Dancing Ghosts - a Personal Ghost Story

The summer I was eight I got to spend parts of my school break in the Norwegian mountains. Through friends we had gotten permission to spend a few nights at an abandoned summer cabin. The house was used by farm hands during the short summers to look after the cattle as it was sent into the mountains to grace. I can't remember much of the car ride up. I fell asleep on the way there as we arrived after nightfall. I remember being carried from the car by someone in our party. Comfortably snug and warm I can still remember the biting frost on one of my ankles that slipped out from under my blankets. I was back asleep before we made it inside.

When I woke up the next morning, we were in a wondrous mountain landscape. The altitude was too much for any trees to grow, but the rolling hills were still exploding with lush green moss and shrub. The land seemed to be drowning in moss, only in a few places could I see a gray boulder or the last traces of an old stone wall. The two wood building we were staying in were themselves as gray as any of the rock. The wood having yielded all it's color to centuries of baking sun and whipping blizzards.

What sticks in my mind is the sense of freedom that sneaked up on me when I looked out over the space that would be our temporary home for a few days. There was no stores for miles and miles, no roads, no electricity or running water. The houses we occupied were as naked and bare as the landscape. The cabin I slept in had four massive beds built in in the attic, and that was it. In this empty space, any fun we would have would be completely up to ourselves.

The feeling of complete separation from the outside world, the lack of television and toys did not make me upset. Instead I felt a powerful feeling of opportunity. The landscape was full of opportunities to run free and make up any game you could imagine. When I looked out over the empty land I felt like a king, free do do whatever I might fancy.

The days we spent in seclusion stand out in my mind to this day. So alien and different from anything I had ever experienced we spent our days on long treks when I was not making up games with the other kids. On one of our long mountain treks we came upon another summer settlement, but unlike the one we were occupying, this one was still in use. As we walked up, they were making traditional Norwegian goat cheese. The cheese they served was so fresh we could drink it from a bowls. Sitting on an impossibly old stone wall, surrounded by my family and our close friends, drinking goat cheese straight from the pan. In my mind this memory is one of those precious memories of a time when everything was exactly right. Even the goat cheese was amazing.

I had an amazing time on this trip, and it's still a trip I recall with great joy to this day. I remember it as a time of endlessly long days spent in freedom to go anywhere and do anything. And although I didn't realize it at the time, it was also the first and only time I ever saw a ghost.

I can't recall what I had been doing that day, most likely spent it exploring amazing secrets in my green kingdom. When the day slowly ran out, all four of us kids went to sleep in the attic as we always did. The grownups slept in the other building. The beds were old, I slept in a sleeping bag on a bed of old hay. The old huge beds seemed fitting for a King who had spent all day roaming his land. I don't remember having any trouble sleeping during our trip. I would often sleepwalk or wake up many times during the night at home, but in our lonely summer house I slept like a rock all night, every night. Except for this night.

For some reason I woke up, I don't know at what time. I remember everybody was sleeping and I wanted badly to see my mom. I got out of bed and started to for the stairs leading down when I caught a glimpse of movement through the cracks in the flooring. The floor was as old as everything else in the house, and over time the cracks had grown pretty wide. In one spot I could easily look down to the room below. As I laid down on my stomach on the floor and put my eye to the crack in the floor I saw people dancing on the floor below. I had never seen the dance before, but it looked like it could be a traditional folk dance. Mu mother had enrolled me in a Norwegian folk dance class, but I had quit after the first lesson, petrified that the class required me to touch girls. Still, from my limited schooling in folk dancing, I figured that was what I was watching.

The dancers below were having a great time and I remember thinking that it was a bit strange and out of character for the grownups to be dancing, but I was very happy to see them enjoying themselves. The scene was joyous and happy and I stayed face down on the floor for quite a while watching what I thought were the grownups in our party. Eventually I got tiered and walked back to my bed feeling very happy that everyone was having such a good time.

I never mentioned what I had seen the night before. A brand new day to explore the mountains seemed so much more important than dwelling with what had happened the night before. In fact it would be many years before I mentioned the memory to my mother one time we happened to be talking about our trip.

Of course, my mother could assure me that they had not been barn dancing on our trip at all. In fact, no one except us four kids had even been in that building. She dismissed the whole thing as something I had dreamed. I would have settled for the same explanation if it wasn't for one detail. I can still to this day clearly recall the sensation of the uneven wood boards against my feet and later against my cheek, and the rush of cool air against my chin as I peered through the crack in the floor.

When I recall vivid dreams I have had that seem as they were real, the one thing that is always missing is memories of actual sensations. The sharp memories I have from the night I saw the dancing strangers makes it clear beyond doubt to me that what I saw was not a dream.

As I realized that I could not have seen the people I thought I had seen, I started to recall certain things that had struck me as odd on that night. For one thing, even though I could see every one of the dancers very clearly, I had had a very hard time trying to identify them, it was as if they were dancing so fast that I could never really see their faces clearly. In fact, apart from a woman who seemed to always be at the center of the dance I had had a hard time picking out much about the other people there. The other thing that didn't really make any sense was that there was no music. In fact the dance was soundless; no shoes trampling or hands clapping. The only sounds I heard was the happy laughter of the woman as she was dancing up and down the floor.

In the years that has passed I have come to realize that the only explanation I have for what I saw that night is that I caught a glimpse of someone who used to call the mountain cabin their home. I have never before or after seen anything that I could not explain in some way or another. The dancing lady, however, I can not explain away. I saw ghosts that night. They were not scary, in fact they were very happy, but ghosts they were.