It isn't true, that ghosts don't exist.
The personalities of people are too strong just to fade into smoke when the body is sealed under cold, sodden earth. They seep into the walls of houses, into the bark of aging trees. Spirits, after all, don't have their bodies anymore, and they are drawn as hopelessly and as hungrily to warmth and life as a moth is drawn to a candle flame. I know.
I've seen things in the woods at night, and in the darkened stairwells and creaking porches of my childhood. Only on nights too cold for the cicadas, only on nights so black that the darkness is a heavy, pressing thing on your skin do you see things. When I was a child, on cool nights between summer and fall, when not even a car's headlights washed over me from the country road, I thought the night was the beginning of the world. The blackness was like existing before everything else, and I used to think this was how it must have all started: blackness, heavy with meaning, and strange creatures grasping at existence. I could feel hands scratching at my arms and legs in the woods at night, trying to make my body their own. And on nights when my parents were deeply asleep, I would creep out of my bedroom and sit on the top-most stair, looking down into the tar-black well. Somehow, in the backer-than-blackness, I could see someone standing down there on the bottom step, silent and motionless. The person wanted to come upstairs, where the night-light glowed in the wall and where I sat quietly, alive, breathing, being. It had only to climb the stairs.
But many times I sat on the top step and it stood on the bottom and we looked at each other and it did not move. Maybe that feeble little light repelled it. I don't think it would have ever climbed those creaking stairs one by one, if my mother hadn't died. After she was gone, though, things were different. When I sat quivering on the top step, chin on my knees, I knew that my mother was down there in the blackness instead of sleeping quietly upstairs, and even though I was quaking inside and out with fear, part of me wanted to be taken as well. I wanted to stand up and leap forward and fall, tumble into dark.
And so I put the night-light out.