Kindred Spirit

AFTER A LONG JOURNEY TO GIVE BIRTH TO HER SON, J. COURTNEY SULLIVAN EMBRACES A NEW LITTLE BOY IN HER HOUSE: THE GHOST.

- J. Courtney Sullivan

MY HIGHLY RATIONAL HUSBAND refused to get excited when the cradle started moving on its own.

As advertised, our son’s motorized rocker swayed back and forth. But it also inched across the living room sideways, so after an hour it was five feet to the right of its starting place. Often the plug popped out of the socket or the whole thing banged against the sofa, alarming the dog, though never waking the baby within.

It wasn’t just the cradle. In the six months since our son was born, lights have flickered overhead. A toy piano once lit up and played music, untouched.

My friend Siobhan, who knows about these things, said it was clear that we had a ghost and that the ghost was a little boy. At any other time, this might have kept me up at night. But we live in the bubble of babyhood. If I, a lifelong insomniac, have the chance to sleep these days, I can get there in an instant.

Still, I went online for answers. Google is such a comfort to me now. Every maternal quandary feels massive and personal until the internet reveals, via all those who have asked the question before, that very few women know innately how to make a newborn’s tiny bird mouth latch onto a breast, that all babies go bonkers and refuse to sleep at exactly four months of age, that no child actually enjoys tummy time.

My search about the phantom rocker did not turn up the usual hordes of women in the same boat. I found only one query on the subject, from a mom in Australia. Respondents fell into two camps—what she had witnessed, they said, was clearly the result of either a ghost or slanted floors.

Of course, the two tend to go hand in hand. I grew up in New England, in a house built in 1922. My family blamed the ghost of the former owner, Bob Mitchell, whenever something went missing or didn’t work right.