A Ghastly Correspondence - Letter 4
Do I believe in ghosts?
This is the fourth letter in a six letter correspondence series between writer
and me. Here are the links to all the other letters: Letter 1, Letter 2, Letter 3, Letter 4, Letter 5, and Letter 6. Read Wil’s Letter 3 here:
Do I believe in ghosts?
I read your letter two days ago, and something you said — a question you asked right near the top — has resurfaced to demand attention at least a dozen times since.
You said:
I still lean to disbelieving in ghosts. But the more I explore, the more I worry the question might need to be reframed from ‘why do these haunted believe?’ to ‘why do I not?’
As I explored in my last letter, I think we trust ourselves way more than we should when it comes to the arbitration of truth. We are unreliable observers of almost everything.
But more and more, I’m starting to wonder what this reality actually undermines — because it sure seems easier, culturally, not to believe than to believe. Talk straight-faced about ghosts and UFOs to a group of college graduates (you know, people who are supposed to know something about something), and see what happens. Even the most earnest believers will often default to self-deprecation on the topic.
I have a close friend, an exceptionally intelligent, well-educated, and well-read guy, who admitted to me the other day that he’s been pretty deeply obsessed with UFO’s for the last few years. But he doesn’t talk to anyone about it. He uses anonymous accounts whenever he engages in conversations online, or goes down some research rabbit hole.
Why?
Because it’s hard to be a believer.
And what I’m saying is that the very fact that it is hard to believe in ghosts and UFOs should make us suspicious of our assumption that this belief is evidence of a weak mind.
Regarding your own collegiate-themed stories, some of it starts to seem sort of based, doesn’t it? Certainly not all of the stories, and certainly not everything in them, but since when is that how true accounts work anyway? Even the best possible tellings of the most verified events are full of flaws. Evolution did not give us mechanistically reliable memory. But just as common as it is for us to get things wrong, or do some embellishing, it is uncommon for most people to fabricate whole stories out of absolutely nothing.
Which is why, if you take a step back and try to look at the whole, blurry picture, you might begin to find evidence of things that fall outside of your assumptions about what is possible.
And this brings me to my friend Lisa.
Just another haunted house
Rather than doing what you suggested, and Googling hauntings in my own hometown, I followed up with a friend of mine about her childhood experiences with ghosts in hers.
With a population under 100, Tuscola, Mississippi, is barely a town. The sizzle and thrum of urban environs doesn’t reach this sleepy place, and there are no lights to compete with the stars sprayed across the sky, or the bright face of the Moon. On cloudy nights, the darkness is as thick as butter.
This is where Lisa grew up, in an old house with a finished basement half-buried on the side of a hill overlooking a little lake. The nearest neighbors are far enough away that it would take a phone or a car to make contact.
In other words, it’s a good spot for a haunting.
The younger of two sisters, Lisa was around 5 when she first started seeing the man with the long hair, standing as a dark silhouette in her doorway at night. Unmoving. Watching.
The first time, paralyzed with fear, Lisa watched back for hours, unable to sleep until exhaustion finally overtook her. Though the man returned, again and again, he never moved or harmed her, and so Lisa eventually lost her fear. The shadowy figure became a familiar fixture.
This is the first “incident” Lisa describes in a long document that catalogues more than a decade of supernatural encounters, most of which included the long-haired man, and nearly all of which included not only her sister, but a rotating cast of their friends as well.
It took me more than an hour to read through everything she had recorded. It is the work of someone determined to capture the truth, to assert control over something so aggressively uncontrollable.
I won’t attempt to summarize all of what she sent me, but I will relate some parts of one incident that shook me most.
Hangout of Horrors
One night, when their parents were out of town, Lisa (12) and her sister (17) had a few of their friends over — Megan (18), Jake (20), and Rob (also 20).
Both sisters, and Laura’s friend Megan, had had encounters with the long-haired man. As had Jake, on at least one significant former occasion. The only one who hadn’t seen a ghost in this house was Rob, who claimed to have taken a college course on the occult. Anyway, being teenagers, they decided to do a seance.
It’s likely the whole thing started as a couple of dudes trying to mess with the girls, but that’s not how it ended.
Possession
The five of them sat in a circle on the living room floor, and Rob started chanting in some other language. His eyes were closed, and his voice got louder and louder until it stopped, instantly, like someone had thrown a switch. And then his eyes were open and staring at Jake. Unmoving, still as a statue, and completely unresponsive.
No matter what anyone said or did, it seemed like Rob was frozen. Finally, Jake reached over to shake him, but then recoiled as though he’d been burned, and ran into the kitchen to run cold water over his hand. In Jake’s absence, Rob slowly turned that frozen stare onto the girls, who promptly freaked and ran after Jake.
The four of them ended up in something of a cat and mouse situation with Rob, who, as a 6’7” guy pushing 300 pounds, was not someone you wanted to mess around with, especially if there was a chance he was currently possessed by some kind of evil spirit.
I’m abridging the account Lisa shared with me, because it was painstaking in its detail, but suffice it to say, strangenesses compounded, and at one point Lisa cut her elbow badly on the broken glass from a framed picture that had been knocked off the wall as they ran away from Rob.
And then Rob disappeared for a while. Which was extremely bizarre in the dead of night in the middle of nowhere, in a very small house. Until finally, Jake found him back in the living room casually talking to an unseen entity, before turning to reassure everyone that it was alright, they could come back into the room with him.
Good Ghost, Bad Ghost
There were, apparently, two ghosts living in the house. One of them was a bored and angry sort, who was responsible for a lot of the harassment Lisa and Laura and some of their friends had endured over the years. The other, the long-haired man, was a more peaceful sort, and apologized on behalf of the first. Rob had come under possession of the mean one until the long-haired man pushed him out, and tried to explain things, including events from the girls’ past encounters that they’d never told anyone about.
After Rob told them everything he knew, Jake went off to clean up the mess of broken glass and frames in the hallway.
Suddenly they heard a loud crash, more glass breaking, and then the sound of Jake running back into the kitchen and shouting at Rob to “Go to Lisa’s room!”
They found Jake in the kitchen splashing water on his chest, which was bright red, just the way his hand had been, as though it had been burned. At first he wouldn’t tell them what had happened, not until Rob had gone and looked in Lisa’s room. When Rob got back and told them he hadn’t seen anything, Jake explained that he’d been assaulted by a dark shadow — that it had hit him so hard it lifted him off his feet and smashed him into the wall.
This is when they all decided they should leave.
“Why not call someone?” you might ask. Well, okay, but what would they say? They’d seen the same movies we’ve seen. We all know what happens when a bunch of kids (or 20-year-olds, who are basically still kids) call older adults to rant about a haunting.
So the best they could do was gtfo.
Except remember, they were in the middle of nowhere, so it would be a bit of a drive, and at least one of the girls had to pee first. Since they were all too scared to split up again, all three girls piled into the small bathroom together, and left the guys outside to stand watch.
And this, Wil, is where the story really gets me.
Escape Bathroom
So, the girls are all crammed inside this bathroom, doing their business, washing their hands. They had told the guys outside they would yell when they were done, and wouldn’t open the door until they got an all clear. After a few minutes, as arranged, they yell, “Jake! Rob! We’re ready to come out!”
No response.
They yell again, “Hey Jake, Rob! We’re ready!”
Total silence.
“Guys, this isn’t funny. Seriously, answer us.”
Still nothing. Not one sound.
”JAKE!? ROB?! Where are you!?”
They start freaking out. They won’t touch the handle because they’re terrified if they do, they’ll get attacked by some evil entity. So they bang their fists on the hollow-core door and the thin walls, making as much of a racket as possible, screaming and shouting. There’s no way the guys don’t hear them, even if they’d wandered to the other side of the house.
They can’t decide if they should be scared or furious. They wonder if it’s remotely possible Jake and Rob are playing some kind of trick on them, after everything they’ve been through tonight so far.
Eventually, they decide they can’t spend the night in the bathroom, so they might as well risk opening the door themselves. Either Laura or Megan — Lisa doesn’t remember which — reaches for the handle.
As soon as the skin of her fingers makes contact, it’s like someone switched off a mute button. A cacophony of sound explodes into the bathroom — shouting, cursing, banging on the door so heavy it rattles the hinges.
Their first reaction is terror, recoiling from the door to cower as far away as possible.
But after a few moments, they realize all the noise is the guys outside, panicked and trying to get in. The girls open the door, and there they are, faces painted with fear and fury, then suddenly washed with relief. But once it’s obvious all three girls are fine, Jake and Rob are livid.
“What were you guys doing in there?! Why wouldn’t you answer us?!”
Jake says he and Rob waited outside for 45 minutes before they started knocking to see what was taking so long. When the girls didn’t answer, things escalated fast, until the boys were banging and yelling and screaming and kicking the door. They even tried to force it open, which should have been no problem, considering how cheap and flimsy the thing was, but it was like it was made out of stone. They were seconds away from shooting the lock before the girls finally opened the door.
This is impossible. The girls know they were only in there for a few minutes. But sure enough, the clocks all say it’s been almost an hour.
They didn’t waste much more time trying to figure it out before finally leaving the house to stay somewhere else for the night.
Credible Witnesses
I should note here that Lisa is not the type of person one would assume has a history with ghosts. While her abiding interest in horror movies is almost certainly related to her exposure to the supernatural as a child, she leads a healthy and well-adjusted life as an adult. She’s a good conversationalist, a devout Christian, a generous friend.
But it would be readily obvious to anyone who speaks to her, let alone reads her painstaking account of the past, that she maintains a clear-eyed certainty about what happened to her and her sister, and their friends. Speaking of whom, she is quick to point out that it would have been dramatically out of character for them to stage such an elaborate and mean -spirited prank.
And this is only one story out of at least a dozen, written in great and searching detail.
What ought we to do with this testimony? Because hers is certainly not the only one. She is simply someone I know. Someone who has made tremendous efforts to materialize the immaterial. Someone who believes.
Why do I not believe?
If I look close, I discover the foundations of my skepticism are not as solid as I assumed. I begin to suspect that what I believed was bedrock support for my unbelief is actually sand, shifting under the weight of scrutiny.
We are like nearsighted moles in a dark and winding cave. Having fenced in the known, we live and work within our bounded little world, and settle into thoughtless conviction that we know its shape and color. But all the while, great beasts wander to and fro, stalking the cold chaos of the cavernous beyond, outside the limits of our own light and shadow.
Last week, I made a claim: I want to believe.
But here’s the thing, Wil, I’m no longer sure that’s entirely true.
This is a good letter. And you got me spooked.
The Ouija Board in Wil's letter and the seance here tell me everything I need to know about what "opens the door". While I have never experienced these kinds of supernatural events, nor do I personally know anyone who has, there is a common denominator when I read about it. Its a fair enough warning to stay away from the occult.