How Many Ghosts Are In the Room?

On my thirteenth Halloween I stayed over at my dad’s apartment on the other side of town, and for hours, well into the morning, we watched a live taping of a paranormal investigation on the Discovery Channel. The host was blond and the psychic had an earring and they were somewhere historic in the UK. The night-vision camera gave the TV an eerie green glow, the blond host had big eyes like a doll; we were rapt with attention. There were sightings of children who’d passed and mothers in cloaks and fathers who walked about in suits. Tapping and knocking and tiny objects making incremental movements. Orbs abound. EVP recordings. 

We sat in the living room and our mouths opened in surprise when something seemingly irrefutable happened—we were never to be called skeptics. We ate Oreos in the semi-dark and it was one of my favorite Halloweens and I knew it as it was happening. 

*

My father’s father died the previous winter while we were visiting my grandparents in the Florida condo they only moved into a few months before. The night before his death, my grandfather looked at his son and said, “I’m done,” and motioned toward the hospital-room window. 

After the funeral, but within the month, my father claimed to have had a vision, an event distinctly not a dream. His father had appeared to him while he was in bed. He was young and bright, and he told my father not to worry. It shook my dad in a way I’d never seen before. He was incredulous. Nearly speechless. He had trouble concentrating at work the next day and left early.  

For the rest of his life, if my dad spoke of his father, he would smell the familiar scent of his father’s aftershave and tell me he felt a “tingling” all around him. 

I don’t think our interest in the afterlife or ghosts began with my grandfather’s death—at least, not mine, anyway. I was a morbid kid with a curiosity about death since my maternal grandmother passed when I was five and I was first exposed to grief. My favorite shows were things like “Scooby-Doo” and Disney Channel’s “So Weird” and I adored Fox Mulder and “The X-Files.” I was captivated by other worlds and secrets and monsters only some people could see. I wished I was a psychic, and maybe it was because I wanted to speak to my grandmother again, but if it was, that’s not the part I remember most about that wish. 

But after my grandfather passed, an interest in paranormal investigative shows was something my dad and I liked to share. 

*

It wasn’t long into my teenage years that it became clear that my father’s heart was unwell, and so was his twin brother’s and so was his older sister’s. All of them had pacemakers by the time I was a college freshman at a small and famous liberal arts school that welcomed weird, morbid kids. With Christmas lights strung up all over the surrounding suburban town and my first semester nearly complete, my paternal grandmother suffered a stroke; ultimately her children chose to remove life support. Like a fable, it was said they could feel when her soul left her body, that the energy in the room changed. 

While I continued my studies and got altogether too caught up in the drama of dating and college kids, my father’s heart continued to falter. There were sudden episodes and trips to the ER that I was only made aware of once he and my stepmother returned home. 

 In the spring of my senior year, my father suffered a near-death experience, one in which doctors had to revive him. I don’t remember many of the details if they were all given to me, but there were words like “congestive heart failure” and “without improvement, heart transplant,” but I let those words wash right over me. I didn’t want to think about them. I visited him multiple times in the hospital, taking the train from the town next to campus, catching a ride with a cousin who was used to driving in the city. I only told one person what was going on, not even the closest of my friends, over a parfait lunch and didn’t allow the conversation to last long. 

I’d been dreaming of my father’s death my entire life: nightmares that would leave me feeling chilled and shaky from the time I was a little girl. I never had nightmares about anyone else this way, only about him. I never told anyone about these dreams. And so, I handled the reality of his waning health the same way I handled the dreams. By keeping the truth to myself, I didn’t allow it to exist in my outer world. Avoid the fear of it. It wasn’t the same as watching Fox Mulder on TV, but I leaned into the escapism of internships and my upcoming graduation, and within months of that, a new relationship that would later turn into my marriage, the same way I would if I were watching an episode from season 6. 

When I visited my father in his home, we would still watch documentaries about the dead and rock music videos and true crime trash. He would DVR things he knew I would enjoy and wait for me to come over so we could watch them together. Once, when I visited, I saw he’d purchased a copy of The Long Island Medium’s book, and I was taken aback; my father was no reader. Severe dyslexia gave him a bad taste for the activity. However, I was a reader, and by then an emerging writer with a couple of publications in small literary magazines. I was in the middle of applying to MFA programs for fiction writing, and my father had always been in awe of my love for that which challenged him most. But there was that glossy hardcover on the end table where he always left his keys: such was his interest in life after death. 

After he needed resuscitation, he became fearful, more neurotic and anxious than he let on in front of me, and probably, most other people. It was from my stepmother that I learned he always needed her in the room because he feared he would die again, for real.  

Never once did it occur to me to ask him what he’d seen before resuscitation, if anything at all. Such was my disinterest in knowing that he might go to a place I could no longer reach him. 

*

When he really did die, I was 24, in my second semester of grad school and walking home from the Metro North to a dreadful basement apartment I found through student housing. Except for my cat, I was alone when I got the news that he had already been pronounced deceased—that he had literally dropped dead. 

And on the night of his funeral, I was reminded of the sensation my dad used to feel when he spoke of his own father’s ghost. My hair felt like it was being touched. Both of my arms felt pins and needles—an icy, pleasant tingling. The feeling moved down my arms to my palms and stayed there for hours. My partner also felt the chill and the pins and needles on their own skin when they touched mine. They were compelled to say phrases and inside jokes specific to my father, who they had only spent time with on three occasions; referencing movie quotes my father loved from 1970s cinema they had never seen. It was a wild night—like my own personal paranormal investigation show. 

For months, lights in our apartment would turn on by themselves; a vintage VCR rewound on its own accord in the middle of a home-video binge after I said aloud that I was too tired to get up and do it myself; my father appeared in my dreams, looking as he did when I was a kid—dark hair, crooked smile. The icy tingling continued. Once, my partner and I both heard a disembodied voice. We heard stories of family members’ alarm systems crying out for no reason and his twin brother reported the feeling of someone jumping on his bed as he was trying to rest on hard night. Our cat often played with something unseen the same way he would play with us or toys. 

Meanwhile, I dissociated, lost time, forget nearly everything that happened in the previous year of my life, forget to show up for work shifts on days I didn’t have classes. Wept on commuter trains and inside the Dunkin’ Donuts beside the Manhattan museum where I worked. I became my own unreliable narrator.

Despite the clear indicators leading up to it—the paleness of his skin, the way he kept his home too warm, how he suddenly looked much older than his identical twin, how he insisted I not wait to tell him news of my engagement in-person after his vacation in two weeks, but instead right then on the phone—I was shocked by my father’s death. Felt like a felled tree by the event. Felt like I was living on my hands and knees, as though standing was impossible. Completely traumatized by one of my biggest and oldest fears come to fruition, I felt like I was living in a liminal space where rules and logic were nonsensical. I sat through my writing workshops feeling confident that the ghost of my dad was standing behind me, could hear my thoughts if I directed them toward him as if we were having a private conversation. I constantly wondered, how many ghosts are in the room? Because if my father was there, all these other people must have their ghosts with them, too, right? There were times while my fiancée drove our car down a random highway, I turned to look in the back seat, feeling deeply and truly, that he was taking the ride with us. 

*

It's been almost nine years since then and I have often wondered how many of my experiences were symptoms of grief or now-diagnosed anxiety, PTSD, and depression. Or, if they were symptoms of that imagination of mine, reaching for an alternative reality, a deep dive into escape.  

But then I think of the things my spouse experienced with me; heard, saw, felt. So, I couldn’t have imagined the lamp suddenly bright in the middle of the night, or how tissues I dropped to the floor in the middle of crying inconsolably formed a perfect letter “Z” to represent our last name. And there are still times when, if I speak aloud to my father, and it’s quiet and peaceful, I’ll feel the icy tingling on my skin and hair, the same as the night of his funeral. This, even though I’m medicated for my mental illnesses, actively present in my life, working as a full-time magazine editor, and stationed in an above-ground apartment in a regular apartment building in a different part of town. All this, even though I’m seemingly a reliable narrator now. 

Then again, maybe I am still just trying to step out of this reality in small ways. Maybe I’m still the 13-year-old watching a live paranormal investigation show and I’m enthralled by the notion of something beyond the mundane details everyone can see. I’ll never really know which it is, but I know what I would like to believe. I know that every time I turn on one these shows and I’m alone, I’ll invite my father to watch along with me.

-Michele Zimmerman

Michele Zimmerman (she/her) is a queer writer with an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. Her fiction can be found in Catapult's TINY NIGHTMARES anthology, POST ROAD, and HARPUR PALATE among others. In the past she has been a winner of the FRACTURED LIT Anthology II Prize and the 2021 BLOOD ORANGE REVIEW Literary Contest. Recently, she was name a Finalist for the 2025 NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW's Kurt Vonnegut Prize for Speculative Fiction. By day she is an editor for a magazine about illumination and design. Find her at www.michelezimmerman.com.