I smell dead people

I’ve never referred to my mom’s dad as grandpa. Not grampa. And certainly not grandfather. To me, and everyone else in my family, he’s always been papa.

A lifelong Illinois farmer and lover of maintaining a stretch of land, big or small, papa must have gotten a kick out of me buying my own home in 2019, situated on a 3,615-square-foot lot in New Orleans and raised up just ever so on brick columns, holding on for dear life in the years of punishing weather it’s withstood since I became its steward.

Spending most of my formative summers attached to the heels of his boots as he puttered around in the various barns and sheds of his farm, flanked by walls of corn on two sides and soy beans and a crick (not creek) on the others, the smell of my papa is cellular to me. Good, warm, dark and healthy soil. Dutch Masters cigars. Motor oil, dispersed among the tractors, pickup truck and the red motorcycle he’d take me out on some afternoons. The smell of the breeze through the apple trees on a summer day. And Chiclets, a constant rattling in his front shirt pocket. This combination meant comfort and security to me, more so than the roof over my head, so it’s nice that, when he’s here, my own property as an adult can take on some of that sensory coziness, which makes a home feel more like a home than anything else.

I’ve always had a thing for smells. That weird Strawberry Shortcake doll that would burp its signature scent in your face when you squeezed its stomach. Scratch ‘N Sniff stickers that ran the gamut from traditional yum to secretly preferred yuck: Root beer, bubblegum, grass, wet dog. Throughout the years, my affections for my friends would be tied to their smells (Marlboro Reds, dirty jeans, sandalwood or CK One . . . um . . . fog machine). And my other closest family members, similar to my papa, all come with specific scents that map their presence in my home from room to room, front yard to back, so vividly. So significantly. I often find myself calling out the name of who the smell belongs to after they’ve passed by.

I’ll catch a whiff of my papa’s tractor-y cigar smell out back, by the tankless water heater.

“Hi, papa!”

I’ll walk from my bedroom to the kitchen, straight through a cloud of hairspray, Febreze and Barclay cigarettes.

“Hi, mom!”

A strong waft of cut cantaloupe.

“Hi, gramma!”

And, when I need it the most, a freshly washed flannel shirt comingled with the oddly pleasant aroma of uncooked meat.

“Daddy.”

Makes it easy to forget that none of these people have ever stepped a foot in my house. And never will. Because they’ve all been dead for years.

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As someone who has always been fascinated with the paranormal, as far back as I can remember, I have always kind of assumed that, at some point or another, I would come in close contact with a ghost. I’ve certainly made myself an easy target for them.

My first dabbling with the paranormal took place in the living room of the previously mentioned farm in Illinois when, one sunny summer afternoon, my cousin Amy and I made contact with who knows what from the beyond via a Ouija Board she discovered in her attic — inarguably the most terrifying of places to chance upon such a thing.

After asking it the standard sort of questions that we both suspected the other was moving the planchette to answer: “Does so and so like me back?” “Will I ever have a golden retriever like Brandon from ‘Punky Brewster?’” “Do I actually need to learn math?” I stepped up to crank the freakiness dial, establishing a burgeoning personality trait, and voiced the question: “What do you look like?”

“Mirror,” the board spelled out. And judging by my cousin’s face, she did not spell this out herself.

After staring into each other’s eyes for several very long seconds, I summoned the courage to get up from where I was seated, criss cross applesauce on the rug, to walk to the nearest mirror, which was in the hallway bathroom. Flicking on the light switch, because no way was I gonna do this in the dark, I padded apprehensively to the narrow mirror over the sink, knowing with everything in me that I was about to see the scariest thing I had ever, or would ever, encounter in my life. But it was just me in the reflection, and my mushroom hair.

I wanted more, though. I was already hooked on the concept of finding proof that there was something beyond death for all of us. That there was more to life than what could be seen, or even imagined.

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As I grew older, starting in my teens, when I had my own money to spend on spooky pastimes and adventures, I read as many books as I could get my hands on that told tales of ghost sightings and haunted locations, making a mental note of places that I hoped to one day visit myself in my continued pursuit of paranormal confirmation, and I’ve made it to quite a few since, with plans to cross more off the list. And though nary a ghost has been sighted — yet — that doesn’t mean I haven’t gotten all the proof I’ve been looking for.

In 2012, I took my girlfriend at the time to stay at the Lizzie Borden Bed & Breakfast in Fall River, Massachusetts, celebrating our first (and only) Valentine’s Day together with plans to spend a romantic evening in what’s marketed as the most haunted room in the house, the John Morse room, the very room where Abby Borden was found dead, right next to the bed where we’d be sleeping.

(Matthew J. Lee/The Boston Globe via Getty Images) A portrait of Lizzie Borden hangs inside the Lizzie Borden House.

I say “where we’d be sleeping” here, rather than “slept,” because no sleep was had that night, and not because romance activities kept us from our slumber.

After checking in, putting our stuff in the room and joining in on the pre-purchased tour of the house, the giggles and “this is so crazy” fun of the experience transitioned into earnest fright, especially once the sun went down. I remember walking up the creaky stairs of the house to our room and feeling like I was walking somewhere with high elevation. As the night wore on, I felt dizzy, sick to my stomach and, at the worse of it, was overtaken by the out-of-nowhere feeling of rage. Sitting on the bed and looking around the room while my girlfriend dozed off for a bit, I jumped out of my skin when I heard her voice after a long stretch of silence, telling me that she’d had a brief dream that someone was dragging her under the bed.

We fled late at night to stay at the house of a friend who lived nearby, returning the next morning for the included breakfast of Johnny Cakes shaped like axes. Talking to the only other couple who managed not to chicken out like we did, I’ll never forget the looks on their faces when they learned we’d left in the midnight hour. They’d heard footsteps that they’d assumed were ours walking up and down the stairs all night long.

To redeem myself from that experience, I stayed at a few more haunted locations and actually did manage to find sleep within.

In 2016, I took my wife at the time to, regretably, spend our 2nd wedding anniversary in a cottage on the grounds of The Myrtles Plantation in St. Francisville, Louisiana, said to be one of the most haunted locations in all of America. The cottage we stayed in, specifically, was said by our tour guide to be one of the most “active” spots on the grounds, thought to be a hangout for the ghosts of children who died on the property, using it as a playhouse just as they did when they were alive.

The guide told us that previous guests had reported toys packed in their luggage for their own children would be discovered misplaced and something seemed to have found a toy of sorts in our luggage as, on our first waking morning, the freshly charged battery on a certain something or other that we’d brought with us for the anniversary trip had gone dead in the night, and it wasn’t our doing, as much as I’d like to brag that it had been.

(wanderluster/Getty Images) Caretaker’s Cottage at Myrtles Plantation, built in 1796, is one of America’s most haunted places, Great River Road, St. Francisville, Louisiana.

Where many a ghost hunter has robbed themselves of a successful fact-finding mission by considering lack of a visual ghost sighting to be a bust, when seeking proof of the paranormal, I’ve been guilty of the same.

For all the eerie experiences I’ve had, I still find myself questioning if ghosts can possibly be real, even though I live alone yet, entering the house after being gone for a few hours, I’ll find it smelling exactly like the house I grew up in with my parents. Or, sitting down on my couch to watch TV at night, I’ll look over at the framed aerial photo of my gramma and papa’s farm hung on the wall, and, all of a sudden, the room will smell like their TV room, circa 1982.

I have to ask myself, how much proof is proof enough?

I’ve felt my heart stop, swearing I caught a glimpse of my long-dead cat saunter by, out of the corner of my eye. I’ve played with a handheld ghost detector at a Christmas party and been surprised by the shocked expressions on the faces of my friends, hearing it go off continuously when touched to the necklace around my neck, which belonged to my mom. And I’ve been playfully baffled to hear, time and time again, that no one else who’s taken the Graceland tour in Memphis, Tennessee thought, like I had, both times I’ve gone, that the kitchen area still smelled strongly like fried food.

The proof is there. And if this ends up being nothing more than a figment of my imagination, where’s the harm in choosing not to question it, if it gives me something I’ve been so painfully missing.