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