Ghost Hunting in New England

I only ever saw a ghost once.  It was a few days after the death of my father.  I hadn’t expected him to die; ever. 

He died before we had managed to pull ourselves back to each other after those tumultuous years between childhood and adulthood which had tossed us into our separate oceans of confusion.

I had moved one hundred miles away from him, though it may as well have been ten thousand, as neither of us had the funds, time or energy to visit; and even if we had, what would we have said?  The days of talking and delighting in one another’s company had evaporated. 

So my father had died.  It was difficult to comprehend.  I felt hollow, apart from my heart, which was full of an unfamiliar sharpness.

Then I saw his ghost.    It was at a bus stop.  The bus stop and I stood in the most grey of concrete communities, there may have been others standing with me, but if so, their greyness made them indistinguishable from our surroundings.  It was a place where nothing happened and nothing changed.  The arrival, or not, of the bus was of no significance, but waiting was an achievable occupation at that point.

I held my breath as a man of about sixty walked along the pavement towards me.   Three small children skipped back and forth around him.  He said nothing, but dug a paper bag from a pocket and held it out for each child to take a sweet.

The man didn’t look like my father, but I knew it was his ghost.  This was confirmed as he passed me.  He wore a belt with a distinctive metal fastening.  Like the one he polished on Sunday nights, after the line of school and work shoes had been buffed to a rich shine and left to stand on yesterday’s news. 

The whole spectacle had lasted only as long as I could hold my breath, but it altered everything.   My father was a ghost; and he still loved me.  A somewhat childlike response, but I was struggling in the hinterland of adulthood, my feet still paddling in the shallows of childhood.

I have looked for ghosts since, especially after the loss of loved ones, but the skin of my soul has grown too thick.  I can no longer sense their presence.  I think this as I sit in a wooden house, in a golden wood, in New England, on Halloween.  My daughter has made her home in this place of pumpkins, cinnamon and dreams.  I have learnt my lesson and have determined that, as far as I can help, distance shall not be a reason not to keep my children close. 

My daughter could not have chosen a more apt environment in which to hunt ghosts.  Salem, that plastic world of horror, is a thirty minute drive away; and this very wood was the home to the American transcendentalists, Emerson and Thoreau; surely some remnant of their highly cultivated souls would be ringing in the natural world.  I did not sense them.  I saw a bird of prey take a slow, wide circle above me, then perch on a high limb of a bare tree.  I could imagine what it might have felt like to live close to the land, but no ghosts showed themselves to me.

We visited the home where Louisa May Alcott wrote her masterpiece, Little Women.

‘Some people cry when they see her bedroom,’ the tour guide leaned towards us with a hopeful expression.  We nodded back, dry eyed and hard-faced.  We were more concerned that my granddaughter wanted to soothe her teething gums by gnawing on the priceless furniture.  Child removed, I waited for the approach of the spirit of the admirable woman, but nothing.  I thought instead of ABCtales, Jean, and her account of the civil war through the eyes of a confederate woman.  Alcott was on ‘the other side’ but had that same courageous and practical gumption.  I was moved, but sensed no ghosts.

We visited the municipal cemetery of Lowell, to find the grave of Jack Kerouac. Here I thought of ABCtales, Parson Thru, his own road journeys and his love for the great writer. Edson Cemetery sits between Industrial Avenue and a rundown area housing the post-industrial unemployed.   There was nothing romantic here, but the harsh honesty of the place was touching.  A large, newish, marble headstone marked the family plot.  Jack’s own small marker was littered with gifts of cigarettes, small (empty) whisky bottles, coins, faded flowers.  I left a shard of green glass I had found at the side of the road. I stood and waited.  I felt Jack was truly dead.  He had no need to let his ghost drift and connect, not with me anyway.  That was fine.  There was something real about this place that spoke of the importance of ordinariness. 

We visited the town of Lowell.  It has no golden trees, the air of aestheticism and elite intellectualism does not waft through these streets.  It is so much better than that.  In the midst of this ghostly white state, this town celebrates its multi-cultural uniqueness.  It is a graveyard to the textile industry, but there is an ease amongst its relatively sparse population that makes it a place you want to be.  We walk up and down the streets and find we are the only white(ish) people out and about.

It would seem that all the white people are shut up in the Whistler Museum. This is a jewel of a place; a beautiful little building packed with extraordinary paintings.  It is hilarious that Whistler denied he came from Lowell.  Although I didn’t see it, I secretly hoped that his ghost was bound to the place.

I have to make the long journey home; and the now familiar sharpness fills my heart. My granddaughter has my daughter’s face, my daughter has my face.  We are like Russian dolls with different colourings.  The ghosts of ourselves and each other flicker in our eyes.

I fly back on All Hallows’ Eve and arrive home on All Saints’ Day.  I tell the budding ghost in me to stay behind and keep a watchful eye.  The skin on my soul is a little thinner.  We don’t need to see ghosts to know they are there.