When I was very young, my mother told me the story of my birth. She’d tell it to me every time I cried, or had a nightmare, or got upset over something at school. I’ll never be able to forget it. She said that she’d had many complications while she was pregnant with me, that it was a miracle I was born alive. She went to the hospital many times for these complications. She spent many nights at the maternity ward, and every night she’d have the same recurring dream. 

She dreamt she was standing in a meadow, and it was snowing. There was a pond there, surrounded by dead grass, and she could see her reflection in the still water. She was an old woman. Her hair was white, her skin was tired and wrinkled. Everything was quiet. Even the sounds of nature were dampened by the snow. She knew that she was alone there, in the meadow, but this did not frighten her. She felt safe and at peace. It was as if the clouds above were watching over her, waiting for her; as if the earth itself, white below her feet, were telling her that everything would be alright.

She went into labor a week early, and I was born at 4:05 a.m. on May 1st. At 4:06, she said, it began to snow. It snowed, and I cried, and I was alive. That was the only time in her whole life, as far as she could remember, that it had snowed in May in Greenbridge, Oregon. 

A while back, I decided to look up whether it had actually snowed on my birthday. It had, although most reports say the snow started just after midnight.

A month ago, my mother passed away. I wasn’t caught by surprise. She was old, and she’d had health issues for the past six-or-so years. I still cried, longer and harder than I’d cried in a long time. She’d moved to Bend while I was in middle school and spent the rest of her life there, but most of her family still lived in Greenbridge, so that’s where we held her funeral.

***

Last month’s visit was the first time I’d seen Greenbridge in almost twenty years. It wasn’t that I resented the little town — I loved growing up under the tall green pines and looming white mountains of central Oregon. It was just that, after I went off to college and my father moved to Portland, I’d never had a reason to go back. 

I walked around for hours the day I arrived. I had no particular location in mind. I was just wandering, wandering and reminiscing. I walked by so many things that had been so familiar to me when I was growing up. Now, they all looked small and alien. There was the high school, the middle school, the dog park, the neighborhood playground, the parking lot where we’d hang out after school… and there was the creek.

I stopped, finally, at the creek. I wouldn’t say I’d forgotten the memories I’d made there, but it’d been years since I’d last actively recalled them. To see it — small, a weak trickle of water surrounded by green ferns and green-brown pine needles, overgrown with blackberry bushes and a plant we used to call devil’s claw — those memories were once again reified. They were so real I could practically see them. That’s not a common occurrence for me. So that these memories don’t once again fade, I’ve decided to write them down.

***

It was common knowledge, when I was a child, that the creek was haunted. If you asked any of the kids that lived within a one-mile radius, they could produce from memory five or six stories of the ghosts that roamed there at night. Many of these stories were unoriginal and forgettable, the types of stories told in every town in the American West — stories of witches, ancient burial grounds, sasquatches. But some were specific, out of the ordinary.

One story describes a man who strangled his wife when she found him in bed with a woman from a nearby town. He buried her near the creek’s source and told everyone she returned to her family in Georgia. But the creek’s water seeped through the dirt and into her skin, and the same calcite that gave the creek its hazy color prevented her body from decomposing. One night, a bad storm caused the creek to flood, and its waters pulled her body free from the earth. It carried her — intact — down to the edge of town, where she was found the next day. It’s said that her flesh was rigid and white and had a texture like that of a bar of soap, that her face was frozen in the expression she’d had when she’d died, an expression of fear and betrayal.

The sheriff set out to find and arrest her husband-murderer, but he’d long since moved away to California or Alaska. Without justice, her ghost still roams the creek. If you go there in the middle of the night, it’s said you can see her pale face glowing milky-white just under the water’s surface.

On the one hand, these stories moved me, deeply. On the other, my father’s education made me wary of anything mystical. 

My father was an academic, and then he was an electrician. He taught electrical engineering for a while at the University of Oregon, but his father had a heart attack and he had to move back to Greenbrdige. He tried to teach high school physics for a few years, and that’s where he met my mother — she was an English teacher. Eventually, he found that repairing electronics was both more stimulating and lucrative than teaching uninterested high school students, so he quit and took up electrical work full time. But, in his heart, he was an academic.

To my father, raising me meant teaching me about the world. He entertained every question I asked, no matter how childish. From the moment I could hold a soldering iron, he taught me the intricacies of electrical circuits. I did not know calculus, but I understood intuitively the concepts of energy, power, resistance, inductance, and impedance. He poured into me those scientific values that were the tenets of his worldview. 

My mother was religious, but, after a long, intense argument, she let my dad raise me as an atheist.  As a result, there was always an unbridgeable distance between me and my father. He’d worked so hard to challenge the religious education he’d been raised with and replace it with principles of empiricism and skepticism. His individuality was defined in opposition to religion, in opposition to the unprovable stories of magic he’d grown up with. To him, every scientific principle was a battle that he’d fought and won. To me, they were simply things that I’d been told my whole life. My coming-of-age conflict was exactly opposite his—I, at various times in my life, have fought back against the resolute materialism he instilled in me. Sure, I too have become an academic scientist, I too have come to not believe in God. But certainty is a tricky thing. 

So ghost stories were conflicting for me. I’d often go down to the creek, looking for proof that these stories were true. I’d stay out there as late as my parents allowed, but, for years, I saw nothing.

Then, when I was eleven, I had an idea that I was sure would prove the existence of the creek’s ghosts once and for all. I saw on TV an interview with a renowned neuroscientist. For a while, he explained his research, and I understood none of it. But then he made a speculative statement that blew my mind. Perhaps, he said, brainwaves are consciousness. The true purpose and nature of the low-frequency electromagnetic waves we see in EEG readings has long been a mystery. They do seem to travel across the whole brain, and, he claimed, there’s some evidence that they coordinate long-range interactions between different lobes. One defining characteristic of consciousness is that it unifies senses, thoughts, emotions, and pain into one coherent experience. Most of these concepts were alien to me, but the suggestion that consciousness was, in some sense, composed of electromagnetic waves, was almost too good to be true. Ghosts, I thought, were nothing more than disembodied consciousness. If there were any physical traces of their presence, shouldn’t they be brain waves? That afternoon, I began constructing my ghost detector.

The ghost detector was simple compared to the things I’d built before with my dad. It was basically just an antenna. Its circuitry was housed in a box made from pieces of plastic, crudely cut into shape with scissors and a hole-puncher, half-glued, half-taped together. A loop of copper wire emerged from one end. The loop fed into an amplifier that strengthened then split the signal in two. One output was connected to a little chip I’d found in one of my dad’s old circuit testing kits that separated electrical signals by frequency band. I’d set up an array of LED’s so that each detected frequency would light up in a different color. The other output led to a speaker that converted AC current into sound, so I could hear as well as see whatever the loop picked up.