fine we’d be banished to the outdoors for all but lunch and bathroom breaks, but mom caved and down we went.  I supposed we had been playing/drawing on the board happily for quite some time when for some reason, both D and I turned our heads to the left towards the stair closet and shelves.  Coming out of the unopened closet (or I should say through the door) was the electric man.  I have no better way of describing it/him than to say it was shaped like a man, but composed of vibrating yellowish light.  Think of the pulsing light you see behind your eyelids when you press your fists to your eyes, or of a cartoon character that has stuck his finger in the light socket.  The electric man pulsed his way from the closet, across the hall and vanished behind the piano. 

D and I looked at each other stunned and stuttered, “Did you see that?!”  P had no idea what we were talking about – she hadn’t experienced the urge to look to her left and had continued drawing during our citing.  At this point, D and I were pretty agitated and P opted to walk us several times around the basement to prove that there was nothing there and that it was all our imagination.  We didn’t see anything else, but neither D nor I would deny that we HAD seen something, even if it was now gone.  I don’t believe we spent much longer down the basement that day. 

At least thirty years have passed since this happened.  Sometimes when I visit with P, we talk about what I saw and she didn’t.  I think she believes me now even if she wasn’t so sure then.  If I’m visiting my parents, I still don’t like to go into their basement alone, much to my parents’ amusement or chagrin.  They have never experienced any sense of unease down there – at least not that they’d admit to me or my sisters. 

I have no idea what we saw that day, but this poem that I learned as a little girl pretty much sums up my feelings about it: 

The other day upon the stair

I saw a man that wasn’t there. 

He wasn’t there again today,

But gee I wish he’d go away.