I loved scary stories when I was a child, even though they terrified me in a way that was genuine and even unpleasant. I had tons of cheap paperback ghost story collections, which at times frightened me so badly I could hardly turn the page, before I graduated to Stephen King and Dean Koontz. The kind of scary story that scared and thrilled me most was the one that began in utter normalcy. (There were a lot of these: horror stories often begin in sweetness and light, an idyll to defile.) The moment of revelation was frightening, but somehow, the build-up was more compelling - the knowledge that something awful or terrifying was going to happen imbued it with a sense of mounting dread that I knew to exist in this world, while monsters, however scary they were to imagine, did not (or so my parents told me).

In retrospect, it seems like the really chilling part of scary stories that began in normalcy was the worldview they essayed: during the brightest and happiest times, some calamity is always waiting down the line - a worldview that it's scarily easy to adopt in adult life, after one has been knocked down a few times. But as a kid, all this was intuition; I didn't really believe that bad things would ever happen to me, and, feeling safe in that knowledge, a world in which awful things suddenly happened to ordinary people seemed all the more frightening for being so foreign to what I knew.

Some of these stories, I still remember today. There was one that scared the hell out of me about a man who woke up one morning to find that he had a new face, an awful and somehow monstrous face. Even weirder, the people he knew still recognized him, as if the face he didn't recognize was the one he'd always had. The kicker comes when the man wakes up to find his own, old face staring at him in the mirror and feels relieved, until he leaves for work and passers-by recoil in horror, and his bus driver doesn't recognize him.

This is heavy stuff for a kid, this Lynchian/Kafkan/psychogenic fugue stuff! The idea of madness - of reality slipping free from its moorings - always terrified me; Hitchcock's Vertigo, I watched with grim fascination. In fact, many of the stories that frightened me most involved slippages of identity, of the face and what lies behind it. I remember another story about a young bride who always wore a black ribbon around her neck, and refused to ever remove it. She and her husband had a happy life, yet the mystery of the black ribbon gnawed at him. Finally, one night, as his wife sleeps, he untied the black ribbon. Her head rolled off her neck and onto the floor. The disembodied head says, "I told you I couldn't take it off."

This is meant to be funny, but my god! That instant of untying, when the latent horror lurches out into the open - that chilled me. I read it as more of a cautionary parable than a joke: "Don't untie it!" I would mentally implore the husband each time I read it. "Your life is happy; leave well enough alone!" The genre of "funny" ghost stories were seldom funny, but always scary - I remember another one about a guy who goes to spend the night in an old mansion, as people in ghost stories are wont to do, for some kind of reward. A cat walks into the living room, and then, another enters, and asks the first cat, "Is it time?" "Not yet," says the first cat, "wait until Martin comes." More and more cats enter the room, one by one, each one asking the others if it's time, and being told to wait until Martin comes. Finally, the man says, "When Martin comes, tell him I couldn't wait!" and runs from the house. Ha. Ha. The mounting dread, as one cat after another entered the room, as "Martin" approached inexorably, always trumped the joke for me. These stories and God were my first introductions to the concepts of forces beyond my ken at work in this world, wild forces unbeholdened to the laws of reality that goverened me. The ghost stories always seemed more plausible, more connected to how I experienced the world every day - more similar in shape to whatever forces or sensations I intuited or imagined around me. They still do.

The story that I remember most vividly of all was about a man who finds a dusty old jigsaw puzzle, tucked in a forgotten corner of a secondhand shop. It's in a plain cardboard box, so he doesn't know what picture it makes. He buys it and takes it home to his apartment, where he lives alone, and begins to piece it together in his living room, at night. As he works out the border, he gets a sense of eerie familiarity. As he begins to lay in pieces toward the middle, it becomes apparent that the jigsaw puzzle is an image of a room; soon, as he fleshes out the room's wallpaper and couch, it becomes apparent that it is, in fact, the very room he's in. Obviously, he gets kind of freaked out, and gets up to lower the shade over the window. Eventually, he's filled in the whole puzzle except for the window. It's his room, exactly (although he isn't pictured in it). With trembling hands, he lays in the last few pieces, which form his window (with the shade, however, up), framing an awful face, leering through the window. He looks over in alarm, and the shade on the window flies up on its own. He sees the same face at his window, and the story ends.

This face is a manifestation of pure, eruptive horror, the calamity that rushes into our lives without warning or apparent meaning. I find myself looking for this face, out of the corner of my eye, always. Last night, I was alone at home, in my room, the window was open and it was dark outside. At a certain point I felt anxious and got up to close the blinds. I told myself I didn't want to let bugs in (my window screens are shoddy, so this is a valid concern), but actually, I was afraid of seeing that face, which open windows at night seem to court. In certain humors, the idea that a horrible face will suddenly appear at your window doesn't seem silly, it seems inevitable, especially in moments when we catch an intuition of forces moving and working beyond our ken. Empty houses seem to court these forces - who hasn't, regardless of what kind of language they want to use to talk about it, felt spirits or energies moving through their houses, when they're alone? What do we mean when we write this off as "nerves" or paranoia, why is this a satisfactory explanation? Why are houses or buildings that no longer contain humans essentially frightening, if it's only our "nerves" that give the spaces their spiritual charge?

One Friday night, a couple weeks ago, I decided to stay in and work on poems. My roommates were out of town. The house was empty, silent, and full of spirits. I don't mean this metaphorically, but I don't mean it quite literally either, because how do you talk about spirits literally? At any rate, I felt spirits. At a certain point, I had an epiphanic or ecstatic experience that I'm not sure I can relate here without sounding vague, crazy, or both, so I won't. But after this experience I felt wide open and buzzing, as these so-called spirits flowed and pushed around me. At a certain point, I opened the door of my room and stepped into the hall. My room had been bright, the rest of the house was completley dark, and an evil or malevolent or just frighteningly powerful spirit swept down the hallway. I felt a dark presence move past me, if not malevolent then malevolent-seeming in its dark power and my utter irrelevance to it. I became frightened, not of something concealed in the dark, but of the darkness itself. Feeling almost panicked, I flipped on the hallway light, which is dim and concentrated in a small area. It illuminated a sort of shrine my roommates made, covered with skull iconography, black veils, candles. This evil or dark totem came into the light and the rest of the house became darker by comparison, and I felt keenly aware of the precarity of light, and the obliterative, always-latent strength of darkness. I went into the bathroom and the shower curtain seemed to respire, as a black cat tread silently across the door frame. And at this point, I became frightened by the epiphanic or ecstatic experience I alluded to earlier, which was connected to someone I love dearly, and which, at the time, I regarded with positivity and wonder. Yet later, immersed in this scary house energy, I became paranoid that my previous experience was a sign of some danger related to this person I love. I called her to set my mind at ease, and told her everything I've just told you, and then some. She said that not long before, quite possibly at the moment of my epiphany or ecstasy, she had experienced a moment of intense anxiety, alone at her house in the country, about something that turned out to be nothing. Coincidence, or...? What do we even mean by coincidence? All I know is that our minds rang out together in that moment, like two glasses falling simultaneously from two counters in two empty rooms. Maybe this is a mystery, how two minds locked in two heads can know each other so well, and connect. Maybe it's utterly ordinary, an alignment on the wheels of chance. But weren't we both looking for the face in the window, that night? Wasn't it, perhaps, actually there?