In the middle of the night I heard a loud crash. It jolted me awake, my heart thudding in my chest. My mother got out of bed to investigate. She opened the front door and went out in the yard to look up and down the street, but nothing was there. She opened the back door to check on our livestock, but nothing was there either. We went back to bed and I fell right to sleep not thinking about the crash we had heard.
The next morning there were suddenly fire trucks and police cars out in front of our house. My mother went to see what was going on. A man had driven just past our house and driven his car from the North-bound lane, across the South-bound lane, and off the little bridge which covered the irrigation ditch. His car had plummeted into the ditch and he had probably died on impact.
I was sad to think that just feet from my bedroom window a man had died and had been left alone in his car for five or six hours. My mother worried that maybe if she had tried harder to find the source of the crash the man would have lived, but the fireman said that he certainly died on impact. Also the car’s engine and lights had gone out, so he never would have been found in the ditch. No one would have thought to take a flashlight and shine it into the irrigation ditch in the dark of night. That is, no one would have thought of it before the accident. I now know how easy it is to be driving, or going about your business, and then to be dead an instant later, and how a seemingly non-threatening ditch can become a death trap.
It took them hours to pull the car out, and to open it up to extract the body. I hid from the news cameras, because what was there to say? I heard a noise in the night and didn’t even get out of bed to investigate, all while a man plunged off the road and into the irrigation ditch, dying on impact, his face being turned to hamburger. I stayed in the house, cringing while I heard the equipment working.
That night it made the news, but with no comments from witnesses. I guess our neighbors didn’t want to comment either.
One day we saw his family come to see the site where he had died. They stood at the edge of the ditch looking down, their loss apparent. My mother gave them her condolences. I wondered what it was like to visit the site where your loved one had died. Would there be any connection to him remaining in the air or in the earth? Would you feel anything other than mind numbing loss? If you placed a cross at the site did it really help?
Sometimes I wondered if his ghost lingered. I wondered if at night he visited that last place his body had been when it was alive. If his spirit did visit, what would it think? What would he do, pace along the rim of the irrigation ditch, or plunge into the water as it flowed in summer?
I never saw his ghost, at night or during the day, so to me, there was no evidence that he returned repeatedly to visit his place of death, but I always wondered. What allows one spirit to pass cleanly from this earth, its ties broken, its business finished. What keeps another trapped on this plane, its journey incomplete, its ties to life still so strong? When I die I hope that I am not stuck here. I’d rather it be quick, like the man who drove off the road one night, just feet from my bed as I slept so peacefully.
My partner this week is the talented
yachiru. Please go and check out her ghost story.