Ghost Stories

Making peace with hants and haunts

I grew up hearing the story of a distant great aunt leaping from a south Georgia porch. The thing that turned the leap into a story was the fact that it took place long after the mythologized kinswoman was dead. With a single reported sighting a ghost story was born. And for a people steeped in an imposed gumbo of religious belief, the legend, as it came to be, was unassailable. Another ghost story of my youth was simple folklore of the urban legend genre. The story goes that three friends make a bet of courage. Which can brave a dark night in the graveyard? The first two night stalkers, one after the other, sit alone with the dead, until the stroke of midnight, then bury a stick in a grave to prove they met the challenge. The third friend, especially afraid of the dark, rushes to bury her stick before midnight and inadvertently impales her own hem. When she attempts to stand but is held down by the confirming stick, she falls into frightened hysteria. Convinced that a ghost is pulling her into the grave, she dies of a heart attack on the spot.

A ghost story is essential to a beautiful and breath-taking generational story by New York Times bestselling author, Dr. Abraham Verghese. In The Covenant of Water, 12-year old child bride, Mariamma, meets the ghost of her 40-year old husband’s first wife in the basement of her new home. Initially perceived as a combatant, Mariamma soon finds compassion for the unsettled spirit who, in turn, becomes a companion to the lonely younger. Shaped by a Hindu influenced Christianity, Mariamma finds nothing unusual about sharing a house with a ghost. She takes the cohabitation as a simple fact of her new life and tends to the ghost when unresolved concerns surface in the form of paranormal activity. Like Mariama, I was visited by a ghost in my home. The week following my mother’s death, I encountered her in a waking-dream. She walked toward my bed with a smile on her face only to bare her teeth as she came within arms’ reach. My therapist said the dream was normal, even typical, the mind’s way of working things out. But the mystic that lives beneath my logical self believes I was visited by the actual soul of my mother, trapped between realms by pain, like the ghost of first-wife who reveals her torment to Mariamma.

And then there are ghosts of our own making. My first such conjure took place on Christmas, when I was nine. Peggy Pen Pal was my whole heart’s desire and the Santa I knew was my mother delivered, big time. The bow-topped present stood aside the reflective aluminum tree that we assembled and disassembled each year. Once stripped of its colorful holiday wrapping, the glossy box, covered with an image of Peggy at her desk, called to me like a doorway to salvation. Peggy was more than a doll. She would be my friend. Also my confident, she would write with me and affirm my inner tumult. Christmas day sped by with secrets flying between us. Then, when called away by a little-girl task, I misjudged my steps and broke Peggy’s pen. In that startling moment, I watched, horrified, as Peggy retreated and turned into a ghost. I kept her death a secret, compounding the grief, and placed her body on my highest shelf. Peggy watched and judged me from that god-like perch and, full of guilt, I submitted to shame.

I brought another ghost into existence, long after Peggy, as I struggled through a divorce. I was wounded and fearful, at fourteen years in, and completely disoriented by reality. Just about every foundational thing I believed to be true had failed to keep my marriage afloat and the person I married a friend. In spiritual crisis, I struggled to solidify my ruptured identity and beliefs. But hovering nearby was the ghost of my marriage and, depleted and needy, I used it to distance myself from blame and pain. “The marriage” hit a hard spot. “The marriage” was in trouble. “The marriage” failed—not me. This quasi-third-person-strategy had me looking to a dead thing—a ghost—for healing that only I could call forth.

Quite shortly after Peggy Pen Pal ascended to her ghostly throne, I had a life-threatening medical emergency and was diagnosed with Systemic Lupus. And, decades later, when I released the ghost of my marriage, I experienced an astounding rebound in my faltering health. While these two ghosts were nothing more than products of my mind, their manifesting was enormous and material. And while I might be guilty of connecting all the wrong dots, I have come to believe that whatever haunts holds power. Peace made with ghosts—as with Mariamma and first-wife ghost—breaks the spell of potential harm. Peacemaking gives birth to freedom and Wholeness. Especially in the mind.