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I see ghosts.

This one was a little girl with long blonde hair and a black dress. She sat on a footbridge that arched across a rushing creek, her little girl legs dangling over the side as she gazed down at the cold water rushing below.

I moved toward her, following a fern-choked path through old redwoods, but the little girl didn’t notice me. Sometimes it’s like that. Sometimes the dead don’t see the living at all. Often, in fact. Often ghosts are no more threatening than old movie clips. They’re helpless specters fixed in time and place, forever repeating some action whose significance was lost long ago, perhaps even to them.

Of course, my footsteps were light. Maybe that was why I went unnoticed. A rusty blanket of dead redwood needles covered the path, but it wouldn’t have mattered if the forest floor was salted with gravel-I can be quiet when I want to. So the sounds I made were hardly sounds at all, and what the little girl would have heard had she been listening was masked by the hollow sigh of clear creek water flowing to the sea.

Masked, until I stepped onto the wooden bridge and my boot heel rang down like a judge’s gavel.

The ghost looked up with startled blue eyes that were as clear as the October sky.

“I’m sorry I scared you,” I said.

She smiled. “Oh, I wasn’t scared. Not truly. I just didn’t see you coming.

“I know. ”

“You’ll be glad you did, though. ” She nodded toward the creek. “It’s a nice place. Sometimes you see fish. ”

I unslung my backpack and sat down beside her. She moved closer. The nearness of her made me shiver, but I masked my unease with a smile. I didn’t want her to think that anything might be wrong.

We sat there in silence. A bower of heavy redwood branches hid the creek, and the bridge, and the living and the dead from the sun. The shadows did not bother me, and neither did the little girl-there was nothing in her clear October eyes to make me wary, or afraid.

I knew the girl could not say the same of my eyes. But even though I’d frightened her, she hadn’t looked away from me. She had studied my eyes as if she were searching for everything that lay behind them, and she hadn’t even blinked.

I hadn’t looked away, either. Strange. I’d seen ghosts since childhood. Maybe because I was born with a caul-that’s the occultist’s favorite explanation, anyway. I’d learned to ignore the dead a long time ago. First the dull ones with their endless pantomimes, and later those whose actions were less predictable. By the time I was a teenager, I could spend a night in a room with a wailing spirit and sleep like a baby.