Holy Ghost

5000 Block of South Ada Street. c1943

When we were little kids, we often stayed overnight at our grandparents house on South Ada Street in Chicago. It was usually a fun time. We would explore my grandparents neighborhood, which was exotic to us little suburbanites. I seem to remember a house on the corner that had chickens in the back yard. Down on Ashland Avenue we could see people panhandling, and at the time I seriously considered that to be a viable career choice. Just stand out there and people give you money, what's not to like? Obviously as I got older I realized the folly of that idea. Back at my grandparents house my grandmother often would bake bread, filling the place with a delicious aroma. In the dining room was a player piano that entertained us for hours. There were a lot of wondrous things to entertain us when visiting grandma and grandpa.

As much fun as that house was for us, it also held some scary and fearful things. Their basement was a dark, dank cave like place, with piles of coal everywhere. I always expected some kind of beast to come bounding out from behind one of them. In the attic, accessed by narrow, steep stairs, were the beds we slept in when we stayed overnight. In that small cramped space that smelled like a pair of old shoes, our Aunt Mary would tell us ghost stories in the dark. If ever there was a boogeyman hiding under the bed, I'm sure it would have been in that attic.

All that paled by comparison to what was in my grandparents bedroom. In that room was a terrifying apparition. It was up on the wall, and it scared the hell out of me. It was a picture of dead Jesus with his eyes closed. The trick was that if you stared at it long enough the eyes would pop open. Worked every time and scared the shit out of me.