When I was a kid, I was friends with this girl in my building, Abigail Buch. She didn’t have many friends. She was always very sickly. Spent the first six months following her premature birth in a hospital, and for the rest of her short life, she’d be in and out for surgery or observation or tests. I never learned specifically what it was. I was too young to learn too many of the details. The doctors never expected her to make it to a month. Then a year. Then five. But Abby was a fighter. Well, as much a fighter as someone like her could be.
There were bullies at school. There always are, and when you’re a pale, sick kid like Abby, there are vultures circling, waiting to pick your bones. When we all got chicken pox, she got it worse than all of us. They called her Scabby Abby. How terrible is that? We all had it, but they still singled her out. Kids are dicks.
Anyway, she was always sick or tired or recovering from something, so she didn’t play much. Not in a traditional kid sense. No running, jumping, climbing trees in the park. She read a lot of books instead, which is how we came to be friends. I was at the library and I recognized her from down the hall. Full disclosure, I was also a pretty nerdy kid, so it was kinda nice to have a friend who knew what it was like, and, if I’m being completely honest, sometimes distract the negative attention away from me. When she was around, they still made fun of me, but they made fun of me for being friends with her, and that’s easier to take than them making fun of me personally. I know that sounds weird and probably terrible of me but, well, like I said. Kids are dicks.
Being constantly told she wasn’t expected to live long, Abby came to have a fascination with death, ghosts, and the afterlife. She was a better reader than me, so she’d check out some of the spookier books from the teen section and we’d hide away in her closet and she’d read them to me by flashlight. Our parents weren’t fans of the nightmares, but I think they were just happy that we had each other, so though they kept telling us to stop checking out those stories, they never put up much effort stopping us.
A couple floors above us, in apartment 4F, lived Melinda Grady. All the kids in the building knew she wrote obituaries for the paper. Older kids said she knew about all the deaths because she was secretly a killer. Obviously not true, but… kids. She fascinated Abby so completely. Her familiarity with death appealed to my friend, for whom death had always been a constant companion. “She’s going to write my obituary one day,” I’d heard Abby say to herself on more than one occasion. I don’t know if that was an assumption she’d made due to her health or a decision she made because she liked her or something she’d talked about with the old lady. I never asked. Death creeped me out a little too much to get into the nitty gritty logistics of it all the way Abby did.
When we were eight or nine, Ms Grady passed away in her apartment. They say they found her dead at her typewriter, having written up her own obituary. I don’t know if that’s true or urban legend. I asked my mom about it later, and she said she didn’t know if that story was true, but that Ms Grady did have a pretty bad terminal illness, and they say sometimes, when you have a disease like it, you can sense when the end is near. “Maybe she felt it coming and wanted it done right,” she said. “Stranger things have happened.”
A death in the building. Unusual circumstances. The deceased having a pre-existing relationship with death. Kids being kids, I’m sure you can guess what happened next. Urban legends began to grow from that apartment. Didn’t help that it struggled to keep tenants, I’m sure due in no small part to kids spreading rumors and playing pranks. But when you’re a kid, the only logical explanation is ghosts. And since Melinda wrote obituaries, that became part of the mythos, the central idea around which her haunting manifested.
Within a couple years of her passing, every kid on the block knew that if you went into that apartment and said, “Melinda Grady, Obituary Lady, tell me how I die,” that you would hear her ghostly voice reading your obituary to you, telling you when and how you die. And when handful of kids broke in during one of the apartment’s many unoccupied times and tried it with no haunting, the rumor changed, because a good story, like a ghost, refuses to die. No, they say, you can’t do it just any old day. You have to do it on the anniversary of the day you’ll die. So, if, for instance, you were destined to die on January 23rd, and you said it on a January 23rd, only then would you hear your death read out to you. The brilliant piece of that is that if it didn’t work, obviously it was because that wasn’t your death day. And since families were constantly moving in and out, no one could do it every day.
When Abby and I were both twelve and she had been told once again she would be lucky to make it to twenty, and rather than just wait to find out how it all would end, she got the idea that she would simply go into apartment 4F every day and ask. She had a calendar, and for months, every day that she could, she’d go in and ask to be told how she would die and cross that day off when she heard nothing. It was easy at first, when the apartment was unoccupied. By that point, pretty much every kid knew how to jimmy the lock. When families moved in, she’d be neighborly. Befriend their kids. Volunteer to do chores. And while she was in there, if she muttered a little call to the dead under her breath, who would know the wiser?
It was August 7th, a Friday. The family there at the time had gone off to the Catskills for one last end of summer trip, and Abby was determined to make the most of it. Every day that week, we’d sneak in together when our parents thought we were reading R.L. Stine in the park. The family would be back that Sunday. We only had a couple more chances, so we went together.
“Melinda Grady, Obituary Lady, tell me how I die,” we said in unison, as we had every other day that week.
I didn’t expect anything. I had grown too mature for such supernatural nonsense, but Abby still believed, so I humored her. We waited in silence for a few moments before giving up. Rising to our feet, we began to make our way to the entryway from the bedroom where she had been found. Then a noise caught our attention. A tickity tapping sound, like keys of a typewriter furiously flying across the page.
We stared at each other, as if to confirm we hadn’t imagined it. But she’d heard it too. Then came the whispering. A woman’s, hollow and distant.
“Abigail Buch entered the apartment with her friend, unannounced, uninvited, and made her way to the room where her neighbor Melinda Grady had died several years prior.”
“That’s not funny…” I stammered. “Who’s there?”
But the voice kept talking. Describing how we’d been coming in all week. I didn’t need to hear anymore. I ran for the doorway. At the entrance, I noticed Abby hadn’t followed.
“Come on, Abby! Let’s get out of here already!” I shouted, terrified.
“No,” I heard her call from the bedroom. “I have to know!”
If I were a better friend, I’d have gone back for her. But I was young and afraid, so I ran.
I sat in the hallway scared and panting for what felt like half an hour waiting for her to come out. Eventually my parents found me and asked why I wasn’t with Abby. I couldn’t exactly say we’d been breaking into the neighbor’s apartment, so I lied and said we had finished reading and she wanted to get a new book from the library so she went on without me while I stayed and played kickball with some other kids.
I didn’t say anything when she didn’t come home that night. Nor did I say anything when the family returned the next day and found her dead in the apartment. The coroner said she’d died of a heart attack. She’d died of fright. When I was asked what she was doing in there, I denied knowing anything about it because I was a terrified thirteen year old. I didn’t want to go to jail for breaking and entering or worse, murder. So I told them about the urban legend and said it must have had something to do with that, carefully leaving out any part I had in what had happened.
Her death only made the legend grow. The kids still tell that story in the building. I know because when I visited my parents last week, I heard a couple arguing about whether it was true. About the ghost of Melinda Grady, about the dead girl.
And in the years since it happened, I’ve often found myself thinking about it. Did I imagine the voice? Was it real? They say she died of a heart attack, but those can sometimes take a long time to kill someone. I wonder if I had spoken up, confessed to my parents what we had done, would she be alive today or at least, not died then?
Sometimes I blame myself. Sometimes, only sometimes, I think that maybe I did hear that voice. That it was her time to go. That Melinda Grady saw it coming and did exactly as we knew she would. She didn’t cause her death, but she was right about the where and when. And in those times, I wonder if it was destiny. If Abby would have had a heart attack on that August 7th, whether we were in the apartment summoning ghosts or not.
And I then I think, if that’s true, if the ghost of Melinda Grady really did come to her to tell her how she died, I wonder did she tell her she would die alone? Did she tell her she would have survived if I, sitting just on the other side of the apartment front door, would have just told the truth.
Sometimes, when I lie in bed at night, unable to sleep, I can almost hear the voice of Melinda Grady echoing in my memory.
“Abigail lay there on the bedroom floor, her heart pounding hard, too hard. She knew it would give out soon. Her friend had left. Maybe he was getting help. But he wasn’t. He was sitting in the hallway, too afraid to admit what they had done to fetch a grown up, to call an ambulance. And so, Abigail Buch died alone, an utterly preventable death had she not been betrayed by her only friend.”