Ghosts

Henrik Ibsen? I'd say not. I'd say it's more like Harry and Lesli Zamora (no obvious relation to the former Cubs relief pitcher Oscar Zamora).

Think of it. The Houston Astros just lost four straight World Series games, and now there are ghosts running around a suburban Houston house.

According to a New York Times article this morning, the Zamoras are convinced their house is haunted.

"It's real to us, it's not make-believe," said Mr. Zamora, 45, a patrol lieutenant and veteran motorcycle officer with the Houston Police Department.

Since buying the modest beige brick house on Skyway Street in 2003 in an estate sale a year after the former owner died there, the Zamoras say, they have been tormented by mysterious presences, ghostly visions including a fluffy white dog, disembodied touches, moving orbs of light, a door that locks itself, and appliances, lights and water faucets that turn themselves on.

"He's searched the house so many times with his weapon drawn," said Mrs. Zamora, 30, a Web designer.

Strange things have happened.

One of the strangest episodes, they say, occurred early this year when Mrs. Zamora was on the telephone with Leslie Henderson, a police bicycle patrol instructor and member of the Phenomena Police. Suddenly, both recounted, Mrs. Zamora shouted that she saw a small white dog with a pink collar streak through the apartment.

"But Lesli," Officer Henderson said she protested, "you don't have a dog."

"I know!" Mrs. Zamora wailed.

The dead owner, she said later, seemed to have had a dog - the house was full of white dog hair when they moved in.

Even their kids have seen things, though considering what they've seen, you have to wonder whether the kids are teenaged boys.

Their children from previous marriages were too terrorized to sleep alone on their weekend visits, Mr. Zamora said. Some told of seeing a woman in a white Victorian dress. Once, Mrs. Zamora said, "the kids came down screaming they saw a lady with yellow eyes and huge breasts."

Yeah, I can just imagine teenaged boys thinking, "Huge breasts, cool! Yellow eyes, homina, homina, homina!"

Mr. Zamora's fellow police officers are helping him try to document the ghosts, and there's going to be a TV series based on the Zamoras' experiences. And while the Zamoras seem to be honest and not trying to perpetrate a hoax, the Times reporter found nothing:

A reporter for The New York Times who spent several hours in the house experienced nothing amiss, except perhaps for a brief chill and photos by the Zamoras that showed orbs all around him. No orbs showed up on a Times photographer's digital camera.

Maybe it's time to post that reporter to the White House.