Before I was born, my family lived in this old house. It was one of those spooky houses at the end of a block — falling apart, boarded up windows, dead trees lining its perimeter, the whole lot. The neighborhood kids rumored it was haunted, but my family wasn’t so convinced.

One day, my brother, who must’ve been four or five years old at the time, was sitting on the floor and playing with a ball. My mom didn’t think much of it. He giggled and giggled, and eventually began talking to someone. My mom, annoyed by the noise, looked up at my brother. He had rolled the ball across the room towards the garage door. In the next moment, without my brother moving, the ball slid across the room back towards him. 

For the logical members of the audience, you might assume that an old house with a faulty foundation probably leaned a certain direction, and my brother just happened to be throwing the ball up a slant. My mom probably thought the same thing. But in the same instant that the ball shot across the room, a shrill laugh echoed throughout the house. My brother’s mouth had been completely and utterly closed. 

Fearful of the possibility of the paranormal and no doubt the decrepit nature of the house, my family decided to move far away. Since then, my mom and, by extension, the majority of my family began to believe in ghosts. This newfound belief, her personal belief in hechicería — Mexican witchcraft — and superstitions created a profound conviction in the otherworldly.

This conviction became especially prolific after my grandfather died when I was in middle school. Every bird perched on our windowsill, slight chill or fortuitous occurrence was the doing of my grandfather’s ghost. And then when my grandmother died, my mother continued with the same narrative. Now, it was the two of them working in unison, reunited in the afterlife. 

After they died, my mom moved into their old house. As we began moving things out — sorting through old vases, tchotchkes and various religious paraphernalia — things kept breaking. It felt as though the house was telling us to stop taking things out of it. To my mom, this was a paranormal reflection of my grandparents’ wishes from the afterlife. She believed that their ghosts kept destroying things to scold her for disrupting the sanctity of the house. A house she had grown up in, and they had cultivated. Despite this, she continued to move things out. We carried glassware, old clothes and rusty hardware to Goodwill, which allowed not only herself, but also her parents to move on from attachments to the worldly. 

As a kid, I thought of it as some form of grief-induced psychosis. I never liked to believe what my parents believed, so I rejected religion, paranormality and any worldview held by them. However, in hindsight, there is a certain beauty in believing in the paranormal. I know scientifically, it doesn’t make sense. A “soul” is not really real. Our brains are full of neurons firing signals to formulate a personality. But beyond science, I feel that there is a metaphysical necessity to the existence of a soul. A soul that will outlive your body. A soul that will exist across time and space for some unknown eternity. 

It’s almost too sad to think that we form all these connections with people, build so many memories, live such full lives and one day that all just stops. You’ll cease to be forever. So maybe it’s a way of escaping fear, and easier to think that there is no finality to your life, that you are eternal in some form or way. 

Beyond the fear of finality, it’s comforting that loved ones might be looking out for you, past their time on earth. Even if you can no longer talk to them and reap the benefits of all of their endless wisdom, they’re still there. An omnipresent force helping to guide you through life. Even as a skeptic, as someone who is against believing in the non-scientific, this fact has become too attractive not to at least entertain. 

So now, when my mom talks about ghosts — about feeling her father guiding her through life, about how present my grandparents are in my life, how they contributed to my acceptance to Yale — I no longer scorn her in my mind, or scoff at the idea of ghosts, because beyond reason, it’s quite a sweet thought.