ORGANIC HAUNTINGS FREE TO A GOOD HOME
Ghosts as a concept fascinate me. Humans are obsessed with the idea that, even after you die, there is something of you left behind. I don’t believe in ghosts, personally. It makes more sense to me that humans are so good at recognizing other people, that somewhere along the way we started finding them even when they aren’t really there. If we were being scientific, we’d call that a false positive. Like seeing faces in rocks and Jesus in burnt toast, we see the people we miss in creaking floorboards and flickering lights. I have friends that do believe in ghosts and have stories of seeing them, though, and I’m not about to call them liars. I have respect for what I don’t understand and cannot prove, and does it matter if they're real when they affect us just the same? I possess a sort of cognitive dissonance on the subject of ghosts in that respect. Ghosts aren’t real, but I believe my best friend when she tells me she and her father both saw the same shadowy old man hovering over their beds at night.
Similar to ghosts, I also don’t believe in God. Except in a sort of abstract way that only someone raised by an ex-Catholic mother can. Meaning that God, if He does exist, is a right bastard and I tell Him this regularly. But mostly I don’t believe in God. Instead, I have my own off-brand flavor of spirituality; a delightful mix of optimistic nihilism and bastardized shintoism. This is a very pretentious way of saying nothing matters, so why the fuck wouldn’t we choose kindness? I think that life leaves something behind and that the something left behind deserves acknowledgement, even though I definitely do not believe in ghosts.
I wish ghosts were real (and that I believed in them). I think generally life would be much cooler if sometimes people decided to stick around after beefing it, but at 15% opacity. I also think my grief would be easier to hold if I believed my loved ones persisted After. Or maybe not. I’ve woken in the night more than once in a fit, hoping only that they aren’t cold. I’m not sure that logic or reasoning are effective weapons against mourning, but I would certainly give it a good effort. I would also obviously use the existence of ghosts to become a necromancer which would be --quite frankly-- fucking rad, and possibly have the added benefit of solving the cold problem. If God were real, I would put together a PowerPoint presentation and petition for Him to make ghosts real as well. Pros: Carrie Fisher and Betty White could potentially still be hanging out. Cons: my evil dead hamster could come back to kill me.
PART II: HAUNTINGS AND HORROR
I do believe in hauntings. I think of them as separate from ghosts, which I know is unusual. What’s also unusual is that I don’t believe hauntings require death. There are two kinds of hauntings in my mind: ones that are funny, and ones that are memories. The funny ones are mostly a joke; another way of acknowledging a liminal space in a cheeky wink-nudge way. Denny’s parking lots at 3am and abandoned farm houses are haunted, mostly because I think that would be hilarious, but also because they’re the kind of places you expect to be haunted. I think placebo hauntings still count, after all, ghosts aren’t real. The second kind of haunting is more genuine than this. I’ve found that there are some places that have been full of people or life for so long that they start to feel alive themselves. Childhood homes, old churches, historic sites; so much life has passed through that I find it hard to believe that it doesn’t have some kind of memory. It should not come as a surprise to learn that I am incredibly sentimental. I'm the kind of person that says hello to the ocean and greets the birds on my deck each morning. I often keep items I do not need or even want because throwing them away feels unkind. Like something alive within them will take offense at my abandoning them. It’s a childish belief, and in my mind, not so different from believing that the dead can haunt us. Which might make me a hypocrite, but I never claimed to be otherwise.
If ghosts were real, I think there are a couple of changes we would need to make as a culture on how we view them. Horror movies and ghost busting ‘reality’ shows give spirits a horrible rap. Don’t even get me started on Ouija boards. To this day I do not understand how a piece of cardboard branded by Hasbro could inspire so much fear in my friends. That being said, I know my horror movie plots and I’m not about to go tempting fate.
I love the vibe of edgy horror and gothic chic as much as the next My Chemical Romance fan; I just don’t think graveyards and ghosts deserve to be labeled as something scary. Rot is disturbing, yes, and zombies set off a primal fear of disease and rabies that makes evolutionary sense, but graveyards are just a resting place for people we loved and ghosts are just people who didn’t get the memo that the party’s over and they need to go home. Popular ghost lore insists that spirits remain due to some unfinished business or strong emotion, but I refuse to believe that if our emotions are strong enough to hold us back from true death, only anger achieves it. I know of people who believe their passed family members stay and watch over them; a haunting made of love. That’s not scary, that’s your Great Grandma Gladys sticking around to slam the cupboards a bit.
We didn’t always think of ghosts and graveyards as scary, and plenty of cultures still don’t. In the early 20th century, Americans treated graveyards like public parks. People would spend afternoons on the grass among the dead in a cheerful affair, picnicking and generally having a good time. I for one believe we should bring this back, and not just because I view Mary Shelley as my personal hero. It’s been pointed out to me that cemeteries, for the most part, are public spaces, if people so chose they could go picnic there. My point is, when was the last time you saw families gathered on the ceiling of the dead for anything other than tragedy or a holiday? Ability is not in question, rather cultural willingness.
I don't believe in an afterlife, but I do worry still that death might be lonely. Thinking about this for too long makes me feel silly, considering how greatly the dead outnumber the living, but as I said before, logic doesn’t work on grief. I do know, though, that the idea of sitting in a plot six feet under, preoccupied only with being forgotten scares me.
PART III: LOVE AND THE UNIVERSE
Light travels at 186,282 miles per second through the vacuum of space. It takes over four years for the light from Proxima Centauri, our closest neighbor, to reach us here on Earth. If for some reason, Proxima Centauri ever went out, it would take over four years for us to notice. For those four years, we would look up at the night sky and see a star that doesn't exist anymore. So, perhaps under certain circumstances, I do believe in ghosts.
"We are made of star stuff" to quote the late Carl Sagan. Billions upon billions of years ago, the first stars died in rapturous, scintillating fashion and their supernova corpses created the foundations of life. I am a firm believer in the romanticization of decay. If only for my own sake and peace of mind, I must believe there is something beautiful about the hunger of rot. Like passing down the name of a loved one, our bodies pass down their flesh to the earth.
When you bury a body, it creates a nutrient bloom; an overabundance of minerals causing a concentrated explosion of plant life. Death becomes another kind of life. This, I think, is why I’ve latched so tightly onto the idea of haunting as a kind of love. I want to think of ghosts as what happens to the leftover love we never got to give away, the parts that are scared of being alone; light from a long-dead star. I am a poet, though, and I think most things are about love in some roundabout way.
So, really, what I mean when I say something is haunted is that there is love left behind. I mean that tombs are a kind of memory. They are I love you, I hope you rest well. They are I hope whatever comes After is kind.
They are grass that grows that slightest bit greener, life persisting in the only way it knows how.
