Popularized by Charles Dickens in his 1843 A Christmas Carol, as well as in the yuletide editions of his literary magazine, All the Year Round, ghost stories were regular Christmas fare for the Victorians. “Nothing satisfies us on Christmas Eve but to hear each other tell authentic anecdotes about specters,” writes Jerome K. Jerome in the introduction to Told After Supper, his 1891 anthology of Christmas ghost stories.

In our contemporary moment, Halloween has supplanted Christmas in the popular imagination as the time of year best suited for tales of terror. However, as in bygone eras, there is no bad time for a good ghost story. We perennially delight in tales of the restless dead. But if ghost stories are scary and being scared is unpleasant, why consciously seek discomfort? What conjures our ghostly desire?

Scholars have many theories to explain the apparent paradox of what we might call the “pleasurable fear” of horror. Denial theorists, such as Kendall Walton, simply reject the proposition that we are ever actually scared—they posit that we know we are safe and it is all just make-believe. Competition theories of horror enjoyment, in contrast, suggest that scary stories elicit actual emotions—more than one of them. This is philosopher Noël Carroll’s proposition in The Philosophy of Horror, where he argues that the fear and disgust evoked by what he calls “art-horror”—artistic works that intend to evoke a horrified response—are offset by the enjoyments of narrative and the interest elicited by monsters. When consuming scary tales, our curiosity and fear compete. The emotion that wins determines if we keep reading or watching or call it quits and pull the covers up over our head.

And then there is Mathias Clasen’s “biocultural” approach. In Why Horror Seduces, he explains that the perpetual allure of scary stories is in fact evolutionarily conditioned. “The most effective monsters of horror fiction mirror ancestral dangers to exploit evolved human fears,” he explains, and we enjoy this because they evoke strong emotions in a safe context, and sometimes can prepare us for real-life horrors.

But these debates don’t quite capture the particular allure of the ghost story because they side-step our deep-seated desire for the supernatural. We need our ghosts, even if they frighten us.

Ghost stories are, of course, scary. In the way of all monsters, ghosts—even benevolent ones—threaten the stability of the conceptual categories we use to organize our experiences of the world. As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen explains in his important essay, “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” monsters are “disturbing hybrids” that complicate our attempts to make sense of things. Ghosts are a perfect example: Neither living nor dead, fully present nor absent, they are remnants of the past intruding upon the present, scuttling notions of linear chronology in the process. From our contemporary perspective, which tends to disavow the actual existence of ghosts, vampires, and things that go bump in the night, they are things that should not be, yet are.

Nevertheless, beneath the dread of the ghost is our intense desire for them—even scarier than ghosts is the prospect of their absence. The diaphanous quasi-presence of the ghost testifies to the persistence of consciousness after death. For most, few things are more terrifying than the idea of simply winking out of existence at the moment life ends. The ghost consoles us with the possibility of an afterlife. It is the evidence that something of us persists beyond physical dissolution.

In a world riddled with injustice, our ghost stories also comfort us with the idea that justice will be served, even if the universe has to enable the violation of its governing principles to ensure it. This is the message of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which begins with the appearance of the ghost of the murdered King, who returns to reveal the cause of his demise and spur his son to vengeance. It’s also the premise of Jerry Zucker’s 1990 blockbuster, Ghost, starring Patrick Swayze, Demi Moore, and Whoopi Goldberg, in which the ghost of the murdered Sam (Swayze) lingers to protect the love of his life, Molly (Moore), and to see that those responsible for Sam’s death are punished. In Guillermo del Toro’s 2015 Crimson Peak, it is the ghosts of murdered brides that haunt the isolated heroine, leading her to the revelation of their undoing and the outing of the culprit. “Murder will out” is the message of these stories and many others, even if a ghost has to do the outing.

These functions of ghosts—confirming the afterlife, ensuring cosmic justice, providing consolation for the living—are evident in the pop culture representations that saturate fiction, film, TV, and other media such as podcasts and videogames. In M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense, for example, ghosts pester young protagonist Cole Sear (“see-er” of dead people, get it?) because they have a story to tell about abuse and murder. There is only one degree of separation between the living and the dead in Stir of Echoes, starring Kevin Bacon, in which a ghost leads the living to her bones in the basement and the murderer who buried them there.

The intense desire we have for ghosts is at the heart of a personal favorite film of mine: Mikael Håfström’s 1408 starring John Cusack. In this expanded version of Stephen King’s story of the same name, Cusack’s Mike Olin is a confirmed skeptic who disingenuously writes guidebooks to haunted places. What we discover though is that Olin never recovered from the death of his daughter and now travels from one purportedly haunted place to another desperately seeking confirmation of life after death. His encounters in a truly haunted hotel room leave him shaken, but also reassured.

At the end of Zucker’s Ghost, the murderers have been dragged to hell and Sam and Molly are granted what was denied them when Sam was murdered: a moment to say goodbye. Near the end of Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense, Cole shares with his mother his grandmother’s answer to his mother’s question, “Do I make you proud?”: “Yes, every day.” And in a particularly devastating moment in Håfström’s 1408, Cusack’s melancholic Mike Olin is able to take his dead daughter in his arms once more and tell her that he loves her.

These moving moments illustrate the power and profundity of our ghost stories: They respond to the deepest of human needs. Ghosts are frightening, of course, but even more terrifying is the thought of their absence. With this in mind, one can do no better during the long hours of dark winter nights than to gather with family and friends, and invite along the ghosts.

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We think the ghosts will come to us as we sit in Kaitlyn’s car, once our car, on top of the man-made hill that houses the only mausoleum in Woodlawn Cemetery. Small blue orbs dot the landscape. Ghost hunting shows often cite orbs as a sign of a haunting. But these are just battery-operated lamps that families have left next to their dead’s gravestones.

We figure this spot under the tree is a good place to hide from the few cars that might drive by in the night, going from Urbana to Champaign or vice versa. I turn the ignition off.

“Now what?” Kaitlyn sighs. Our ghost hunting inexperience is evident.

Three months ago, I had stood in our kitchen, now my kitchen, and said: I’m gay. At first, I had said I would find a new place because she had loved the garden in the backyard. But she wanted to go because she didn’t want to be in a house haunted by our former togetherness.

Over the remains of our marriage, we both wanted to create a celebration for our new friendship and a new tradition—one last ours. Inspired by the then-new show “Ghost Hunters,” we’d search out ghosts on Halloween, our shared favorite holiday. We decided to call it Wake the Dead.

Fog from the cold creeps up the windows. Silhouettes of the tree’s branches knock against the back window.

“What was that?” Kaitlyn whispers

“What was what?” I look around, afraid. The idea of seeing a ghost seemed fun, the increasing possibility as we sit in the dark cemetery, not so much.

“Thought I saw something moving across that way.” She points towards a row of graves.

I don’t see anything. Still, as the cold bleeds in through the vents, making everything feel even creepier, a thought whispers to me that we shouldn’t be there.

“Want to go?”

She nods. I drive as fast as I can on the twisty cemetery road in the dark. We go back to my apartment to eat pizza and watch a comedy. We laugh hard at anything slightly funny.

The author’s ceramic figurine in Chicago’s AIDS Garden—a place he believes is crowded with gay ghosts or ‘lavender apparitions.’ Courtesy of author.

Maybe we didn’t see anything because ghosts don’t hang out in cemeteries. According to Shane McClelland, co-founder of the Stonewall Columbus Ghost Hunters, they tend to return to places they associate with happiness or a place where they experienced trauma.

McClelland’s group hosts a YouTube show called “Queer Ghost Hunters.” In contrast to regular ghost hunting shows, all the investigators on “Queer Ghost Hunters” are queer, and the subjects of their investigations are queer ghosts.

I started watching Stonewall Columbus Ghost Hunters in April 2022, while researching my memoir about my relationship to ghosts. Like my queerness, ghosts have always been with me, even when I didn’t want to acknowledge them. I started to notice my father’s ghost standing behind me three years ago when I remembered that he had molested me. Those memories brought on PTSD, major depression, and generalized anxiety disorder. I stopped showering. I slept with the lights on. No matter where I went or what I did, he was there, his hand hovering above my left shoulder.

But just as ghosts can haunt places of pleasure or trauma, that “you are not alone” feeling can be scary or be a comfort. Like I once accepted being queer, I eventually accepted being haunted. My once-casual interest in ghosts has become a full-fledged fascination. Now, instead of fearing being haunted, I devote much of my free time to seeking queer ghosts and writing haunted memoir, a term I coined, about the lived experience of being haunted. Ghosts have led me to a community of others also welcoming ghosts into their lives.

I’ve found that queerness and ghosts go together in fundamental ways. For one, our lack of queer history is a haunting. Rather than camera-ready scares, the hunts on “Queer Ghost Hunters” are a vehicle for finding and sharing queer history. By seeking out our ghosts and telling their stories, we defy erasure.

But in “Queer Ghost Hunters”, the Stonewall Columbus Ghost Hunters focus their searches on places of trauma, like prisons and abandoned asylums. They don’t go anywhere the queer ghosts might have had fun. If we are to memorialize places of queer trauma—and I believe we should—we also need to memorialize places of queer joy. For me, the power of queer ghost hunting lies in the way that it offers a means to acknowledge the co-existence of loss and celebration in queer, haunted spaces.

AIDS Garden Chicago balances this coexistence. Built on the ruins of what used to be a cruising and queer gathering spot known as Belmont Rocks in one of the city’s gay-friendly northern neighborhoods, the garden’s site memorializes a joyful part of Chicago’s queer history. Chicago Reader described Belmont Rocks as “the rare spot where the queer community could mix and mingle in broad daylight all summer long” and “nothing short of a gay paradise.”

Opened this year, the AIDS Garden’s centerpiece is a 30-foot, green Keith Haring sculpture titled Self-Portrait. Its defiant, joyful figure has its left leg and arm raised, as if photographed mid step. The park that circles the sculpture has concrete walking paths, benches, and pink and orange flowers. Through QR codes, visitors can scan to hear a still-growing collection of stories from those who lived through the crisis years in Chicago, as well as stories about those who didn’t make it. Because not a lot of storytelling exists about the Midwest during the height of the AIDS epidemic, the park is vital in making space to witness queer history and lives.

The author’s ceramic ghost stands in front of a 30-foot Keith Haring sculpture at AIDS Garden Chicago. Coutesy of author.

On the day I visit, the garden is busy: Cinnamon fills the air from the churros being made by the nearby food stand; closer to the lake, the air smells of sweat and sunscreen. People picnic under the shade of the trees surrounding the garden, while others hurry by to get a spot on the grass close to the lake. Some sunbathe on the concrete lip between the garden and the lakefront walkways just like in the historical pictures of Belmont Rocks. All of it feels like a way of honoring the space—laughing, taking in the sun, being with friends by the lake, just like the ghosts who haunt this space did when they were alive. It is a communal space for the living and the dead where the feeling that you are not alone is a comfort.

I’ve brought my own ghost to the garden, a ceramic figurine. I lie on my stomach on the crisp summer grass right in front of the sculpture to get a picture of the two together. The garden, I imagine, must be crowded with gay ghosts—or “lavender apparitions,” this more delightful descriptor courtesy of the podcast History Is Gay’s Halloween episode featuring the Queer Ghost Hunters. Just as ghosts are evidence of history, lavender apparitions prove queer people have always existed—even when we didn’t have language for queerness, even when some try to make us vanish.

Wake the Dead was a one-time event. Kaitlyn started her own tradition the next year: a Halloween costume party. Eventually, we phased out of each other’s lives, and I moved out of central Illinois to find my new home in Chicago, a city that provides space for queer history, celebration. Here, through searching out queer ghosts, I’ve reclaimed the ghost for myself just as I have the feeling of being haunted—two things the frightened version of me hiding from ghosts in that car in Urbana-Champaign would not have thought possible.

My new home is also walking distance to a local gay beach on Lake Michigan. I walk along the sand-covered concrete ridge that separates the beach from the preserved prairie dunes, the tall yellow-green marram grass stretching out towards the dark gray-blue water, towards the lighthouse with the rainbow base, on one of the first warm days. The dunes are themselves an unofficial cemetery of those lost to settler genocide. As I sit on the beach, the Chicago wind picks up, and sand swirls in the wind as if it’s dancing. I try to record it on my phone, to document what feels magical. I know I won’t capture it, but that’s OK. I let myself enjoy this lavender apparition, enjoying movement after being frozen for the winter. A gay ghost, as in a happy one.

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But this isn’t a story about America in the 21st century. It’s a story about ancient Greece in 430 B.C.E. That year, a mysterious disease (likely typhus or typhoid fever) hit the crowded city-state of Athens. Already burdened by being at war with Sparta, the Athenians sought guidance from a long-standing source of wisdom: ghosts.

The belief in ghosts was so well refined among the ancient Greeks that there were three different categories of the spectral beings: the deceased who were not buried with the proper rituals, those who suffered premature or untimely deaths, and victims of violence, including casualties of war. If someone died under those circumstances, it was felt that the soul was caught between two worlds, and could not move on to the Greek concept of the afterlife. Sometimes, this lack of final fulfillment was so great that a ghostly spirit could appear among the living, occasionally set on revenge.

The Greeks also believed that the ghosts of the dead had special knowledge to share with the living, coming to their rescue to provide advice on what to do in difficult situations. A mysterious pandemic was just the kind of dilemma in which the ancient Greeks would seek out some spectral advice—and one of the easiest haunts to find ghosts in ancient Greece was, arguably, the stage.

Ancient Greeks enthusiastically supported their theater, and in fact, historians believe that the outdoor theater of Dionysus in Athens remained open during the pandemic, even drawing large crowds. And stage-ghosts, or eidolon, common in ancient Greek dramas, were a device to offer words of wisdom to audiences from beyond the grave.

The classical Greek dramatist Aeschylus is one of the best known for utilizing ghosts in his plays. Knowing that the wisdom of ghosts would carry far more weight than the word of flesh-and-blood human characters, Aeschylus used them for important storylines in some of his most notable works. In his drama The Libation Bearers, for instance, the lead characters, Orestes and his sister Electra, summon the ghost of their late father, Agamemnon, in hopes that his spirit will provide guidance for how to punish his murderer—Agamemnon’s wife and their mother, Clytemnestra. The spirits of the dead were believed to hover near their final resting place and could be called upon to work either for good or for evil. Electra pays a visit to Agamemnon’s tomb, where she pours libations (an important part of the proper Greek burial ritual, usually consisting of wine, water, honey or oils) on his gravesite in hopes of conjuring his ghost. She is successful, and Agamemnon’s ghostly counsel helps Orestes succeed in murdering Clytemnestra.

Aeschylus continued this genre of ghost tales with The Eumenides, which opens after Clytemnestra’s death. Now it is her ghost that is seeking vengeance. But just when it seems she will initiate another round of revenge killings, a group of spirits called the Furies come to the rescue and put an end to the cycle of violence. The Furies were originally considered to be the vengeance-fixated ghosts of murder victims, but Aeschylus has them act as a force for justice here, reflecting the fact that as Greek society evolved, the Furies also become known as the titular Eumenides, or the “Kindly Ones.” This softened stance toward the spirits no doubt would have soothed anxious Athenians watching in plague times, who may have thought what was happening around them was a curse from their pantheon of gods. While the Greeks worshipped their gods, they knew they might mete out punishment to humans on a whim or as part of an inter-deity competition. The benevolence of the kinder, gentler Furies might reassure Athenians that the plague was not necessarily a penalty for warring with Sparta, for instance.

It was not just Greek tragedies in which ghosts made their presence known on stage. Ancient Greek comedy also featured their own ghostly guest spots. There are references by writers from the Classical period, for example, to the comic Greek playwright Eupolis, who lived in Athens during the time of the 430 B.C.E. plague. In his play Demes, Eupolis suggested how life in Athens might ultimately get back to a “new normal” again through ghosts of the great Athenian statesmen Aristides, Pericles, and Solon. Unfortunately, their exact dialogue has been lost to us, but Athenian audiences were likely able to gain historical perspective from the satiric spirits who offered comedic advice to the embattled city-state (experts traditionally believe Demes was written around 412 B.C.E. after another Athenian disaster, in this case the military expedition to Sicily). Their presence, after all, was a reminder that life in ancient Greece had never been without tribulation. Yet society continued on.

Like the ancient Greeks during their time of plague, people today living through the time of COVID may find their own solace in seeking out ghostly counsel. It is no coincidence that the advent of spiritualism in the United States rose greatly in popularity after such deadly cataclysms as the Civil War and World War I. People wanted to hear from their lost loved ones, to know that they were happy in the afterlife, and seek insight into a bewildering present and an unknown future.

While popular culture today has expanded to include ghostly offerings on everything from television to TikTok, maybe the Athenians were onto something when it came to stage-ghosts. Archaeological evidence suggests ancient Greeks saw a connection between theater and healing. So, as was the case in smaller towns around the Greek countryside, a temple to Asklepios, the god of healing, was built adjacent to the theatre of Dionysus in Athens. And so, when plague patients would have been brought to the temple, it may have been felt that listening to a play nearby aided in their recovery—and, perhaps, with the help of some eidolon even offered them a bit of solace.

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Growing up in this place, I often wondered if I could ever make a film here, and in the spring of 2014 I started working on a documentary about peach pickers. I wanted to capture the beauty of manual labor, the backbreaking intensity of fieldwork, and the folks who make it come alive, day after day, in the summer heat.

I was just beginning to work on this film, finding the orchards, looking for farmworkers to follow, when the project was transformed after I learned of a personal story within my own family. A cousin of mine, much older and wiser, perhaps trying to show me the possibilities I had ignored, told me that many years ago, my grandfather had disappeared for a span of five years. Back in those days, grandpa would leave his wife and children back in Michoacán to go to California, traversing thousands of miles to work the fields during harvest time. It was a cyclical journey, leaving in the spring and always coming home to Mexico for Christmas. But one year, grandpa did not return from California. Nobody knew where he was or what had become of him. As far as I know, even when he finally stepped through the door of his home and reunited with his family, he never really explained his absence to anyone.

 
My mind started to focus on the image of my grandfather coming home, as if he were a spirit coming back from the dead. I wondered what his life would have been like if he had stayed lost even longer. What if 10 or 20 years had gone by? What would his life have become if he were gone long enough to forget his family and his home? I realized that my grandfather was a ghost like many others. Even today, every city and town in California has ghosts. Every immigrant community has a man like my grandfather, who just disappeared across the border and became a lost soul. Their stories fall silently by the wayside, ignored and overlooked, perhaps because we are afraid of what they have to say about the great American Dream. Because of my grandfather, I knew I could no longer make a lyrical documentary. I had to find a way to tell the story of the man who did not come back.

Little by little, a story began to take shape. I brought in some of my research from the documentary, using the same peach orchards and many of the neighborhoods where I was scouting for talent. I wrote the script by trying to imagine the life of a single, Mexican man from the countryside who had worked the land his entire life. What did he do? What was his daily routine like? What was his greatest hope? I soon had an outline of a story about a man named Lupe who lived and worked in the Central Valley but felt like he let life pass him because he let his wife and children back in Mexico slip away from him. One day, Lupe comes to understand that he is dying, and now all he wants to do is return to Mexico one last time, no matter the cost.

In the meantime, one afternoon, my father introduced me to an old friend named Daniel Muratalla. He was a native of Michoacán and had worked for over 30 years as a field laborer, and he was absolutely perfect for the part as I imagined it: strong, charismatic, and with an intensity about him that could bring to life the conflicts of the character. We were both very shy at first, but soon enough we started talking about the film and the character I wanted him to portray. Danny did not know much about filmmaking, but he was intrigued by the idea because he knew a lot of men like Lupe, who ended up alone after a lifetime of work. At the same time, he felt intimidated by the prospect of acting on camera. I told him that he would not have to memorize lines like a professional actor would. We would take it one scene at a time, step by step. But I also told him that in order for this approach to work, he had to feel that he could trust me. Once we established that bond, Danny helped me to convince Ana, his, wife to play the role of Lupe’s girlfriend, Gloria, the only meaningful relationship the character has in the United States.

 
Our trust paid off during the filming itself, as I would often ask Danny and Ana for their take on dialogue or situations at hand. Many times, I simply adapted to the circumstances. When we filmed in their home we used all of their furniture and personal items as props, as well as their own normal wardrobe. I cast their children as extras in the film, and we incorporated their speech patterns into the dialogue. The result is that the film often steps into the world of documentary, capturing Lupe’s story with a sense of realism that is almost completely absent from how we look at the immigrant experience in this country.

For second-generation immigrants like myself, ghosts like Lupe present a special challenge. They are the painful side of our journey. These lost souls are the picture of loneliness and a deep, woeful anguish that comes from an acute awareness of not belonging on either side of the border. It is scary to look at them because there is always a possibility that we may see our own struggles reflecting back at us.

I felt this fear myself as I worked on this film. For a long time after I wrapped up the shoot, I was very angry with Lupe. I felt that he was incredibly selfish and I could not respect him. Only in the last months of finishing the film did I reconcile with him. One afternoon, I sat down and watched the film by myself and I finally understood that Lupe, and by extension my own grandfather, were men who lived with a limited set of resources. They did not know how to express their emotions. But they did the best they could to make things right. I finally could see Lupe as a man facing the supreme moment of truth. Nearing the end of his life, confronted by death, he finally comes to understand the price that he has paid for leaving it all behind. He rushes to make amends, against all odds, upturning his life once again, willing to do anything to go home and face his destiny.

As immigrants, we often want to look away from the struggles and pitfalls of our journeys. We want to highlight the successes, and understandably so. But we must also confront our fears and recognize that these ghosts are part of who we are. We must embrace the Lupes of this country if we want to truly make our communities whole.

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Each time I visit the Mystery House I try to envision what this space must have looked like to the “rifle widow” Sarah Winchester, when she first encountered it in 1886—acre after acre of undulating orchards and fields, broken only by an unassuming eight-room cottage.

Legend holds that before the 1906 earthquake—when her estate was as huge and fantastically bizarre as it would ever be with 200 rooms, 10,000 windows, 47 fireplaces, and 2,000 doors, trap doors, and spy holes—not even Sarah could have confidently located those original eight rooms.

Sarah had inherited a vast fortune off of guns. Her father-in-law Oliver Winchester, manufacturer of the famous repeater rifle, died in 1880, and her husband Will, also in the family gun business, died a year later. After she moved from New Haven, Connecticut, to San Jose, Sarah dedicated a large part of her fortune to ceaseless, enigmatic building. She built her house with shifts of 16 carpenters who were paid three times the going rate and worked 24 hours a day, every day, from 1886 until Sarah’s death in 1922.

An American Penelope, working in wood rather than yarn, Sarah wove and unwove eternally. She built, demolished, and rebuilt. Sarah hastily sketched designs on napkins or brown paper for carpenters to build additions, towers, cupolas, or rooms that made no sense and had no purpose, sometimes only to be plastered over the next day. In 1975, workers discovered a new room. It had two chairs, an early 1900s speaker that fit into an old phonograph, and a door latched by a 1910 lock. Sarah had apparently forgotten about it and built over it.

In 1911, the San Jose Mercury News called Sarah’s colossus a “great question mark in a sea of apricot and olive orchards.” Over a century later, the San Francisco Chronicle was still baffled: “the Mansion is an ornately complex answer to a very simple question: Why?”

Mrs. Winchester’s main bedroom.

The answer: Sarah’s building is a ghost story of the American gun. Or so the legend went. A spiritualist in the mid-1800s, when plenty of sane Americans believed they could communicate with the dead, Sarah became terrified that her misfortunes, especially the death of her husband and one-month-old daughter, were cosmic retribution from all the spirits killed by Winchester rifles. A relative said many decades later Sarah fell “under the thrall” of a medium, who told her that she would be haunted by the ghosts of Winchester rifle victims unless she built, non-stop—perhaps at ghosts’ direction, for their pleasure, or perhaps as a way to elude them. Haunted by conscience over her gun blood fortune and seeking either protection or absolution, Sarah lived in almost complete solitude, in a mansion designed to be haunted.

When I heard Sarah’s ghost story from a friend in graduate school, I was enthralled. Eventually, Sarah became the muse for my book on the history of the American gun industry, and culture.

I keenly anticipated my first visit to the Mystery House. I must have been hoping that the house would yield up its secret to me. At first glance I was deflated, for the unusual reason that from the outside, the house wasn’t entirely weird.

But the drama of this house, like the drama of Sarah’s life, was unfolding on the inside. A staircase, one of 40, goes nowhere and ends at a ceiling. Cabinets and doors open onto walls, rooms are boxes within boxes, small rooms are built within big rooms, balconies and windows are inside rather than out, chimneys stop floors short of the ceiling, floors have skylights. A linen closet as big as an apartment sits next to a cupboard less than an inch deep. Doors open onto walls. One room has a normal-sized door next to a small, child-sized one. Another has a secret door identical to one on a corner closet—it could be opened from within the room, but not from without, and the closet drawer didn’t open at all.

Details are designed to confuse. In one room, Sarah laid the parquetry in an unusual pattern: When the light hit the floor a particular way, the dark boards appeared light, and the light boards, dark. Bull’s-eye windows give an upside-down view of the world. Even these basic truths, of up and down, and light and dark, could be subverted.

The house teems with allusions, symbols, and mysterious encryptions. Its ballroom features two meticulously crafted Tiffany art-glass windows. Here, Sarah inscribed her most elegant clues for us. The windows have stained glass panels with lines from Shakespeare. One reads, “These same thoughts people this little world.” It’s from the prison soliloquy in Shakespeare’s Richard II. Deposed from power and alone in his cell, Richard has an idea to create a world within his prison cell, populated only by his imaginings and ideas.

The Winchester Mystery House, circa 1900-1905.

Is the legend accurate? I found spine-tingling clues on the archival trail that incline me to believe that Sarah really was a spiritualist, but I never found that smoking gun, to borrow a metaphor from Oliver’s empire. I do know that her mansion conveys a restless, brilliant, sane—if obsessive—mind and the convolutions of an uneasy conscience. Perhaps Sarah only dimly perceived the sources of her unease, whether ghostly or profane. But she wove anguish into her creation, just as any artist pours unarticulated impulses into her work. Over repeated visits, I came to think that if a mind were a house, it would probably look like this.

The House is an architectural exteriorization of an anguished but playful inner life. Ideas, memories, fears, and guilt occur to us all day long. They come to consciousness. If they displease or terrify, we brood or fuss over them for a while, then revise them to make them manageable, or we plaster over them and suppress them, or refashion them into another idea. One of the house’s builders recalled, “Sarah simply ordered the error torn out, sealed up, built over or around, or … totally ignored.” The mental and architectural processes of revision, destruction, suppression, and creation were ongoing, and similar.

Perhaps the same mental process happens with a country’s historical narratives about its most contentious and difficult topics—war, conquest, violence, guns. Sarah’s family name was synonymous by the 1900s with a multi-firing rifle, and the Winchester family had made its fortune sending more than 8 million of them into the world. It wasn’t crazy to think that Sarah might have been haunted by that idea, that she might have perpetually remembered it, and just as perpetually tried to forget.

I’ve come to see the house as a clever riddle. Sarah made charitable donations, certainly, and if she had wanted to, she could have become a philanthropist of greater renown. But the fact remains that she chose to convert a vast portion of her rifle fortune into a monstrous, distorted home; so we can now wander through her rooms imagining how one life affects others.

Instead of building a university or a library, Sarah built a counter-legend to the thousands of American gunslinger stories. And in this counter-legend, the ghosts of the gun casualties materialize, and we remember them.

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The four of us were drinking cocktails amid the bustle of a downtown Santa Barbara restaurant. Yet we still leaned in over our table’s fading candle and lowered our voices, as if to nestle closer to the campfire.

The Lobero is home to two ghosts, Angie explained: Harry Pideola and Dr. Frank Fowler. Harry was the theater’s Prohibition-era night watchman. He lived upstairs in an old converted dressing room, where he also died. Dr. Frank was a founder of a local theater group. Both ghosts were known to cause mischief around the place, Harry with a taste for pranks, Dr. Frank with a habit of popping up in a top hat and tuxedo.

Angie hadn’t seen the ghosts, but she insisted other people had. The theater’s director had a few chilling tales of his own unusual encounters. And had we read the story by the Santa Barbara Sentinel reporter? He’d planned on spending a night in the theater to debunk the myth last Halloween, but fled after a push-broom showed up where one hadn’t been and the specter of a man in tails flashed before his eyes.

This was all fantastic material, I thought, for a person who gets paid to promote the theater. After Angie leaned back to let us ponder the mystery of what she had just revealed, I couldn’t help taking a dig at the story by asking if any of the theater’s visitors ever were gullible enough to believe it.

I looked across the table at my date, expecting some sort of grin. Instead, she looked disapproving.

“You don’t believe in ghosts?” she asked.

“Why, do you?”

“Sure.” She took a sip from her glass and shrugged. “You never know.”

The fourth person in the group chimed in and agreed he’d seen some spooky things. Then they all started talking about what they were cooking for Christmas dinner.

A year later, that conversation still bugs me. Yes, there are countless things about this world I don’t know, but no, I don’t believe in ghosts. And if I did, I wouldn’t be so casual about it. As the group went on, the skeptic in my head climbed on his high horse and rode through a whole thorny meadow of implications that follow from a belief in the phantasmic. Ghosts mean there’s an afterlife. An afterlife suggests we have souls. Souls suggest there’s a god. Shouldn’t believing in even the possibility of ghosts drastically shape our belief about pretty much everything—how we should live our lives, what we’re doing here in the first place?

If I step off that high horse, though, I get it. Ghosts are fun. We love ghost movies, Halloween, that TV show Ghost Hunters. If someone gets a kick out of a ghost story, it’s not that different from getting a kick out of a vampire story, or a zombie story, or an apocalyptic tale. And ghosts do offer hope—that the people we love are never really gone, that there is indeed something waiting for us on the other side. Even a casual belief can provide a creepy sort of comfort.

Still, there’s something deeper about ghosts that nags at me. It’s not what their existence implies, but the fact that I’d have to deal with them if I believed in them. My life, like everyone’s, is already filled with things that keep me up at night. I have deadlines to meet, people to please, student loans to pay. And then there are the big questions: Will the work I do ever live up to my ambitions? Am I a good person? Would life be different if I’d tried harder when I was younger? Would it be better if I’d tried less?

In Tribute to Freud, a 1956 memoir by the poet H.D. about her friendship with the famed psychoanalyst, there’s a line that has stuck with me for years. “We are all haunted houses,” H.D. writes, reflecting on the experience of living through World War I. Her point is that everyone’s haunted by something—traumas, lost friends, lovers, expectations, mistakes, failures.

With so much that bedevils us, what good are ghosts? I don’t believe in them because I don’t want to believe in them. The things that haunt me are enough, and they don’t live in someone else’s theater.

The post I Choose Not to Believe in Ghosts appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

We’d been living upstairs
From a funeral home
For a summer
It was too hot to go outside
It was too hot to stay in

I saw her again
The same position
Clutching air
In each arm, cradling space

Another night I woke to find
A man, bald and mustached
Suspended inside the wall
He looked like he was choking

I recalled a boy
His face against the wooden floor
A sound like marbles dropping
When he’d bang his head
Throughout the hours
I lay awake, too mindful
To shut my eyes. We lived on

Water, we lived on spoiled rice
Cooked slow, stirred even
Slower, we lived on
Cabbage, couldn’t hardly
Make kapusta, gołąbki,
Couldn’t hardly
Get milk unless it was post-dated
Unless we waited
That long, we gathered
Change on the street,
See a penny
Pick it up
We huddled close
And bathed fast

We kept on
Seeing strangers
Every evening
We were never lonely

Counting the hours
The before and the after
Touch, trembling along
The walls, I thought I’d never leave
Brooklyn, I thought I’d never
Be anyone but the girl
In slip-ons and gray stockings

On a stoop
On Diamond Street
So many afternoons
I watched the windows
I watched the people inside
Hungry all the time

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The story isn’t mine. It belongs to my late mother. She was a teenager, living with her family in La Puente, when one night she heard a gentle rapping on her bedroom door. The door opened and her aunt, who was living with them, let her know in a whisper that she was getting up to make breakfast and what would she like to eat? Then she left the room. My mother went rigid with fright, because her aunt had only days before left for a trip to Yucatán. She was trying to make sense of what she had seen when she heard sobbing. It was her older sister, who shared the bedroom with her, crying in the twin bed next to hers. One of them asked the other (my mother couldn’t be sure who spoke), Did you see that?, and the answer was a crashing wave of grief, wailing that woke up my grandfather, who ran to their bedroom to find his daughters repeating over and over, She’s dead, she’s dead. Mi tía está muerta!

There’s more to the story. After my grandfather chides his daughters for being ridiculous, for believing in what they think they saw, just a short time later there’s a phone call, well before the sun has come up. Cut to my grandfather, hurriedly getting ready to leave the house, dragooning my mother—who, at 16, had just earned her California driver’s license—to take him from La Puente to LAX, amid early morning traffic, so he could fly to Yucatán where his sister had been killed in a grisly car accident. Not till many years later did it occur to me that for my mother, an inexperienced driver, having to trek all the way to LAX may have been as terrifying as what she’d seen that night. But when your mother is first telling you her ghost story in your for-whatever-reason darkened apartment, at night, and you couldn’t have been older than eight, that sort of detail can escape you.

There’s more. Soon, the home in La Puente is haunted, or at least the hallway leading to the bedrooms is. First they hear pacing, a padding of “feet” in that hallway behind them as they sit in the living room trying to watch My Three Sons. Then it’s the hallway saturated in perfume, the aunt’s perfume, an unbearable reek. Finally, their priest is consulted and he believes what they tell him, and he agrees to perform an exorcism. He sprinkles the holy water, he recites from the Bible, and he tells the ghost, You don’t belong here anymore. You’re dead. You need to leave. There’s no longer any need for you here. And she goes. No more haunting. The end.

After the sighing, after the blinking, an occasional head shake, someone will ask, When did your mother tell you that story? Of course, when I told this story as a boy, and then as a teen, nobody (or at least no one that I can remember) ever asked that, but I would volunteer that I had heard it when I was a kid, as a way of saying, If you think you’re freaked out, imagine how freaked out I was when I first heard it! It was bragging, like saying I’d ridden on this coaster a bunch of times, so no big deal. But then I’d tell this story in my 20s, 30s, and now 40s. And when revealing the age I first heard it, there’s no comment but certainly an unspoken question: Why would your mother tell you this? Why would she bequeath me her haunting?

I don’t know, and I’ll never know. Over the years, though, I’ve tried to guess. If my memory isn’t completely betraying me, my mother seemed pensive that night. I dare say she seemed sad. I don’t remember my father being in our apartment, though he may well have been shut away in their bedroom. But he certainly wasn’t in that dark living room, the only light coming from our porch light when, sitting on one end of our sofa, she told us about what had once happened to her. I think she forgot we were there, me and my younger brother and baby sister. Maybe she was telling, aloud to herself, this incredible thing from her life, as if to reassure herself her existence wasn’t what it seemed. She had seen a ghost at 16, was married at 19, and had three children by the time she was 26. Her life was circumscribed by taking care of us, taking care of the house, and working a job. But this amazing thing had happened.

Then sometimes I think she knew we were listening, but didn’t mean to terrify us. She just wanted us to know our mother had seen things. That she had been a girl who once drove her bereft father on a busy freeway because her mother and older sister didn’t drive, drove him all the way out to LAX, where she’d never driven to before, palms sweating on the steering wheel, then drove all the way back to La Puente by herself, with probably not so much as a Thomas Brothers in the car to help her if she got lost, and did this and more—had lived with a ghost. That this is the story she meant to tell but couldn’t articulate. That she was brave. That she confronted mystery. This is what she couldn’t say—didn’t know how to say—but only that she had seen the newly dead at her bedroom door, and what does it mean, children? what does it mean?

 
 
*An earlier version incorrectly referred to Villalon’s mother as having three children by the age of 24. She was 26 at that time.

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