Ghosts I have met

I was always ready to meet a ghost.  I hung out in the sort of places where anyone might naturally expect to find them—graveyards—but however much I prepared, the ghosts always seemed to have something else to do when I was around.  Perhaps they were handicapped by my habit of working during daylight hours, when visible ectoplasm is the hardest to assemble.

The search went on during my senior year of high school, as I worked on completing a cemetery census of my home county, a project that my mother had started eight years before but put aside as family demands on her time increased.  I decided to try to complete the field work in the eight months before I left for college.  The skills I needed were a clear voice for dictation and an ability to decipher half-obliterated inscriptions on the stones in overgrown, abandoned cemeteries.  With those and a small open-reel tape recorder, in the days before cassettes were common, I started out.

I drove twelve thousand miles in eight months, bumping over miles of secondary or dirt roads in a banged-up half-ton ’62 Jimmy pickup, visiting almost eighty places in the county where we had evidence of burials.  Some of them were well-tended community cemeteries, some were abandoned family plots, a couple were single graves in the middle of a pasture, and one was lost altogether—it just wasn’t where it was supposed to be, any more.  Each one had its own personality:  some open and welcoming, some wary, a few actually hostile.  In none of those places, though, did I ever manage to find even a suggestion of a ghost.

The place for which I had the most hopes was the town cemetery in the county seat.  When I was there, I always felt that I was among friends, ones who had died long before I came.  My mother’s interest in local history had taught me something about many of the people buried there, and I believed that perhaps that knowledge might generate a kind of sympathetic vibration that could help a spirit to materialize.

I completed the field work the month before I moved away, and I had to admit I failed to meet a ghost during all that time.  But I still go out into a graveyard in the evening sometimes, when I get the chance, because I never know but that this might be the time . . . .

Arthur Dent builds a fence of indurated Fuji apples.  Fnord.