The Necklace

One evening in March of 2021, someone rang the doorbell to our Algiers house. Although our two-level white concrete house with its orange clay tile roof was provided to us, free of rent, by the United States Embassy in Algeria, there were only a few other Americans in our neighborhood; the rest of our neighbors all were Algerian. I looked at the video screen that showed who was at the door downstairs and saw a young guy with a curly mop of hair, a long face, and big ears. He asked for Jeremy. I told him there was no Jeremy here and then he asked if I would come and talk to him because he had something to tell me. I called my husband Adam over and he told the boy through the intercom that we wouldn’t come down, using some of the local language called darija, which is a hybrid of French and Arabic, even though the boy spoke English with no discernible accent. Odd that he was asking for “Jeremy”. Literally no one in Algeria was called Jeremy.

For the next four nights, I heard our doorbell buzz when we were in bed, but I didn’t get up to see who it was and Adam always slept so hard those first few hours of sleep he never heard a thing. On the weekend, I attended a wedding shower for an American woman from the embassy and after, I walked home at dusk through our hilltop neighborhood of El Mouradia, the rocky walls of which are embedded with tiny sea fossils — shells and fishbones — which meant there was a time, maybe a thousand years ago when El Mouradia must have rose up out of the Mediterranean Sea. This was the season when the orange trees bloomed and I thought how orange blossoms mixed with wafts of jasmine would forever remind me of living in North Africa. As I turned the rocky curve to my house, I realized I didn’t have my key, and Adam wasn’t home, so I wouldn’t be able to get inside. I saw a figure in the narrow street in front of the gate to our house. It was the boy with the mop of hair and the sticky-outy ears. “You’re the person who’s been coming here and ringing the bell” I said as I approached him.

“Did you get the necklace?” he asked. 

That morning, our femme de manage Fadela had found a necklace in the driveway when she arrived for her weekly cleaning. She held it up for me to see – a black nylon cord with a charm that looked like a white Indian arrowhead. I figured someone had thrown it over the gate or else it had been dropped by a house higher up the hill (that happened sometimes, although mostly with balls of the soccer or foos variety) and I put the necklace in a Moroccan basket that I used as a catchall in the entryway. 

“You left that necklace? Why?” I asked. 

“It’s a crazy story,” he said. “I need to tell you.” 

He told me his name is Ramsay and he was recently approached by a man in Bir Mourad Rais, the neighborhood in the valley below us. This man put his hand around Ramsay’s neck, and told him he had to deliver the necklace to Jeremy in this house in El Mouradia. My house. Our house. 

“What power does he have over me?” Ramsay asked me. “I’m Muslim. Why did I do what he said? Bad things have happened since I’ve had the necklace. Someone died.” 

“But still you left it here, at my house? It’s haunted and you gave it to me?” I asked.  

I was still locked out of my house and the situation was bizarre but not scary. Ramsay did not seem threatening. A actually felt some warmth toward this awkward-looking but sort of adorable boy who seemed to believe the things he was telling me. I thought perhaps he’d seen Adam and me in the neighborhood and wanted to know us, the foreigners, or maybe he recognized us from the U.S Embassy’s social media. By this point, embassy guards drove by, doing their regular rounds of the homes where Americans lived. I tried to explain who this boy was to the guards, and they started talking to him in darija. I called Adam and told him he needed to come home. “I’m locked out and there’s a boy here with a whole story about a cursed amulet and you need to get back home now.” Eventually Adam pulled up in our dented maroon Honda Civic. Before he left, Ramsay asked for the necklace back. 

“Why would you want it back?” I asked. 

“To destroy it,” he said. 

I went inside and reached for the necklace in the Moroccan basket where I’d set it hours before. It was covered in tiny ants! I figured there must have been something sticky on the necklace, so I rinsed it in the bathroom sink before giving it back to Ramsay. I put it in his hands and I think I told him that what he told me isn’t real, which gave me a flash of a time I’d told an ex boyfriend the same thing when he showed up at my apartment in DC in the midst of what I suspected was a schizophrenic episode. 

“That man doesn’t have power over you” I told Ramsay and then I told him to take care. I spent the rest of the night thinking about this encounter. I couldn’t sleep. I texted friends about what happened. I told our American colleagues who were in charge of security about it and they said to let them know if he came back, which he never did, but he did message me on Instagram, thanking me for being kind to him and apologizing if he had scared me. 

I’ve thought of this odd occurrence often in the years since. I’ve wanted to write about it, and I sometimes tell people the story of when a cursed amulet was hand-delivered to me in Algiers. But I’ve never known how to tell the story, if I tell it funny or not, or what it meant. Is it a spooky story of djinns and a cursed amulet in the Middle East? Is it about a lonely Algerian boy who made up a very creative story because he wanted to know the “famous” Americans in his neighborhood? Is it about how an alert and imaginative girl takes random happenings and weaves them into an entertaining tale that signifies just the sort of connectedness she longs to see?

Three and a half years later, in October of 2024, I found myself in a 3,000 square foot villa perched atop monkey-filled trees on the Papagayo Peninsula in Costa Rica, a turquoise bay of the Pacific Ocean visible from the picture windows of the luxury home. My life has changed considerably since March 2021. I’m no longer part of the community of Americans who live abroad working at U.S. embassies because I’m no longer with the diplomat whom I moved around the world with. I was invited to Costa Rica by a Moroccan-American diplomat friend, Ikram, whom I got to know while I lived in Algiers because she was posted there too and working at the U.S Embassy. I’d invited my good friend Sarah, an American Foreign Service Officer whom I know from when we lived in Jerusalem. And Ikram had invited two French friends, Babette and Marie, friends from before she joined the Foreign Service, back when she lived in San Antonio Texas. 

The first night of the trip, Sarah and I unpacked our tropical outfits in our shared room and Sarah straightened one of two brightly-colored paintings of playful monkeys that hung on our wall. We all went to dinner together and Babette cracked us up with her stories of moving to Texas from Paris in her early twenties and running to tell her new husband that in America they sell a special spray for your butthole after she misheard “household cleaner” as “asshole cleaner” (The French can’t pronounce the American “h” and apparently don’t hear it either). No surprise that I’m especially fond of a person who can tell a good story. 

The second morning at breakfast Babette told us another story: a long and captivating one about her son Jeremy who died suddenly in 2015 at the age of 20. (Babette is writing a memoir about Jeremy’s death and the impact it’s had on her, so she wouldn’t mind me sharing some of her story here). 

Babette was an atheist before, but almost immediately after Jeremy died, she felt his presence. A touch on her back on morning, other messages he’d left for her. She found a medium who told her things about his death that ended up being true, things she couldn’t have possibly known. Once, the medium told Babette that she saw a necklace, perhaps a black leather cord and a rectangular charm, and Babette said that didn’t sound like Jeremy who only wore a gold chain to remember his grandmother by. But soon after, they found a necklace by that same description in Jeremy’s room. As Babette is telling this story – “necklace” and “Jeremy” are in my head and my body erupts in goosebumps and I’m overcome by emotion that spills out of me in tears. “I have to tell you something” I said. It felt imperative that I deliver a message to this woman whom I’d only just met.  

I told Babette the story of a boy showing up in a Muslim country where no one is called Jeremy asking for Jeremy and then delivering a necklace to me which was given to him by a man who ordered him to bring it to Jeremy at my house in the El Mouradia neighborhood of Algiers. The words poured out, I was crying, I was worried I was scaring Babette, or Ikram, or Sarah, who sat nearby, unsure of what it was that they were witnessing. Babette though, she didn’t seem spooked and she didn’t seem surprised. These types of things have happened to her over the years. I looked into Babette’s huge blue eyes feeling extremely connected to her but also confused. I pulled up old Whatsapp messages of me telling friends about the boy who delivered me a haunted amulet meant for Jeremy to prove to her I wasn’t making this up. She said the medium had also told her that her son would one day be reincarnated in the Middle East, a place where he thought he could do good. 

This moment was as intense as it sounds. I was lit up with energy, vibrating with particles. I could have lifted a car, run a marathon whilst delivering a dissertation on how matter is neither created nor destroyed. I went back down to my room and I called Adam, who is posted in Baghdad now, feeling like I needed to walk through this wild coincidence with someone who’d been there in Algiers when Ramsay came looking for Jeremy. But if being married taught me anything, it’s that no one ever experiences a thing the same way and Adam seemed to have little recollection of the event, and he hadn’t even remembered that the boy was Ramsay or that he was looking for someone named Jeremy. Trying to get him to understand, I exclaimed:  “Adam, it’s like I have energy shooting out of my scalp! Out of my fingers!” and I held my left arm outstretched, hand flexed, and I fuck you not, the two monkey paintings, affixed to the concrete wall with sturdy metal L-shaped hooks five feet away from me, fell off their right hooks and rotated in unison on the wall. 

“Oh my god! The monkey paintings just fell off the wall!” I said. 

Sarah came out of the bathroom and saw me standing there, the paintings still moving, each held on by a single hook. Sarah was understandably freaked out and I assured her “It’s not scary! It’s powerful but there’s nothing harmful here.” I called Babette into the room and showed her what happened. She laughed and said “He’s here. Jeremy, ha, you are funny” waving her finger into the ether. “Little monkey” was what she and her husband called Jeremy when he was a child. 

Although there were a few more spiritual experiences and bizarre coincidences on the trip, the teeming, frenetic energy from this day morphed into a gentler vibe but underlying it all was a feeling that I was supposed to meet Babette right when I did. I know that five women who have all been brought together by reasons unknown in a secluded mansion in a tropical jungle is a fab premise for a horror movie, but there was nothing sinister about this experience. No darkness. Only light. 

When my marriage of 12 years fell apart in July 2023, I wanted answers. How had this happened when life seemed so great and my love for this other person hadn’t disappeared? At a yoga retreat in the Dominican Republic seven months later, I forgave my husband for wanting to end our life together, for taking from me the exciting life abroad that I adored. My yoga teacher Gemma had prepared a printout for the retreat and I highlighted the line “…because it is not finding the answers but rather asking the questions that is the essence of the journey” which is a Buddhist teaching. I’ve carried that sentiment with me ever since and have realized that the human experience and relationships and connections are far too complicated to have “answers” but there sure are a million questions we can, and should, ask that helps us gain a better understanding of what we’re doing here.

Did the spirit of Jeremy visit me via an Algerian boy named Ramsay so I would relay the message of his presence in the Middle East, knowing I’d encounter his mother years later on a tropical vacation? Can I continue to call myself an atheist if I believe that such a thing is possible? Aren’t these terms I use — “energy” and “matter” — what believers actually mean when they’re talking about a spiritual/religious presence?

No answers here. The answers don’t matter all that much. Matter matters.