hauntI don’t really believe in ghosts, just so that’s out of the way up front. My aunt Carol did though, and she recorded everything, conversations, weird noises, on this ancient handheld recorder she kept in her cardigan pocket like it was a phone.

She called it collecting true ghost encounters. Everyone in the family just called it embarrassing, quietly, at Thanksgiving, never to her face.

She died last March. Heart thing, in her sleep, which felt like a strange kind of luck for someone so obsessed with the other side.

My mom got stuck cleaning out the house in Scranton, and I got stuck helping because I was between jobs and had nothing better to do with a Tuesday.

There were maybe forty tapes in a shoebox under her bed, most of them boring, grocery lists, a recipe for some lemon cake she never finished explaining because the tape ran out mid sentence.

One tape said, in her shaky handwriting, “scary halloween experiences, do not erase.”

I put it in mostly out of boredom. My mom was downstairs arguing with the estate guy about a couch nobody actually wanted.

Started normal. Carol’s voice, describing trick or treaters, some neighbor’s dog that wouldn’t stop barking, the usual stuff old women narrate to themselves.

About six minutes in she says something about hearing footsteps upstairs, even though she lived alone and always locked both doors, she was specific about that, both doors.

Here’s the part I didn’t expect. You can hear her actually go check. Stairs creaking under her weight, breathing getting heavier the way old people breathe doing something they know they shouldn’t.

Then nothing for almost two full minutes. Just tape hiss, and I remember checking if the recorder had frozen because it felt that long.

Her voice comes back quieter, like she’s trying not to be heard by whatever’s in the room with her. Said there was someone sitting on the bed, not doing anything, just looking at the door like waiting for her to come back in.

I stopped the tape there. Not scared exactly, my hands just went a little cold and I didn’t love that feeling in a house I still had three hours left to pack up.

Went downstairs, told my mom half joking that Carol’s tapes were haunted. She didn’t laugh like I expected.

Said Carol used to call her late sometimes, saying almost that same thing about a man sitting on her bed. Mom always figured it was just confusion, maybe something that never got diagnosed because Carol refused doctors on principle.

Went back up eventually, someone had to finish the room. The shoebox was where I left it, tape still in the recorder, except now rewound to the start.

I definitely didn’t rewind it. I’m not big on believing that means anything, still don’t really, but I noticed it and I’m putting it here because it happened, plain as that.

We finished that afternoon. Donated the furniture, kept a couple boxes of photos nobody wanted to throw out yet.

The recorder and tapes ended up in my apartment because nobody else wanted them and tossing them felt wrong, though I couldn’t have told you why at the time.

Haven’t listened to the rest. Keep meaning to, curious what else is on there, more of that voice or just more half finished cake recipes.

Every time I go near the box though I find something else to do. Laundry. Dishes. Things that suddenly feel urgent when they’re really not.

My mom asked last week if I’d gone through them. Told her I was busy. She gave me a look that said she understood exactly what I meant, neither of us saying it directly.

Box is still by my closet. Moved it there from the kitchen table about two weeks ago, didn’t like walking past it every morning on my way to work.

I don’t know why I’m even writing this down, honestly. Wanted it somewhere outside my own head I guess.

Maybe that’s all Carol was doing with those tapes too, just trying to get something out of her head before it could follow her around the house forever.

My cousin Rachel says I should just throw the whole box out, stop overthinking it, she never liked Carol’s stories anyway growing up.

I probably will eventually. Not yet though. Feels too much like throwing out something that isn’t finished, even if I couldn’t explain what finished would even look like here.