There's a dead man in my closet but mommy says don't stare.

I'm not supposed to say to much 'cause daddy put him there.

He hasn't ever moved, he doesn't really smile,

He kind of smells funny 'cause he's been in there a while.

He's slowly changed colors from purple then to blue,

He seems to have attracted flies and funny white worms too.

I check on him from time to time to see if he wants to play,

But he just seems so preocuppied with being dead all day.

I asked for some race cars and maybe a race track,

But all I got was daddy's boss with a knife stuck in his back.

© Katlyn Loch 2005

I was seven when I begged my parents to buy me a blue light bulb to put in my room. When they finally gave in I was so excited I insisted on sleeping with it on every night. On one night I had a dream. My grandfather, the one that was still alive, was sitting quietly on a small chair in a grocery store parking lot. I could see him from the window of my family's old station wagon. We drove all around the parking lot passing my grandfather several times. After a few circles a car came swerving out of nowhere. It careened towards the paking spot my grandfather sat in. It's front bumper made contact with the back of my grandfather's chair. He flew straight up into the air landing flat on his back. His arms straight out at his side. I woke up screaming and crying. My parents tried to calm me down. They tried to reassure me that it was nothing more than a dream but I insisted something was wrong. I was that nothing in dreams are real and he was fine. I would not rest until they took that blue light out of my room. I remember my mother stating that I had just gotten it but I kept on. She finally agreed and I went back to bed. Three months later my grandfather died of a massive heart attack. I was aloud to go to his funeral. He laid quietly in his coffin in the same position I saw him laying in the dream. I could not understand why I could see him but he was not there.

I soon became what some might call obsessed with the idea of death, the after-life, immortality, spirits. I read and watched everything I could get my hands on that involved those things. My mother started to become worried. She thought I was to young to deal with such subjects. She became more worried when I announced that when I grew up I was going to be a vampire. She and my father would started arguing about the types of movies I was should be able to watch.

I finally started writing my own horror stories at the age of eight. They were often simple and almost copy cats of other stories I had read. My poetry was according to my mother very morbid for a young girl to write. One in particular entitled "Things That Go Bump in the Night" contained a particularly odd line for a Al eight year old to think of stating, "The scraping on the window is not a branch on the tree. It's the hand of a dead child."

My family decided it was nothing more than a strange phase and that I would soon grow out of it. Years went by with my interests never altering from the path. Everyone just learned to accept it. Outside of that I was a normal girl with a vivid imagination and a great amount of curiosity. So I spent my childhood with Vincent Price, Bettie Davis, Bela Logousi, Edgar Allen Poe, and Henry James.

It wasn't until the fifth grade that my weird interests got me into trouble. My teacher had everyone in the class start a journal for her to grade. One of my first entries was a poem. It was an idea I had envisioned. I wondered what the sea would be like if it was empty and every living creature inside it had died so I expressed my ideas in the journal. Soon after my teacher called a conference with my parents claiming that my journal was proof I was terribly depressed and my family should put me in therapy. Of course my parents came to my defense. They knew I was just a kid with a weird and wild imagination.

My sister and I used to celebrate All Hallow's Eve by going to our pet cemetery and laying fresh flowers on their graves, saying little prayers that befit each one. Infact we would often go to cemeteries when we could. I would make sure that the older graves had fresh flowers that I would pick up along the path. I always felt sorry for the older ones. I knew that no one came to visit them anymore and I wanted them to know they had not been forgotten.

As a teen I started taking my writing more seriously and entered some of my works into contests and submitted a few for publishing. Although I was not focused in school I always did well in my English classes often impressing my teachers with my papers on the analogies of books but never seemed to cut it on the spelling tests. My family encouraged me to go to college for writing but I was not interested in going back into school right away. I wanted to explore the world on my own.

I met my husband at the age of seventeen. He was the most amazing and strangest person I had ever met. He was a true gentlemen and very polite when appropriate but had a smart mouth and could put anyone in their place when necessary, an excellent listener and always had good advice. After two years together we decided to get married in between acts at a punk rock show. ( Just wait till we get to tell our kids that story.)

Currently we have been married for two and a half years. He is pursuing a career as a musician and I have continued my work as a writer. We support each other in following our dreams and we always will. Although I have been published in two anthologies I would like to some day publish a book of my own works and continue to write for magazines.

Thank you for all of your time.

With Best Regards,

Your Dearest Ghost

Katlyn Loch