Ten Things About Ghosts

Speak! Speak! (1895) John Everett Millais

1. My father insisted that he did not believe in ghosts, but he had a whopper of a ghost story nonetheless. When he was in the US Army in Germany, he was on guard duty one very cold and snowy night. As he stood there, he became aware that a man was approaching. He told the man to halt, twice, but the man continued to advance. He drew—his bayonet? or lifted his gun?—I can’t really remember this part of the story very well. The man came into view. And just as he did, he melted away.

   The following morning (as he told it), my father found a WWII German military helmet with a bullet hole through it lying in the snow.

   This story is, of course, even more full of holes than the alleged helmet, and remember as well this is a secondhand account recollected from hearing it as a child. My mother loved this story. My father didn’t. She would insist that he tell it, and he would get very uncomfortable. The fact that he didn’t like to tell it increased my belief in its veracity, but maybe it was just a story he told my mom once to impress her and then he found himself stuck with it. I feel like including the bit with the helmet may have been laying it on a little thick. I also very much want this story to be true.

   Once, as he concluded the telling of this story, my mom asked, "Why didn’t you bring that helmet home with you?” and he shuddered and said he didn’t want that thing in his house. My mom would have loved it, though. She was totally one of those characters in a horror film who takes the haunted object home with her or messes with a seance and ends up getting possessed.

2. When I was a kid, I believed in ghosts. I desperately wanted to see a ghost and at the same time I desperately did not because I feared that such a vision would lead to being frightened to death, a fate that befell both a woman on some allegedly true “ghost” docudrama program I saw on TV in which a face appeared on her wall and also the fate, arguably, of the protagonist in the A.M. Burrage short story “The Waxwork” (although whether it’s fright that truly killed him is left somewhat ambiguous).

   

   Johann Heinrich Füssli, The Nightmare (1791), aka the scene I pretty much imagined myself into as a child, after I’d died of fright

   I’ve had people assume that I believe in the supernatural just because I write weird stories, which has always struck me as a strange assumption. As for the question of would I like to see a ghost now? I remain undecided.

3. My father had a second, less spectacular ghost story. A dean at the college he attended whom he’d liked a great deal had committed suicide. “Sat at his desk and pointed the shotgun at himself and pulled the trigger with his big toe,” he told me. Later on, business trips found him frequently driving past his old college. He said every time he did, he could feel the dean sitting in the back seat of his car.

4. What are ghosts anyway? Manifestations of our own unresolved emotions? Leftover “energy,” whatever that is? Visitations from beyond? Pieces of consciousness? Nothing supernatural but simply a natural phenomenon we’ve not yet discovered? Jungian shadow selves? A trick of the light? Superstitious hooey? Demons in disguise? Bits of some collective unconscious? Figments of the most atavistic shards of our imagination? A desperate but deluded desire to transcend our all-too-mortal bodies and short lives? An intimation of the threads that bind us all to one another and to everything that exists in and beyond the universe?

5. The best ghost story ever written is “The Beckoning Fair One” (1911) by Oliver Onions. But there are many other fine ones as well, including but not limited to: Wylding Hall, by Elizabeth Hand; “The Specialist’s Hat,” by Kelly Link; The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson (late edit to say not really a ghost story but a haunted house story! But I’m leaving it here because it’s so good); The Shining, by Stephen King; Ghost Story, by Peter Straub; The Little Stranger, by Sarah Waters. After I hit “post” on this, I will remember others I should have included. Add your bests in the comments! (In fact, after finishing writing but before posting this, I thought of a ghost story I read sometime last year that I really liked a lot: Joan Aiken’s The Haunting of Lamb House.) (And I’ve just remembered two more I read a very long time ago, like in the previous century, but liked very much: The Black House, by Paul Theroux, and The Green Man by Kingsley Amis.) Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black has ghosts in it, but it is not what I would call a ghost story. (They require more than just the presence of a ghost.) It is a very good book, one that I used to recommend enthusiastically to people because I forgot how unremittingly bleak it was, or rather, I sort of forgot that not everyone rolls with unremittingly bleak in quite the way I do.

6. When I came home for my father’s funeral after he died in 2005, I was convinced that I would be able to feel his spirit somehow, in the woods around the cabin that he had so loved. There was nothing. Absolutely nothing. Almost less than nothing. The world could not have felt more bled dry of any sense of wonder or mystery. It turned me into the staunchest of staunch materialists for a long time. In contrast, I swear that bits of my mom hung around for somewhere in the neighborhood of a year after she died. Not only that, but since she died, for the first time ever, I started to feel the presence of my father, just round the edges of things, as quiet and reserved as he’d been in life. I am perfectly willing to acknowledge that these feelings are nothing more than that, but there were other, very weird, concrete things, like: butts from my mom’s preferred brand of cigarette suddenly turning up in places after I and/or other family members had cleaned them thoroughly, and when no one since had been around for ages besides me. Things turning themselves on (the television, repeatedly), things getting left in one place and turning up in another. Gradually, it all settled down.

7. My belief in ghosts has waxed and waned over the years. These days I consider myself mostly an agnostic on the topic. The older I get, the more I consider myself an agnostic on many topics. I do not think certainty is a hallmark of wisdom. I guess this particular item isn’t really about ghosts, but is anything about ghosts really about ghosts?

8. Last year I reprinted a column I originally wrote for Black Static about ghost stories for Christmas, and in both the original column and the reprint, I erroneously claimed that the children’s novel The Ghosts by Antonia Barber was set at Christmas. I listened to the audiobook this past year and it isn’t, at all! I wonder how I mixed this up? I think the film that they made of it, The Amazing Mister Blunden, was set at Christmas but I didn’t even know that film existed until I was in my thirties. Maybe because as a kid I always associated The Ghosts with the equally-loved children’s novel Mirror of Danger/Come Back, Lucy, by Pamela Sykes, which was set at Christmas? I am always amazed every time I am faced with yet another concrete example of how memory distorts, and amazed as well at how much faith we place in our memories nonetheless. Our memories are ghosts as well.

9. Last year, Joyce Carol Oates asked me to contribute a ghost story to a journal she was co-editing. I was overjoyed by this invitation—Oates is one of my very favorite writers—but in the months heading into and the year after my mother’s death, I really struggled to write fiction. So, I missed the deadline, which kind of crushed me. The story itself was one I’d begun while my mother was dying, weaving some of my own experiences into a narrative and character that was entirely fictional (a writer’s sleight of hand that seems to baffle people, who assume that if you put one thing from your life into a story the entire framework is some kind of faithful autobiography). It’s a really good story, but at this point it’s infused with so much pain for me, first because of the inspiration and subject matter itself and secondly because of my failure to finish it for one of my literary idols that I’m not sure if I’ll ever go back to it. I haven’t even opened up the file and looked at it again. The story is called “Ephemera.” It has itself become a ghost.

10. I had two—well three—four, really other topics in mind I was choosing between to write about this week. This, a fifth one, stole in out of absolutely nowhere. Clearly, the ghosts got the upper hand.

    Like my writing? Want more? Buy my books! I’ve written three collections of weird and ghostly short fiction: The Moon Will Look Strange, You’ll Know When You Get There, and Now It’s Dark. You should be able to buy them online or special order them from your favorite local bookstore. The links lead to my publisher’s page, where the second and third can also be ordered directly. Not sure you’ll like my fiction? Go here for a list of places where you can read and listen to it online for free. Here’s a more complete bibliography.

    Where to find me recently: I wrote a silly piece about the trials and tribulations of being a Gen X Lynda for Business Insider: My name went from being very popular to a frumpy archetype.