From Shirley Jackson to my great granny Jackson in honor of Day of the Dead

My cup of stars and An Eleanor

In honor of my favorite time of the year, I want to tell a tale of my Ouija board experience. And I’d like to share this song for you to listen to to help set the atmosphere.

This part of my post was inspired by

Kaia Preus

and her amazing essay on Ouija boards. I learned a lot about Ouija boards in the essay, so you should definitely head on over there and read it.

Ouija Board: What We Ask of the Dead

Coincidentally, her essay synchronizes with mine in a wonderfully spooky way, indicative of the spooky season.

I was 16. I had one friend who was really into Ouija boards and she had tried to talk several people into doing it with her. I heard about it, and asked her to let me try it. There was a part of me that was terrified, but most of me knew, and I mean with absolute conviction, that there was a spirit world. I had seen some things, already at this point. I knew I also had a guardian angel, so I decided to open the door more to that other world.

She said to come by that weekend. Her mom would be working and we’d have the house to ourselves. We went inside, and immediately, the lights began to flicker. I was aware that she had been talking to spirits already by the atmosphere it left behind. The air was kind of staticky, alive, like a bunch of earth worms. There was an odd feeling like doors open you couldn’t see.

When paper started moving in the other room, she said “Odd…that’s not normal.” I got really excited. We were there alone, so she looked at me with giant eyes. “I am positive that’s not rats.” I was expanding. The depths of my being grew in ways I’ll be ever grateful for.

First we played with a pendulum. She asked my spirit guides questions. We did the usual thing that most girls do. I asked “Who will I marry?” I was told I’d marry CD and I did. She was told she’d marry CM and she didn’t as far as I know. We’re no longer close. Once, when we were all fond of the chaos of Yahoo messenger, I made a friend who’s initials were CM. After finding out he wasn’t gonna be my new boyfriend, because we didn’t have much in common, I decided to play a little match making. And if nothing else, get a few laughs. I sent CM my friends user name and told him to message her. She texted me telling me how “CM messaged me! I can’t believe it!” I still cackle in delight at that, I can’t lie.

I do have a theory about her marrying CM. After all these years, I’ve learned a thing or two about words and their multiple meanings. Ghosts are like Fae, in that they can play with words. Since my first name begins with M, and my hubby’s begins with C, I think that the spirit meant that I’d be married to C and my friend was the officiant who did the marrying. There was a time when she was sort of the facilitator for Oak and I coming together.

She asked my spirit guide many questions. I mostly don’t remember the answers, but it served to better connect me with that part of myself.

Later that night, we moved into her bedroom and pulled out the Ouija board on her bed. She told me the rules and we got to it. Immediately the planchet began to move and I moved my hands. I was way too freaked out to keep doing because I believed she didn’t push it. I know I didn’t push it. I was also absolutely delighted. The moment served to further open a doorway into a path I’ve never strayed from. All it took was one decision to touch the planchet, to choose to look beyond the veil, to change my life entirely. It led me into one of Mysticism. A path that was extremely discouraged in my small town.

After that, we got to talking about our ghost stories and she said “Let’s take this to the shed. Mom’s coming home soon, and she hates it when I talk about ghosts.” She led the way to an absolute dark dungeon of a shed. One they used to store feed.

I was in love with the romance of it all. Here we were, two teens talking about things no one talked about in our town. If they did, they were behind secret doors we weren’t invited.

As we sat down in the shed, she decided to pull out the pendulum again since I had felt more comfortable with that. We didn’t ask many questions, because at that moment 1000 white light orbs filled the room and my heart with an awe I’ll never forget. They floated around us for over 20 minutes giving us our own personal light show. I never felt safer in my entire life up until that point. All of my spirit guides came to initiate me into a new world. One where I was actually loved and protected and guided. And that is why I do believe in magic.

On to the original post:

I am a spiral, a never ending staircase that descends into the deep well of my very being. I can’t not be this way, and I always wonder how most other people I know aren’t…I love finding old ghosts to set free, or escort onto the underworld. And my mind is both rainbow and storm…I am both the ocean and a mermaid, drifting along an endless wave of events, pinpointing all that makes sense to me, that points to my experience, that says I’m alive.

Today I was reading an old journal I discovered is from 2020. I had a child that year, and we know disease had a child. The two didn’t make for a fun time, and isolation was increased and I that was not the first time I felt insane.

My poem is from a time when some Okies said “corvid” instead of covid, when they talked about death’s march of 2020, the march that quickened our pace to 2024 like a dream. This post is from some of the broken years.

The crab cries
while the scorpion stings
and the almost archer
forgets his ring
the goats mind wanders
and lashes out
there's fire within
and questions without
where to look
where to go
what can she see
what can she know

"Nothing" cries the light
you must calm
be the seaweed
let the water stream
let the animals screech
let the fires cease

As I was reading that, the quote from Shirley Jackson crept in my mind. I’ll never forget this quote as it touched me very deeply. I didn’t know why when I first read this book in 2016, when I devoured Shirley Jackson.

“Eleanor looked up, surprised; the little girl was sliding back in her chair, sullenly refusing her milk, while her father frowned and her brother giggled and her mother said calmly, 'She wants her cup of stars. 'Indeed yes, Eleanor thought; indeed, so do I; a cup of stars, of course.

'Her little cup,' the mother was explaining, smiling apologetically at the waitress, who was thunderstruck at the thought that the mill's good country milk was not rich enough for the little girl. 'It has stars in the bottom, and she always drinks her milk from it at home. She calls it her cup of stars because she can see the stars while she drinks her milk.' The waitress nodded, unconvinced, and the mother told the little girl, 'You'll have your milk from your cup of stars tonight when we get home. But just for now, just to be a very good little girl, will you take a little milk from this glass?'

Don't do it, Eleanor told the little girl; insist on your cup of stars; once they have trapped you into being like everyone else you will never see your cup of stars again; don't do it; and the little girl glanced at her, and smiled a little subtle, dimpling, wholly comprehending smile, and shook her head stubbornly at the glass. Brave girl, Eleanor thought; wise, brave girl.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

When I read that book, I decided I’d never again to drink from any cup except my own cup of stars. To me, that cup of stars means a joyful, unadulterated “YES!” or not at all. It’s been a fight, but I try every day to maintain that promise to myself. A couple years later, I met another Eleanor when she was 3. She is now my daughter, and she always wants her cup of stars too. I couldn’t let it pass without writing about these two Eleanor’s never meeting, one encouraging and one insisting that drinks only be from cups of stars.

As I was reading, I was inspired to write.

I love my poetry process
like casting for fish
like a child waiting at recess
for someone to make flower crowns with
like waiting for fire to catch
on a marshmallow to burn
sweet sticky fingers
reaching for another donut

a response to a voice in my head
perhaps if this were the 50's
I'd be lobotomized instead
that family history
runs deep in my blood
and I cry when I think
of great granny's pain

My great granny. A woman I never knew the last name of until I did a genealogy search in 2016. She wasn’t lobotomized, but the stories say she had little control over her life. I’ll do my best to honor her by telling a small portion of her story.

I lived with her for a time. Though I was only two years at the time, I remember some things about that era in my life. There was the time she thumped me in the head because I picked her a beautiful rose from her prized rose bush. The painful split from love as I handed it up to her shaky hands, skin like paper, blotted and bruised. The deep sadness I had done wrong when she thumped my head.

I remember a horrible fire in her house… Connected to another horrible fire in a borrowed trailer house we lived in years later…(Since writing this back in August, I have checked with some of my family. There has been no confirmation of fires. No one I could ask remembers them happening.)

And something I didn’t remember until Sophia retraumatized me with the burden of knowledge. When I was two, I went to the stove to get the boiling pot of water. My granny, at age…82 or so, rushed to the stove to stop me and on the way, she slipped and fell. She broke her hip and entered a nursing home, where she stayed for her last years. At 2 and 82, our lives crossed Death’s path in the same instant, when she bent to whisper she’ll be back for granny, and when she smiled and waved goodbye to me, urging me on to a beautifully dark life, like a butterfly on a cow’s corpse. Where granny and I were both the butterfly.

My granny had a hard early life. One common told in our family was that once, when TB asylums were a thing, my granny got sick and a doctor decided to admit my granny into one. After a few years, granny was cleared of the suspicion TB, but the state wouldn’t let TB patients out without someone signing for them. My great uncle had to fight it in court to get her out.

(Photo credit: Wikipedia: Brehmer sanatorium, photo before 1904)

My granny has been gone a long time, but I believe in ghosts. I believe in spirits. So naturally, I have a tale to tell about how she gave back to visit me from beyond the grave.

One day, back when I lived in an apartment, I was up late working on my couch. Trying my best to bring more money into the household. I noticed our lights going on and off, flickering, and every now and then, a cabinet doors slamming when I knew they were already closed. The room was freezing, though that was nothing new. It was no spirit causing that particular issue.

Ignoring the light show, also not new to me, as I’ve since discovered I’m what’s called a slider. I was getting upset because I knew the electric bill was going to be high, and it was late in the fall and the AC shouldn’t be on. However, during those days, I was never supposed to turn the AC up from 69 degrees. The ex was very particular about it. So when I heard the switch on the AC flip from one side to the other, I knew exactly what it was. It was a sound I was very in tune with like when a dog that tucks it’s tail between its legs when it hears the word bath.

I got up and checked, sure enough it was off. I felt that it was my granny because I had felt she was still with me from time to time. This was during a time in my life when I felt a very strange and compelling calling to discover more of my family history. I was estranged from everyone I knew, and I didn’t remember much of my previous life before marriage. I wanted to find out more about my granny. I wanted to know where she was buried.

And I feel that we were especially connected because my direct actions, albeit at the age of two, directly led to her death. I can’t help but feel a little guilty about that though I know logically, I was not to blame. Now that my aunt has retold me the tale, memories have resurfaced. Someone screaming over granny who had fallen. Screaming hateful words at me, and my granny assuring her it is not my fault. My granny, a spicy temper, but a fierce protector over me, even to her detriment. I now remember the shame and fear and sadness I felt when I was reassured it was my fault, and I remember the ambulance coming to take her away. These memories flit away when I look at them too strongly, like a star in the night sky.

As I have mentioned, she spent the last of her years in the local nursing home, and plenty of my memories surround visiting her there. I’ll never forget the sounds of the moaning of those elderly women. Like ghosts, in pain, lost in their own internal world, lost to this world. Crying out “oooOOOoooh…” never stopping their call for death to take them away to a better place. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t somewhat afraid. My granny never made me feel guilty for what had happened during those years. She was always happy to see me.

Those things are now all just waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs if I look hard enough into the deep deep dark. To finish the apartment tale, in 2016, the very start of my new reality, things changed that year in a big way. Bowie died who I had idolized back then, I bought a house (that I gave up in a divorce a year later) and I saw the only ghost I ever saw up that close, standing at the foot my bed looking at me. I woke up to a strange feeling pulling my gaze to the foot of the bed.

There she was. Watching me in my sleep, and in my wakefulness, she did not shy away from my attention. She was young and beautiful, and her long brown hair hung down over her shoulders. I looked her directly in the eyes, less fearful of her presence than I had been of the man I’d chosen to marry. I could not tell the difference with my eyes of her and any other physical human, but I knew she was a ghost. I never saw my granny that young, but I know it was her. She stood there looking me in the eyes until I turned my head and looked back just to speed this very intense moment forward. Wondering if I looked back, would she be there still. I regretted it, because she was gone in that instant. I had so many questions I could have asked her. But she left her mark on me. An impression deep inside like her fingerprint. Like her knuckles thumping my head over the rose 27 years prior.

Maybe devouring all of Shirley Jackson I could get my hands on, I had called forth both a very much alive Eleanor, and a very much dead granny Jackson. I’ll never know, but I know one thing. All these things are all tangled up in a woman’s writing that I love, and that is my cup of stars.

Thank you for reading, if you liked today’s tribute to one of my beloved ancestors, please feel free to stick around and hit the subscribe button. And if you have a similar story or two, please feel free to share them. I love a good spooky story and I will probably believe them. I also have a ton of other creepy true tales, so if you like that sort of thing, let me know. I’ll make another post about that.