The ghost in my sister’s house
SAVANNAH—In the liquor store, my sister turns to me and begins to tell me about the ghost that haunts her little house.
She has seen it, she says, a misty gray arrangement, an evaporating presence that inspires neither fear nor awe. It sits on their porch, wafts like an aroma through their tiny home. Her husband Porter, she says, has felt its cold touch on his shoulder, jabbing him playfully in the back. The best evidence she can offer is the disappearance of a grandchild’s boots from beside the front door. They were placed there in the evening, but in the morning the child had no boots to wear. A month later, they mysteriously reappeared.
Their ghost was just playing with them.
My sister does not drink. She has insisted on buying wine for us and a bottle of Jim Beam for Porter. We are guests and she has news she wants to break to us—they’re moving out of the house, though not because of the ghost.
“We’ve told him he can’t come with us,” she says. “We told him, ‘You have to stay here.’”
I just nod and wonder if she actually believes. Much of Savannah’s economy depends on ghosts; there are dozens of tours of cemeteries and old houses operating in what is called “the most haunted city in America.” It’s understandable. An old city like this is bound to collect sorrows. At night Spanish moss filters starlight in a way that might seem sinister. I want to tell my sister about my slipper that went missing for six months, how we finally found it behind a sofa where a little dog had touchingly stashed it away, but Karen reads my mind and grabs me by the eyes.
So I say nothing and think of Ambrose Bierce and his sardonic essay “The Clothing of Ghosts.”
“If the ghosts care to prove their existence as objective phenomena they are unfortunate in always discovering themselves to inaccurate observers, to say nothing of the bad luck of frightening them into fits,” Bierce writes. “That the seers of ghosts are inaccurate observers, and therefore incredible witnesses, is clear from their own stories. Who ever heard of a naked ghost? The apparition is always said to present himself (as he certainly should) properly clothed, ‘in his habit as he lived’ or in the apparel of the grave. Herein the witness must be at fault: whatever power of apparition after dissolution may inhere in mortal flesh and blood, we can hardly be expected to believe that cotton, silk, wool and linen have the same mysterious gift. If textile fabrics had that property they would sometimes manifest it independently, one would think—would ‘materialize’ visibly without a ghost inside ….”
His disbelief didn’t disqualify Bierce from writing a lot of ghost stories. He had an economic motive: People like those stories, they satisfy an emotional need to be temporarily scared of something that will—unlike bureaucrats and tax codes, bad genes and carcinogens—go away when the lights come up. Some of us enjoy the chemicals— the adrenaline, endorphin and dopamine cocktail— that are released into our brains when the fight-or-flight instinct kicks in.
Ghosts aren’t real and couldn’t harm us even if they were. Right? They are sad, lost creatures somehow hung up between two temporal realms, perhaps perceiving the living who apprehend them as apparitions. They are like the college kids who come back to their old high school wearing their letter jackets and chatting up their old teachers. There’s something pathetic about them.
Even as scientists get closer to rationally explaining how “feelings of presence” can be created in the minds of people in extreme physical or emotional situations, most of us are probably willing to completely discount supernatural phenomena. I shrug my shoulders at my sister’s story and acknowledge that people have always seen and sensed ghosts and angels, that demons and wraiths have pervaded human cultures for thousands of years. I don’t presume to know what I don’t, what I cannot. Faith is a gift I’ve been denied; people believe in a lot of things I cannot wrap my poor head around.
But I suspect a bit of our undying fascination with afterlives has to do with the impossibility of imagining our own non-existence. While part of the human condition is the knowledge of the certainty of death, none of us can really quite believe in its finality. The existence of ghosts argues for the imperishability of the human soul, for horrors and succors of immortality. To believe in ghosts is to believe in something that supersedes our mortality and the possibility of postmortem solace and communication. A ghost may be a wayward saint, divorced from heaven and estranged from God, but it is nevertheless “alive” in some crucial way.
I think they are products of our subconscious, animated by wishfulness and superstition. I don’t believe in them because, like Bierce, I can’t imagine why they appear so infrequently to credible witnesses prepared to verify their existence. Why are they content to tease and prank us? Why would they bother to hide our shoes? If they want something from us, why can’t they just come out and scream it? And where will the ghosts go when the world itself winds down, when it cracks apart and cools?
I guess it doesn’t matter, that I ought to just play along. Everyone in Savannah has a ghost; the city’s built on the bones of the dead. Graveyards have been paved over. Innocents were hanged for the murders of children. Legends propagate. Houses settle, pipes squeal and boots go missing.
My sister’s house has a ghost. She might not really believe that, but it’s her story, a bit of narrative leverage. She scolds her ghost, but he’s like a family pet. One they will have to abandon when they move. For, as everybody knows, ghosts don’t travel far.
I don’t believe buildings can be haunted. But maybe some people are.