A Ghastly Correspondence - Letter 2

A back and forth about (mostly) true ghost stories

This is the second letter in a six letter correspondence series between writer

Wil Dalton

and myself. Wil kicked it off last Friday with the first letter:

A Ghastly Correspondence - Letter 1

Each Monday following (like today!) I’ll be posting my response. For those of you who are like weirdly into numbers, that means Wil’s got parts 1, 3, and 5 over at

Process by Wil Dalton

, and I’ve got parts 2, 4, and 6 here at Dispatches.

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I don’t believe in ghosts.

Well, maybe I do. It’s sort of tangled up in the fractured components of my selfhood. Do I believe in God? The afterlife? The devil? Do I believe in aliens?

When it comes to things that lack definitive, empirical evidence, people want to believe. And it turns out I happen to be a people.

I want to believe.

But it sure is a war in there, down in nether regions of my psychology. And questions like, “What even is belief?” suggest nobody’s going to be winning that war anytime soon.

One thing that is demonstrably true is that there are such a thing as consistent, observable, measurable phenomena that we tend to call “natural law.” Stuff like gravity, and the way sound waves move through air and water.

Meanwhile, God and ghosts and aliens seem to exist only within the purview of phenomena that are neither measurable, nor consistent, nor often even observable.

And yet.

The idea that all truth can be circumscribed into what we currently understand to be “natural law” seems almost comically narrow-minded. What I’m saying is there’s plenty of mystery to go around.

One last caveat, though. If we can agree that lots of people — probably most people — want to believe in things that seem firmly lodged in the realm of the mysterious, we should also admit that human beings, all of us, tend very strongly to believe what we want to believe. Truth, subjectively, is a product of our desires. It is hard, if not impossible, to prove something isn’t true if a person wants to believe it is true, and vice versa.

The short version: Wanting a thing to be true doesn’t make it true.

But it doesn’t make it untrue either. What wanting something does, in terms of proof, is nothing.

OK, enough epistemic blathering.

The point is we don’t know what we don’t know. But what we do know is that a belief in ghosts, based on slippery, non-empirical evidence, is deeply rooted in the experience of being human. Despite several hundred years of cultural dedication to materialism, mysticism persists.

And I’m not at all ashamed to admit that it persists in me, incorrigibly, right alongside the well-groomed skeptic.

Dr Pepper and Bedsheets

So what of your brother and his spooky bed unmaker?

I think you’re probably right. We tell ourselves a story often enough, it becomes truth in our minds. This is on purpose. It’s how we’re wired. It helped us avoid poisonous snakes and plants, or something, way back when those things were the main things that could kill us.

Another version of this is that he really meant to make his bed, so much so that he was sure he had. And then he walks in and WHAT?! Was he wrong? Certainly not. It must have been a ghost. The Dr Pepper connection was a textbook result of mistaking correlation for causation.

And even if he really did make the bed, and the bed really did wind up unmade somehow, we could imagine a hundred possible explanations that are firmly grounded in boring old physics.

Or, you know, it was a ghost.

A Canine Contribution

You started small, so I’ll start small.

A close friend of mine (we’ll call him Jim) told me about an old abandoned hotel near where he lived in the rural midwest. This was a place that was constructed sometime in the 1870’s, and was locally and unsurprisingly famous for being haunted.

Back when Jim was in high school, he and a friend decided to sneak in for a private tour one night, deep into a hard midwestern winter. Their plan was to enter through the basement, which had at one time been an old saloon. Easy to imagine why a couple of teenage boys might take interest.

As soon as they reached the threshold of the old broken door, they both heard a dog bark loudly. No warning. They were startled to a full stop before, just as suddenly as it started, the barking stopped.

But they never saw a dog, or any sign of a dog. Even when they went back to investigate later, they found no evidence that a dog had ever been anywhere near where they went.

So: ghost dog.

I don’t know about you, but this story is pretty easy to write off. Of course there was a dog. Just because they didn’t see the dog doesn’t mean it wasn’t there. It was dark! There are any number of reasons for any number of wild animals to seek shelter from the bitter cold of winter in an old abandoned building.

But then, who knows? If we grant, for a moment, the existence of human ghosts, why not dog ghosts too?

I promise I’m only being 70% glib, at most.

Anyway

You asked for my help. While I find the topic fascinating, and I find myself frequently gravitating toward stories of the supernatural in my own writing, I don’t personally have any ghost stories to tell. I wish I did.

But this little project has gotten me into some extraordinary conversations that would never have happened otherwise.

I very much look forward to your thoughts on my thoughts, and more ghost stories. On that score, please do your best to rattle me. I promise that despite my hard shell of skepticism, I really do want to believe.