(Electro Magnetic Field) readers while I positioned the microphone above their heads.
“Okay, we’re getting something,” Mom said. “It’s faint, but it definitely wasn’t here last night.”
I felt my nose begin to tickle and knew a sneeze was coming on. I tried to hold my breath.
“Keep talking,” Dad instructed. “I think it’s working.”
Annalise kept up her conversational tone, asking simple questions and then waiting a moment as if she expected an answer. My sneeze was building, I could feel it. I tried not to, but just as Annalise asked again if anyone was present, it happened. I sneezed so loudly that half the team jumped, startled, and the sound echoed off the walls. Dad shot me a disapproving look while a few people tried not to giggle.
“Sorry,” I said, loud enough for the entire room to hear. “My bad.”
“Charlotte, please, if you could just—” Mom was cut off by sudden activity on all the readers. “Wait a minute. We’re getting something.”
I could see the lights of the equipment dancing wildly. It was rare to get so much activity so quickly. My parents were smiling and everyone seemed excited.
Everyone but Annalise.
“Um, guys? Something feels weird.” She looked around the room and grimaced.
“What’s wrong, sweetie?” Mom asked.
“I don’t know, but something’s not right.”
“Just a few more minutes, okay?”
I was watching my parents so I knew where to position the mic, but I was also keeping an eye on Annalise. Her open, casual demeanor was gone, and her patient smile had been replaced with a slight trembling, as if she was cold and scared at the same time. I had never seen her frightened before. In fact, I’d never seen anyone in my family scared. We were all rational, logical people who knew that a simple scientific reason was waiting to be discovered behind nearly everything. Something was causing massive activity in the room, but my parents would figure out what it was once they had collected all their data. Annalise had done this enough times to know that. But she was obviously freaked out. She shook her head and looked down.
“Please? I want to leave.”
Dad was gazing at his EMF reader. “One more minute, hon.”
Annalise swallowed. “I can’t. I can’t stay here one more minute. I’m done.”
Mom and Dad exchanged a glance. “Sure, of course. You can go. We’ve got enough,” Dad said, but he furrowed his brow. I knew he wanted as much recording time as he could get.
Mom walked over to me. “Go with her,” she whispered. “I can take the mic.”
I followed Annalise into the main dining area. She sat on the floor and covered her face with her hands. I sat next to her.
“You okay?”
She shook her head. “It was so strange, Charlotte,” she whispered. “I mean, I was fine, and then suddenly I felt so—so sad.”
I rubbed her shoulder. “How do you feel now?”
She sniffed and looked up. Her eyes were slightly red. “Better, actually.” She looked at me. “The second I left that room I felt a little better. I have goosebumps, though.”
I pulled off the pink sweater she’d let me borrow. “Here. I stretched it out for you.”
She laughed. “Thanks.” She looked past me, toward the other room. “Did you feel anything? I mean, besides that you were cold?”
“No. And the cold I felt, well, that was just the room.”
Annalise frowned. “But the room was warm. Hot, actually.”
I thought my sister was out of sorts and I didn’t want to disagree with her about temperature. We both knew that feeling cold was often a sign of paranormal energy, but we also knew that sometimes it was just that—cold. People often read too much into it.
Within a few minutes the team finished up, and we all helped put the tables and chairs back the way they had been, thanked Mrs. Paul for her time and headed out for a late lunch. Annalise remained quiet for most of the afternoon, and I tried to reassure her that everything was fine.
“Just think,” I said. “You’ll never have to step foot inside that place again.”
I didn’t know it then, but I was dead wrong.
two
It’s all about energy. That’s what my parents say, at least. The theory that drives them, the single idea that makes their career possible, is that ghosts do not exist but energy does. The way Dad explained it to me when I was little is still the way I like to imagine it. I had been having a hard time sleeping in the house we were renting at the time because I could hear footsteps pacing outside my door. Dad came in and sat on my bed.
“Think of time as an ocean,” he said, smoothing my hair. “And think of yourself as a small stone tossed into that ocean. What happens when you throw a stone into water?”
“It sinks?” I wanted Dad to stay as long as possible so I wouldn’t have to listen to the footsteps alone.
“Well, yes. But it also creates tiny ripples on the surface, doesn’t it?”
“Yes.”
Dad’s theory was that some people created greater ripples than others. Their energy, he said, echoed long after they’d died. At first, he believed that only strong or intense emotions lingered, which was why places where a death had occurred seemed haunted. But then Mom discovered something that changed his mind.
Mom met Edith, a woman who lived down the street. Edith claimed that an evil spirit was trying to force her out of her home. “It grabs my feet at night,” she said. “It tries to pull me out of my bed.”
Edith was nearly hysterical. She’d been living in the house for only a few months and she didn’t want to move, but the paranormal activity occurred every week, and she couldn’t take much more. My parents investigated and noticed some strange readings in the master bedroom. While Dad spent a week at the house, Mom contacted the former owners, who had lived there for over thirty years before retiring to Florida. They’d never had a problem with anything strange, they said. Their daughter, now in her forties, still lived in town, and Mom invited her to the house one day.
“I loved this place,” the woman said. “My family was so happy here.”
Mom didn’t tell the woman what had been happening, only that she was researching the history of the house. When they walked into the master bedroom, the woman told Mom how she used to wake up her parents every Sunday morning by running into their room.
“I’d grab their feet,” she said. “I’d try to pull them out of bed so they’d get up and make me pancakes.”
The revelation changed the way my parents looked at their research. They’d been working under the assumption that only people who died left behind energy, usually after a single powerful event. Now they realized that perhaps simple repetition could also leave an imprint. It explained doors opening, or the sound of footsteps. Their new goal was to determine what triggered such energy. Why didn’t Edith feel the pull at her feet every single night or only on Sundays? They never figured it out completely, but they did introduce Edith to the woman and explained the story and their theory. The solution was actually easy: Edith moved her bed, and the tugging stopped. My parents reasoned that the trigger was the position of the bed because Edith had placed it in exactly the same spot as the previous owners.
“The truth is that the paranormal is normal. It’s just a normal we don’t understand yet,” Dad liked to say.
I thought about Edith’s story as my parents continued to investigate Charleston. They would spend a week at a place,