Do You Believe in Ghosts?

                                        Edith Wharton at her writing desk, 1905 (Photo: NYTimes)

American author and designer Edith Wharton (1862-1937) wrote a very scary collection of literary ghost stories, Ghosts, reissued in 2021. I was intrigued by Wharton's answer to the question, "Do you believe in ghosts?" in the preface to this collection: “I don’t believe in ghosts, but I’m afraid of them.”

                           The cover of a first edition copy of Ghosts. You can have it for $2,500.

In her biography, Life and I, published posthumously, Wharton explains that this fear of ghosts emerged after she read a ghost story during convalescence from an illness at the age of nine: "To an unimaginative child the tale would no doubt have been harmless, . . .[but] with my intense Celtic sense of the super-natural, tales of robbers & ghosts were perilous reading.” Wharton, thanks to reading this story, entered "a world haunted by formless horrors.” She continued to be "haunted' into adulthood, even though she had no paranormal experiences--only the experience of reading about ghosts.

I understand how this could happen. When I was 16, I read a collection of ghost stories from New England folklore, and got scared senseless--for a week. Then, as the memory of these tales faded, ghosts went off my radar for a couple of decades. (Obviously, I do not have Wharton's powerful imagination.) Then, coming to the realization that my family and I were living in a proverbial haunted Victorian house, ghosts were brought to my attention again. However, after experiencing quite a few inexplicable events over the years, my daughters and I became more nonplussed than scared. (I plan to write up these experiences in future blog posts.)  When I heard footsteps or witnessed a TV turning on in the middle of the night, my reaction was not, "Aieee!", but "WTF?" On the other hand, some of my daughter's friends who came to check on our pets when we were out of town understandably got freaked out when they heard footsteps in the upper hallway when no one was there.

                     A ghost photoshopped into an image of a staircase in a wrecked Minneapolis mansion.

A couple who told me very scary stories about their haunted house (where I, too, had a ghostly experience), when asked, said they did not believe in ghosts. Perhaps denying their existence made it easier to cope with the very strange goings-on. My father, who also was not a believer, nevertheless told stories about his experiences in the auditorium in Woodlawn School and stories about a fellow actor who haunted the old Pittsburgh Playhouse. My Aunt Estella, another non-believer, told me of an eerie experience on the death of a relative. 

Some non-believers are willing to suspend disbelief to hear a good story; other non-believers scoff at and ridicule believers. ("She must have been drunk", "He's a nutcase," etc.) Others just don't care one way or the other.

Of course, many believers who have not had any paranormal experiences desperately want to believe. They watch TV programs about "investigations"; they go to allegedly haunted locations to see if they can have an experience. Many don't have experiences, and some, I suspect, want to believe so badly that they start "seeing things."

                                                    An old wing in Eastern State Penitentiary

I have never been to a Halloween haunted house, but I have visited one of the allegedly most haunted locations in the US, Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. On a lovely summer day my friend Jay-Louise and I did a tour of this historic prison, where inmates once lived in horrific conditions. We'd heard some of the ghost stories about this place; we learned the history as we walked through its corridors. If a place should be haunted, Eastern State should be. We didn't have any paranormal experiences, but I admit to getting the heebie-jeebies in some of the cells and walkways in this crumbling, dark edifice. 

I have been to other places that creeped me out, most recently a house on a architectural tour. As I walked through the house, I felt more and more uneasy, but said nothing. It had a nasty odor. The rooms seemed dark, even on that sunny day. As we hastily exited, my companion commented, "I couldn't wait to get out of that place. Horrible!" An earlier visitor had a similar experience, going so far as to say that the house should be torn down. Others, however, thought the house was cool. Who's to say?

Duluth's "Haunted Ship", the William A. Irvin. Is it really haunted? You can try to find out for yourself during one of the October "Haunted" tours.

If you haven't had any ghostly encounters, but want to experience them in their most intense forms, I recommend reading literary ghost stories. You can get thrills and chills from the comfort of your home by reading Wharton's "Old Souls", Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw," or Ellen Glasgow's "Jordan's End"--or so many others from Dickens to Shakespeare. 

                 Macbeth sees Banquo's ghost (although no one else does) Macbeth, Act 3, Scene 4

MACBETH, to the Ghost 
Avaunt, and quit my sight! Let the earth hide thee.
Thy bones are marrowless; thy blood is cold;
Thou hast no speculation in those eyes
Which thou dost glare with.

 

Leave the lights on.