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