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BIRMINGHAM GHOST GOES BUMP IN THE NIGHT
Three disheveled young musicians wander down a century-old hall and through doorless rooms. They are giving me a guided tour of my own bookshop, some twenty years ago when I am located down on 20th Street, just a few blocks away.
“This is where I slept,” one rocker says, staring at the heavily-laden bookcases.
“Yeah, I was across the hall where those old newspapers are,” says another.
“Man, we froze to death some nights in this place,” the third man smiles.
“But we had great parties when we could afford the fixin’s,” the first recalls.
Way back then Reed Books occupied the second floor of this run-down former hotel, once across the street from the location of a vaudeville theatre.
Before I moved the shop into this building, the young performers had crashed in the unheated unaired structure and made it a temporary shelter.
Whizzing through town on their way to a distant gig, they decide to stop by and see where fond memories were once made.
“I wonder if the ghost still lives here,” one muses.
Now they have my attention.
“What ghost?”
“Oh, well, there was a ghost here, and some nights we could all hear it bouncing down the hall,” he says matter-of-factly.
“And we never actually saw it. It just came to visit now and then.”
I ask whether the ghost ever scared them.
“Oh, no, we just let it be.”
Hmm.
After the merry wanderers take their leave, I am left alone in the shop, the shop that suddenly takes on another personality once I learn about the ghost.
Through the years other visitors occasionally mention the same ghost they notice in previous contacts with the building.
My then-employee Craig verifies that he, too, has felt a “presence” when alone among the books.
Today, recalling the ghost of a bookstore long ago flattened and covered over by an apartment building, I wonder a couple of things.
Whatever happens to ghosts when their hauntings disappear? Do they re-locate? Do they remain and roam about, waiting to be noticed?
And why do I never experience the presence of ghosts? Maybe I’m just too skeptical for my own good. It might be fun to encounter such a harmless apparition.
Cruising the aisles of books upon books in today’s bookshop location, I realize that I actually live among thousands of ghosts and ghostly stories and page-turner apparitions. These are ghosts enough for me.
So long, Birmingham ghost. I hope you find places to go bump in the night when you grow weary of lolling about
Jim Reed © 2021 A.D.
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