Postscript: on the lack of ghost stories in "Ghost Stories," and because you asked

While I was writing what became a story in three parts, my criticalreader started chirping. Time, it told me, for some bits of these old, forgotten sixth grade ghost stories. In fact, the criticalreader was pinging for one just, here, and here, and here...usually where, if you read the story, you find yourself suddenly hanging with Hamlet through no fault of your own. Hamlet? I ask you. My criticalreader whined and sighed and ground its gears in unfulfilled need for a few snippets, a shred or two, just a splinter or single shiver from the past. People, it warned, are going to be unhappy. And sure enough, as people read they chided gently, for being left out of the stories. Even went so far as to suggest that I was holding out on them, or that if I really were so deficient in the memory department, certainly I was more than capable of fabricating a false but convincing shard or two. You see what happens when you start to make things up?


What do you read, my lord?

Words, words, words.

So, here's the thing. I wanted to read those stories myself. Well, not really read them, certainly not for the reading's sake, but have access to them. Editorial access to bits and pieces that I could use for depth, for color and (I'm sure) humor. Not just mention a little girl on the basement stairs. I hate ghost "stories" like that. I hate grabbing a book called "Ghosts of Old New York" or "Haunted Hotels of the Gold Rush" like it's made out of flourless chocolate cake and I haven't eaten since Thursday only to find that it's nothing more than a glorified a list of sightings. Pish! Those aren't stories! Tell me the Why-and-Wherefores! Who was the woman in the lavender dress often seen walking up the stairs from the lobby of the Geiser Grand Hotel and then turning to pass smoothly out of view and into the wall?! If you don't know but you expect me to pay good American currency for your book, speculate in a satisfying and forthcoming fashion! Do your research, draw conclusions! Make it up, for crying in the night!

But. I could not. Remember. The stories.


I would have had to lie. I really can't make things up like the sixth grader I was. I can remember, if I am careful to work without distractions and with the criticalreader's threshold set at an extremely high tolerance, what certain moments of being in sixth grade were like. And I tried to live in those memories as I put together, from the bits I had, a coherent (I hope) telling of just one strand; one single part of how, from where I set out one day, I ended up where I am. If I had tried to create stories for this new telling I don't think I would have been able to maintain the thread. I would have unconsciously, despite my fervent intentions and efforts to the contrary, charted a new course, made comments and created agendas that just weren't there for my sixth grade self. Simply having grown up to be a bigger person in the boat causes it to sit differently in the waters I sailed as a child, to move more quickly sometimes and sometimes more slowly. I was so curious to find out why on earth I was telling this tale at all, and where on earth we were going to end up. I kept waiting to see what this one was about. I so didn't want to tell the story, I wanted it to tell me.


Whither wilt thou lead me? Speak, I'll go no further.

Perhaps that's how the cast of Hamlet wormed their way onstage. Hamlet, of all the people Shakespeare made, is closest to my heart. Not the character I would most like to play but the one I am most like. Seriously. Ask my children. Of the many ways we two are like, this one most applies here; he also lived in a haunted place and came of age grappling with the ghosts of stories that overlapped, but really were not, his own. These aren't any ghosts any one can tell about with absolute certainty no matter how closely we comb through the bits of their stories. The only person, in a story about clashing and competing stories, who gives everything in his mind and heart to an audience of powerless onlookers is Hamlet. The original blogger. And the essence of a reliable witness. Right?


...unpack my heart with words...

Once upon a time there was a story of a little ghost girl who got stuck, somehow, on the stairs that go down to the basement of the old State Capitol Museum in Fillmore, Utah, and I think she kept some piece of me with her, there below where the living are wont to assemble. Once upon a time there was a little girl who made a rule for herself that she would never tell but then on a day without a thought she told after all. And got stuck in the telling, the real making of stories about dead people. And what came of it. If the people were never born till I told about them, are they still dead?


Who is to be buried in it?

One that was a woman, sir, but, rest her soul, she's dead.

If I'm going to the trouble to make up a ghost for a story and then more effort making a story for that ghost, I will want it to be a good one, both ghost and story. And I will want it to fly free of my personal anchor lines and guide ropes. Otherwise, I'll just stick to the dead people I actually know. And make of their stories what I can remember.

The way I remember them.

Alas, how is't with you,
That you do bend your eye on vacancy,
And with th' incorporal air do hold discourse?...

Do you see nothing there?

Nothing at all, yet all that is I see.




Noah's photos

Ghost Stories: a Cautionary tale in Three Parts; the third part. Don't start reading here, this is the end. Look for something called "Beginning."

People in the town where I grew up figure on one apricot harvest in seven years. Too many falsely warm days that come too late and too early to be of any real use. Sunshine out of its time can't extend the late ripening of last year's tomatoes but can steal fruit from July and August. The past is not prospered and the future comes to naught.

So, do you believe in ghosts? Did you ever tell their stories? Think quick of the stories you know. Do they scare you? Did they, ever? Lots of people wouldn't talk about ghosts or let anyone else talk, either. They said talking about ghosts calls them. I'm more inclined to think it births them. Gives shape, name, intent to something we feel but don't touch. I've read that Daphne Du Maurier lived her life haunted by Rebecca, by Rachel, by people she told into being and tried to leave where their stories ended. But a ghost stays right there. They don't go away. Of course, I don't know if that's true, about Daphne; she's dead. Maybe someone made it up.


I was not frightened by the stories I told. I was the one making them up after all and they really were not good stories (if they had been good stories I'm sure I would remember them). They violated every rule (bylaw, suggestion and guideline) of ghost building but especially that one about being in anyway plausible. Every story in this creepy little grouping I was setting in a building in which no one was ever born, lived, loved, died or was betrayed either tragically or otherwise. History passed by it, rather than through it and while that has made it interesting, from a historical perspective, such a sad lack of human past would be back-story suicide, if you were a building trying to get your hauntings told. No, I was never frightened by my silly stories. I was frightened by the other girls' belief. And I was very frightened by the telling.

Horatio says 'tis but our fantasy
And will not let belief take hold of him...

Frightened. And completely seduced. This performance was as delicious as Hershey squares soft from your pocket, but risky, a thing chocolate never was till just recently. The girls were choosing to listen to me. They went everywhere with me. More of them came every day. I never had to agree to play with someone no one else wanted.

I waxed desperate with imagination. And we were all having so much fun.

I might have noticed their fun took the form of wide-open, seldom blinked eyes. Of holding arms tightly, of avoiding some edges of the playground altogether. Of a quick-formed addiction to something all of us knew was, really, not too good for us. I might have noticed that certain of those three shining girls tried to tell stories of their own only to be shushed or ignored. I might have noticed a spreading coolness toward performances no one else could reach, toward skills no one else in this microcosm had. I might have noticed that, though I was constantly surrounded by a densely packed herd, no one, ever, not once, asked me to play. I should have noticed that my heart or my guts or the knowing part of me where the stories come out was gone all shaky and cold. I should have realized that I always know how a story will play out.

There needs no ghost, my lord, come from the grave
To tell us this.


It was only a matter of time before nightmares began. Children who live in farming communities have chores that must be done after school whether there is still light in the sky or not. Barns and outbuildings usually have lights in them. You can take a flashlight or you just walk from the house to the chickens in the dark. It was only a matter of time. You go down to the basement or upstairs to your room alone. You are sent to the cellar for a jar of peaches. You are told you had better get on home from your friend's house where you have played till all the sunset drained out of the west and you will not have a ride, you will ride that bike home what on earth do you think we bought it for?


We had a hard freeze. It was only a matter of time.

It was unnerving because it happened all on one day. The girls came off their buses as if their angry mothers had shot them at me from canons.
My mom said I couldn't listen to you anymore.
I can't play with you (!?) because my mom says you are not a nice girl or you wouldn't tell stories like that.
I'm not supposed to even be around you.
No one tell me any more of her stories.
I'm supposed to forget them.
I'm not allowed to talk to you, don't talk to me.

These are but wild and whirling words, my lord.

I am sorry they offend you, heartily,
Yes, faith, heartily.

It was the same sort of surprise as when they had first wanted to hear about my ghosts. Caught me off guard. Sorry, wasn't paying attention, not really keeping track of any of you, just my own self. But also not surprising, either, because I was half expecting it, wondering with a corner of my attention how long I could spin this out, how long this could last. Every teller of tales knows that telling scary stories to children brings their mothers down on you. No matter how old you are. No one asked me to play that day. None of them ever had. My usual play-partner-in-despair ignored me for a tiny while, too.

It felt unbearably horrible at the time and seemed to go on forever, like dying. Or being sick but not able to go home from school and just throw it all up. Burn it off in a fever. But looking at it from a perspective where I can see how it ends, shunning, banning, and ignoring only really work where attention has once been paid. I actually skated out of this pretty cleanly. Right back to familiar patterns; my cedar tree, reading books under my desk, failing to understand math, floating along on a private story, bobbing through the streams in the halls rarely focusing on anyone. Playing with whomever was left. Keep the rules, make more rules, rules of silence and observation, of distance and insulation. No one remembers your crimes if they forget all about you. I only felt the consequences on rare occasions when I was invited as part of a group, say to a birthday, and someone's mom recognized my name, looked at me again closely, reminding herself I was the troublemaker. The one who told all those terrible stories. What kind of a little girl does that? Not a nice girl, for sure for sure.

I grew on up watching those girls and their mothers and women like them. They talked a lot and I listened. Conversation is devastatingly revealing. I wondered about the stories they were making of themselves. I picked up bits of their lives they left behind, and turned them over and thought about them. These girls are here, and would be gone and only little bits would be left for other people to make the best sense they could out of them. Bits in my museum, in my school every year, in the church lost and found, at the dump and in dead people's houses. I thought about the bits of left over anger and grief, despair and sorrow, hope and excitement seeping from the belongings of the photo people to stain and to haunt the old State Capitol museum. I wondered about unfinished and badly told stories, one-sided but seeking the attention and justice they deserve. I thought about the best sense I could make of people's abandoned bits dropped where the owners lost their own threads. I wondered if I could use them since they were going to be hanging around, anyway, with nothing to do but tell stories to pass the time. I kept some in my pockets to turn over and rub and take out and ponder. I saw the wreckage of cheaply told tales, how far and fast the the shrapnel flies; how it breaks glass and how glass cuts flesh; how the bits splash when they reach the surface, how the splash swamps unheeding vessels; how the ripples move out and out, further than the maker could have ever imagined. I made some new rules.
Rule.
Never tell badly of anyone. Ever.
Rule.
When you make people, be careful.
Rule.
Be careful with your metaphors. You may lose control of them in a long sentance.


What sort of stories does a nice girl tell?

'Tis gone!
We do it wrong, being so majestical,
To offer it the show of violence,
For it is as the air, invulnerable,
And our vain blows malicious mockery.

It was about to speak when the cock crew.


All the Photos are Noah's

Ghost Stories: A Cautionary Tale in Three Parts; the middle part

Does this seem like a strange time of year for a ghost story? Autumn ghosts are traditional in America and I suppose that fits quite well even without October's fairly recently acquired Halloween costumes and trappings. Night reaches out for us more and more early, summer plantings die and the sound of the wind changes. We pull away from summer long outdoor pursuits to well-lit interiors. I know December is the haunted season in Britain and I wasted good life trying so hard to make that work for me but though the nights are darkest then, the cold is still relatively novel and besides, we light so many festive candles, draw together so fiercely. What can harm us in December?

Some say that ever 'gainst that season comes
Wherein our Savior's birth is celebrated,
This bird of dawning singeth all night long,
And then they say no spirit dare stir abroad,
The nights are wholesome, then no planets strike,
No fairy takes, nor no witch hath power to charm,
So hallowed, and so gracious, is that time.


I think January and March are frightening.

No Valentines to warm our blood. Wear green if you're Catholic and orange for Protestants and how many ghosts will come clustering, pleased that you've remembered and kept the old fight alive?

We've been cold so long, inside, tending to be alone. We've grown tired, our guard is down. We can't dance the dark away forever. How long will it be before they notice you never made it to their January party? They aren't having a January party. It's a nasty joke to call it midwinter in December. That's not the middle of any winter I ever grew up in. From a school Christmas party I could still clearly see autumn blazing away if I looked back over my shoulder but coming back to Fillmore Elementary after the holiday break there is just tedium in both directions as far as the mind can see. One brief, bright spot of crimson and lace, heartshaped and candycrusted then March just goes on and on and on but holds out promise after promise, beckoning enticing teasing till you overreach, ride the bus to school on a balmy morning without your stupid heavy coat and freeze all the way home in a blizzard. Next day, reverse that order and lug the stupid coat home through tropical heat. Better yet, leave the coat at school where you can't possibly use it to protect you from whatever March does next. March brings ice fogs that last weeks when you can barely see beyond the fences of your own yard. Have to wait at the bus stop, no watching for it down the street and stealing a few more warm moments. Enough days of dense ice fog will coat your whole world with crystals till it looks like your town is a dead coral reef, white against white forever.

What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord,
Or to the dreadful summit of the cliff
That beetles o'er his base into the sea,
And there assume some other horrible form
Which might deprive your sovereignty of reason,
And draw you into madness? Think of it.

It was really in the middle of winter when I made the ghosts.

We had a warm spell. There are darkly seductive, melted central Utah days that come any time before the end of April (before it's safe) and coax an early, blushing bloom from the apricot trees. Days like sun-softened chocolate that flatter and coax the fruit trees, starved for warmth and attention after so many days of black on white.

We got to play outside and I made up a ghost story and somehow told it to another human girl. I told it just as it came to me. I told about a little girl who died on the steps going down into the museum basement and about her ghost that was still there. Or maybe she actually died in the basement, cold and forgotten, and hung out on the stairs to seek the attention and justice every ghost requires. The poor supposed child's pitiful living and unhappy dying were to prove not nearly as important as an enthusiastic telling of it. When the telling ended I wandered away from my must-remain-anonymous audience of one into customary solitary recess labors and abandoned my little ghost just where I had dropped the thread of her narrative. I guess she stayed right where I left her.


Over the next couple of days I would tell lots more stories of varied ghosts of the old capitol and their tragic pre-death lives and subsequent wanderings dark and drear, but none would have quite the power of the little girl I left like a foundling on the stairs. At my ten year class reunion a girl told me that story never left her, that it made the museum breathless and horrible to her forever after. And she reminded me how much trouble I had gotten for myself that winter.

Enter Ghost
But, soft, behold! lo where it comes again!
It spreads his arms

I fell in love with the museum on the first field trip in third grade. (Oh, yeah, we went on field trips from school to the museum. You bet we did. It was, as I mentioned, within range of a strongly thrown rock and, besides, it was free.) That was when I realized it was haunted. I played under my special cedar tree in the shelter of its west wall, I explored all its outsides (we weren't allowed to go in the museum during recess). I visited it during the summer (free, remember) when no one was there but one brown-uniformed forest servicey guy in the gift shop who made me sign the register. I knew that museum, every memorial hair wreath, the chain with a caged ball carved with a penknife (?!) out of a single stick of wood, the tiny, black jet-beaded dress standing on a dressmaker's dummy in the glass case in the funny room where the stairs went either up or down, the ivory parasol leaning by it (the tag called it a white parasol), the ring set into the huge stone in the basement wall for chaining up prisoners ("no prisoners were ever housed in this room" )in the room that had been a jail (don't tell nine year old me no one ever got chained to the stone wall) but especially the photos. Yards of them. Yellowybrowngrey photos to stare at for hours on a hot summer day, bare feet on cold stone floor, walking slowly, slowly along the wall where the great black scythe also hung (who hangs a scythe on their wall? was it...special?). Faces, faces. Dead people, old people, families, babies with blurry hands, boys and girls dressed alike so there was no way to tell which name went to which child. Long white baby dresses, high collars, black on all the women, tightly combed hair, no smiles, no teeth. Find the only smiler, pretty lady with curls and flowers. The old man and woman on a basement wall sharing a frame, married to each other forever ago, both obviously crazy. Miserable. ("No," adults said, "they just looked like that because they had to hold still for so long in the photo." Looking back, then, at the long ago faces with new understanding and solidarity. But still, those two were quite, quite crazy.) All their lives gone and no one on earth could possibly know anything about them, not anymore, not for sure. No other little girl, I firmly believed as a fact, ever went to the museum of her own volition but I loved it loved it loved it. How, in all fairness, could I be accused of making that building into an ugly thing that it was not?

And what was so terrible about telling a story? After all, these were ghosts I was making up.

We had morning recess (more of a break, really) lunch and afternoon recess. I performed my story in the morning. Lunch went as always. Afternoon recess I found myself suddenly in a small, tight group of girls. They rushed up behind me without my knowing and demanded I tell the story I had told the first little girl, several hours ago now. I was very surprised. I couldn't remember that story just at that moment (too long ago! not paying attention!) so I made a new one very like it, though not so like that the first little she didn't stop me from time to time to correct or reprove one of my embroideries. Of course I was embellishing! Just wait till I tell it again! I swept up her fixes and helps in a rush of narrative, reinserted them, created back story to support everything I had so far wrought and shoved us all over the edge to a shudderingly satisfactory conclusion. In one motion the girls sucked in their breath and drew back into a little knot, eyes wide and fixed on me, absolutely, absolutely still.


Utter success.

They grabbed me and bore me away to another part of the playground, my wretched playmate-of-necessity completely forsaken and forgotten. There were other little girls who needed to hear this story. By the end of the day, the telling was quite purple, quite florid and my poor little step dweller had been joined by a wretched crew of what I guess must have been other desperately unhappy Mormon pioneers roving, raving restlessly through my little museum of horrors. I hadn't read many Gothic novels at this point, had this happened a few years down the line I could have really curdled my small listeners blood. But by that time I would have returned to the ironclad rule.

Rule 1. Never tell anyone anything. Ever.

Noah's Photographs

Ghost Stories: a Cautionary Tale in Three Parts: the beginning of these stories

This Post Is Also Illustrated with Photographs from a Vacation But These Are Meant to Frighten You

For much of my life I told lies. A friend just commented on Facebook, "[Suzanne] claims...but this is a lie." Skewered. When I was small it was very bad, and when I was in 6th grade I made up some ghosts. They got me in horrible trouble.

Our move to Utah me put in the third grade at Fillmore Elementary School. That building has been demolished, but then it stood hard by the Old State Capitol Museum. If you stood with your back to the school you could easily have thrown a rock across the small, asphalt play space on its northeast corner, across the single lane road (asphalt again) that ran between the museum and the school, across the small lawn and the front walk flagged with red sandstone and onto the steep front steps of the old capitol building. No doubt many, many children did. Boys, that would be. I didn’t know any rock-throwing little girls in those days. I don’t know why. I know lots now, and it’s not as though the female denizens of Fillmore Elementary were sweet or gentle or well behaved. In fact, that’s how these ghosts came to be in the first place.


I spent a lot of time playing alone. At home, at school, with people or not, I spent a lot of time inside my head. I was pretty good at ball games, I was pretty smart in class (math, boo), I was pretty well behaved in a way that mattered to adults. I was just pretty bad at making friends. I wanted them, I watched them, I tried to get them, but it was all awkward and clumsy. And when I had one, the few strange and brief times I had one, I didn’t honestly know what, exactly, I should do with it. So I never really had one, unless one up and decided to have me, and that made me feel strange, almost feverish and caged; sort of secretly restless and resentful but guilty, too, as who was I to resent any friendship thrust upon me, I, who was so impoverished, so empty and abandoned.

When I played, I told myself stories. One day, for reasons I cannot remember though I have tried and tried, I told a story or two to another girl.

Do you believe in ghosts? You did, when you were a child. The girls in my sixth grade class did.

I can't imagine how this could have started, can't think who she could have been. I can't envision the little girl that was me ever beginning to tell a story to anyone. It would be so unlike me, breaking a cardinal rule.
Rule 1. Don't tell things. Ever.
I cannot imagine who might have wanted to listen to me. She was probably an outlier, like myself, though not so far out as me because she must have had access a lot closer to the center than I had. She must have told someone who spoke directly to one of the popular girls (there were three of them. one was my cousin. she played with me, but not at school), the shining, untouchable ones, the ones who always had another girl of their choosing to eat with, spend the day with, talk to and laugh with. We called it playing.

It was a ritual.

At the beginning of the first break, the earliest moment of the first unsupervised bit of time in the school day, before class began if you could manage it, you had to find a girl to play with. You asked, "Will you play with me today?" and if she said "yes," you spent all your free time with her till school was out for that day. Friendships and quarrels, breakups and makeups, the rise and fall of alliances, personal fame and ignominy could all have been charted, had anyone been interested in our play patterns. The best people snapped each other up quickly; the pool dwindled, girls choosing more recklessly as options grew more grim; finally a pause in the asking, a breath and a silence wrapping all those of us left standing around, burning, naked, our unworthiness made clear. There was no one left anybody wanted. We didn't even want ourselves. We paired up out of desperation. You could hardly call it playing. (only) Once, I approached one of the so-sought-after triumvirate and asked if she would play with me. She looked at me for a long moment and then said, "Oh. We don't do that anymore. We all just hang out together," and then she carefully turned her back just enough and walked off with the other two. We all. Not you. I felt small and immature, provincial in my own sixth grade. She sounded so grownup. So sophisticated. Anyway, she was lying.


I sound scarred, don't I? I think I'm not. But you have to understand my story of those days in order to understand where I found power to raise the dead.

You might play with the same person everyday, or someone new as often as you liked, but not to have someone officially at your side playing with you was unthinkable. Suicide.
I used to tell stories to myself, alone, under a cedar tree on the museum grounds.

Suicides are associated with hauntings.



Noah's photographs

Some of These Photos Are From a Paris Vacation to Cheer You Up

Man Refusing to Paint; Brian Kershisnik, 1988

OK.
So I was working at a friend's house. (I love working with this friend. We get together and write. It's groovy. Like the best of my university-library memories. We are industrious and only talk about Very Important Things. Then we eat lunch.) She, like myself, has become suddenly routerless and is internet challenged. No problem, I said. I'll work in Word and paste it in.
And I did. For two hours. Two. Hours. I forged a stupid post for this stupid blog even though I had nothing to say that anyone in their right mind could possibly want to read. I also wrote to Noah. In Word.
OK.
I came home and dutifully copied and pasted up the letter to Noah and off it went to Hong Kong or wherever in the ether those things go.
Then. I didn't put the new post my blog.
I checked my e mail. Hey, it's got to be done.
Checked Facebook. Everyone seems to be fine.

Finally signed in here.
Read the blogs to which I have committed. Y'all are great.
Could no longer avoid the posting.
Select all.
Copy.
(save? no, thanks, it'll be on my blog, no need for it to be there, too)

Paste.
Paste.

So, here's the thing. I really didn't like that post anyway. But two hours!
I had to go eat chocolate.

Paste.
Paste.

Noah's photos.

Some Things

"What are some of the things that testify to you that there is a God?"

It's the first question on the first page of the Gospel Principles Study Guide. I'm not used to those trigger questions actually triggering anything.


I cannot describe it as a flood of memory. More like suddenly looking up at the room you've been living in forever, years and years and all your life till you completely forgot that you were in a room at all, and seeing to your astonishment that there are walls and that they are green. Good grief. Have those always been there and been that color? Oh, yeah, of course. Walls make a room. Green is what I always choose.


It's an early memory. No. It's a continual memory from as long as there have been memories. Talking to someone. Talking in my inside space to someone who listens, who knows me, who is living too, and is right there, just inside and outside my mind. Someone who likes me. Not a capitalized or italicized person, or a person in a special font. That would be an adult reading of the person, a spin or a learned stance. This is just a regular unseen, inside-your-head-outside-your-head, normal person. His name is God. I can call him that, or I can call him Father or I can call him you. He knows who I mean. And he is real. I know him, so I believe in him. I believe in my little sister, too. I can't remember a sense of being loved profoundly, unconditionally or any other great big way but that might be because that wouldn't have been too important to me. Lots of people love me. This person likes me which is the most important thing I care about in this life spanning memory room. Likes me a lot, better than a very best friend or a cousin or a brother maybe though I've never had a brother so I can't speak with authority.


I remember always living in a world that was made, and obviously lots of parts were just made for fun. All the parts were alive and vibrating with their life. I knew that whoever made it was around, like gardeners in a garden are around even though you don't see them while you're playing on the grass, and that he was still messing with it. I felt the rocks and the water and the wind and the plants vibrating. And the trees. Especially the trees. That was because someone had made them and made them alive. That was God when he was making things and was a gardener. I knew someone was making the world up just like I knew the dinner on the table had been made by my mom.


And these are the ways I know there is a God. Everything else I think or believe or know about God and His economy is shaped by these walls that shape the room I have lived my life in. They are my favorite color and have always been there, for as long as I can remember.



Noah made the sculptures and took the pictures.