Ghost Stories
My Aunt Rose believes that a ghost lives in her house. It is an old house, built over a hundred years ago and inhabited by members of my family for three generations. It has many flaws: small rooms, an unfinished basement that floods, and only one bathroom that happens to be located right next to the dining room table. But Aunt Rose loves where she lives, and is rooted there by her memories.
She has seen the ghost countless times, usually in the middle of the night when she has to walk downstairs to use the single bathroom. She will tell you that this is proof she wasn’t dreaming, that she’s traveled a whole floor before seeing it. It appears in classic ghost fashion: a vapory shadow in a long, white dress. It floats through the room and disappears, usually flowing down the basement stairs.
One time I saw the ghost too. I was staying in the guest bedroom upstairs and it appeared at the foot of the bed. It was just like Aunt Rose described it. I remember that the white fabric of its dress had tiny, pretty eyelets. It hung in that space for some seconds, maybe a minute. Then it was gone. For me, the proof that it was real was that I didn’t feel any fear. In dreams, figures that invade your bedroom at night tend to be symbols of dread, something you don’t want to confront. This, instead, was a wonder, a visit from some kind presence.
In this season of Halloween, I am wondering why we love ghost stories. You will read about how it is a safe way to process our fears. We can feel and explore our fears while knowing that at any moment we can turn on the light, or run into the tent, or grab a loved one’s hand and be secure. Ghosts raise the possibility that our loved ones live on in some parallel realm, that we will see them, hug them again. They make our memories concrete. This also means there’s the possibility that we too will live on.
There’s something else as well. In my classes, I will often have students from many different backgrounds sitting in the same room, from various cultures and religions. Many times, we are purposely discussing matters on which there is disagreement, conflict. But when I raise the topic of ghosts, as I sometimes have reason to do, everyone smiles.
Everyone has heard a ghost story. Most people have told one, or at least recounted one. It is a human universal, like loving cute puppy videos or ice cream. It simply feels good to experience that connection, even if we may not be aware that that’s what’s happening.
Ghosts hint at the metaphysical, at Truth, at Reality, at What happens when we die. But unlike religion, ghosts don’t require us to give our consent to a certain dogma or tenet. We can believe, or not. We can just enjoy the story.
Our best guess about Aunt Rose’s ghost is that it is my great-grandmother, the woman who gave birth to my mom’s father and his four brothers (or maybe five - there is some uncertainty about whether there was a fifth. Families were much bigger then. I guess it was easy to loose track of a stray uncle). She lived her life in that house, one woman taking care of six men. Not hearing much about her growing up, I’ve recently become more curious, asking more questions about my origins.
Last year I was astonished to learn that my great-grandmother had chickens, and when she was fed up with all her men she would go out the back door saying, “I’m going to sit with my birds.” And she would stay out there for long stretches of time. Her chickens, I’m betting, were primarily for sustenance while mine are more like pets. But did she also feel the peace that I feel while watching these funny little personalities express themselves, while listening to their peeping, purring language? Is this where I got it from? I love thinking that I did, that my love of chickens is not random. That it is instead knitted into the fiber of my family.
This feeling of connection is what I get when I listen to ghost stories – connections to the past and connections to the present, to all the varieties of people who will smile when you say, “Let me tell you about my family’s ghost…”
Happy Halloween everyone :)