I Found a Dead Guy in my Car. Now I Think His Restless Spirit is Haunting my Honda Civic...

Okay, let's get one thing straight right off the bat. I'm a good person. I mean, I'm not a GREAT person. I'm not the Pope or Mother frickin’ Theresa - nobody is going to canonize me after I'm gone - but I do my best.

I say, "Good morning," to people at work. I bring in donuts occasionally. Last week, I even offered to help an old lady clear some snow off her car.

It's hard to think of more examples right now, but just take my word for it - I'm a decent person.

Anyways, there's this guy on my drive home from work. He's not far from where I live and I pass by him almost every day. In the winter every so often I'll roll down my car window and pass a couple bucks out to him. At least, I meant to. I saw other people doing it all the time, so I figured he was okay. He was getting by, I thought, even if he did look pretty cold. Pretty desperate and disheveled, wrapped up in a blanket and shivering all the time.

If I'd known the truth I would have done more.

I don't usually carry cash, mostly everything is debit these days and if I do have a bit of coinage I need to save it for the coin-operated washing machine I use to do my laundry - it's hard to find change these days, after all.

Like I said, I meant to do more. I wanted to do more.

But I didn't. Maybe that's why this is happening to me...

Anyways, when I opened my back car door yesterday morning at 6AM to throw my work bag inside, I recognized him right away.

It had been a cold night, the temperature dropping to thirty below freezing. Even for Canada, that's cold.

There he was in the backseat of my car, dead from exposure.

His beard was coated in icicles and his skin was slightly blue in the dim light of the morning.

He wasn't moving. And he wasn't breathing.

I shook him, trying to see if he would wake up, if maybe he was just sleeping, but he was definitely dead.

After calling 911 the police and an ambulance came and took him away. I told the cops what I knew and they said it wasn't my fault, these things happened more often than most people would believe.

"Lock up the car next time," the shorter cop said. "And get an alarm system. Then this won't happen."

I muttered something in agreement, thinking him a bit heartless. Part of me didn't mind the guy using my car to sleep, especially if it was helping him stay alive in the cold weather. More than anything else I felt bad I hadn't done more to help him. I felt an immense guilt like a hand gripping my heart and squeezing it tightly.

The shorter cop walked away and the other one stayed behind and looked at me sympathetically.

"Don't mind him," he said. "The guy's own wife hates his guts. He doesn't care about anybody but himself. It's too bad about this guy, though. I'm sure somebody out there will miss him. I'll try to find out who they are and I'll let them know what happened here. He doesn't have any ID but maybe someone will recognize him or we can match his prints. Thanks for calling us."

The cop started walking away and I went back to my car.

I got in and began to drive towards my job at the hospital. It was light out by that point and I had to explain my tardiness to my manager, but when I told people what had happened they quickly forgave me and I got a lot of sympathetic looks. That made me feel even guiltier - I didn’t deserve sympathy, I thought, not after I had done nothing to help the man while he was alive.

When I drove home that evening it was dark outside once again and I heard something rustling around in the backseat. The car was moving along at a steady speed with traffic on all sides, so I couldn't exactly stop to look around.

I thought it was just the sound of junk shifting around back there for a few moments since I had left my basketball in the car and it tended to roll around. But then a hand gripped my shoulder, icy cold and blue. It gripped my trapezius, pinching and twisting, causing me to jerk the steering wheel to the side and swerve in pain and fright.

The driver in the car beside me honked, rolled down his window and gave me the finger, cursing at me. I had other concerns, though. Like the familiar blue-tinged face staring at me in the reflection of the rearview mirror.

"Holy shit, you're that dead homeless guy from my trunk!"

His emaciated face stared back at me in the mirror. His grin showed yellowed and missing teeth and his skin was pulled taut over prominent cheekbones, making him look skeletal and terrifying. His blue-tinged skin reflecting even bluer in the flickering streetlights' glow.

"Y'know, ‘person experiencing homelessness’ is actually the preferred term these days," he said. "It's less… stigmatizing. Nobody likes to be put in a box. Ha-ha, no pun intended."

"What do you want from me," I asked, almost screaming it at him. My heart was pounding wildly and my hands were gripping the steering wheel tightly. The road seemed to blur in and out of focus in front of me.

"I'm not sure yet," he said, considering this. "I'm just not ready to move on. It’s like something is keeping me here."

"What's that?"

"Hell if I know. Wish I could say. Maybe it's you."

"Me?? What'd I do? You just happened to die in my car!"

"Uh huh… right. So you didn't drive past me every day on that street corner and ignore me? I'd still be alive if I'd had a few bucks to buy a coffee at McDonald's, y'know. That's what I used to do to warm up - but they don’t let you sit inside unless you buy something. Sometimes I'd hop on a bus, sit at the back until they kicked me off. I relied on the kindness of strangers for spare change to get by, but not strangers like you. Never people like you."

I was silent for a few seconds.

"Why didn’t you get a job? There’s plenty of them out there.”

“Excuse me? You’re asking the dead guy why he isn’t employed?”

“Sorry, maybe that's a rude question."

"You're right, it is a rude question."

Silence ensued for a few more long seconds.

"You think I didn't try? Nobody wants to hire a bum. You've got no address, no phone number - red flags for any employer - it reads 'unstable.' And I did have a job, just so you know. I was a bricklayer until my wife left me and I started drinking to cut the pain. She was the only good thing in my life. The only thing that kept me going, and when she left it was like I lost everything. And then, before I knew it, I really did lose everything. I couldn't get my shit together and my boss fired me, then I lost my house in the divorce. My kid stopped talking to me..."

"You have a kid?"

"Had a kid. I ‘had’ a kid. Past tense, remember?"

"What about the shelters," I asked, genuinely curious now. "Why didn’t you stay there to get out of the cold?"

“Boy, you sure do know everything, don’t you? Hell, I never heard of a homeless shelter before, what’s that?”

I could tell he was being snide so I didn’t say anything. This was one sarcastic ghost, but at least he wasn’t trying to kill me. Not yet anyways.

“Y’know, the thing about the shelters is you’re only allowed to sleep there. And even then, only for so long. The limit at the one in town here is three months. They’re always overcapacity nowadays so there’s no exceptions like there used to be. I went over my three months - they kicked me out. Gotta make space for the next guy.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I’d thought the system was better than that. More forgiving and kinder.

“Man, I’m sorry. If I’d known…”

“You would have flipped me a quarter now and then?”

A long silence sat between us again and there was no sound in the car except for the hum of the tires and the other traffic going past outside.

“I want to try to make it up to you. How can I do that," I asked. "The cop said they’d try to find your family - so, who’s your son? I’ll find him and I’ll give him a message for you, whatever you want to tell him. Your wife, too.”

He seemed to think about this for a little while, but then he made a discontented sound.

“No, I don’t think so. They abandoned me. I told them both I was dying on the street and they didn’t lift a finger to help. Forget it, I’ll stay back here. It was a comfortable enough spot, only a little cold. You can just get used to me. Or not.”

By that point I had finally pulled into the parking spot outside my building. Realizing he wasn't going to let me help him, I turned the car off and got out, gratefully leaving him behind. He stared at me from the backseat, watching me go, his cracked, blue-lipped grin never faltering, his eyes never dropping.

I can’t get rid of him. It doesn’t matter what I do. During the day he isn’t visible but at night he scares the hell out of me every time I drive the car. I begin to think maybe he’s left but then he grips my shoulder tightly, painfully, and speaks raspily in my ear.

“You can’t get rid of me now. You thought I was annoying before, when I came to your window at the red lights. I saw you roll your eyes at me, ignoring my suffering. Well, you can’t ignore me anymore.”

“What do you want from me!?”

I scream at him again and again when he scares me like this.

He always says the same thing.

Change.

TCC