There’s the theory of the ghost and the metaphor of the ghost and then there’s the ghost. History and philosophy didn’t prepare me for noises in the empty house or my phone that flicked on at four in the morning: an alarm I’d never set ringing and ringing, then a video app downloading itself and playing music, untouched. We thought it was a mistake. We fumbled for a light switch and found nothing—a total absence of sense beyond the noise that pitched us from sleep. My husband and I blinked at one another, searching for an inroad to explanation or diffusion of the tension that hovered around our bed. How could Derrida and Lévi-Strauss account for echoes of billiard balls racking themselves at midnight in a house with no pool table?
The conversations about the house’s spirits materialized over the course of the previous day, surfacing only minutes after I arrived for the first time at my husband’s family’s sprawling desert home outside San Antonio. After seating us in the cavernous formal living room, my mother-in-law, Heather, offered polite questions about my recently completed writing project: a series of fictional interviews with ghosts. Then she tentatively asked me, “So, how do you feel about ghosts in real life?”
I thought the question was a joke and laughed it off, “I don’t. I really only study ghosts in theory.”
As an outsider living in Texas for the last decade, I’ve learned it can sometimes be dangerous to admit any belief in the paranormal, which might be equated with new-age tomfoolery—or worse, brujería, witchcraft. Salt is used for food, not purification. Candles should be burned for ambiance, not to manipulate energies.
But as the afternoon wore into evening, talk returned again and again to haunting. Finally, over dinner, Heather just said it plain: “Look, believe in it or don’t, be careful poking your head out at night. This house has spirits.”
The whole family of ten paused, chewing their fajitas. Pete, my father-in-law, chimed in, “Yeah, Heather brings ’em with her, whatever house we’re in.”
The brothers-in-law nodded diligently, “It runs in the family.”
Then Heather began to tell the story of her childhood: having what teachers and priests always termed “imaginary” friends. Her sisters and mother, too, had a gift of seeing what others couldn’t, or wouldn’t.
“I saw them for years when I was growing up,” her oldest, Austin, added, “though I don’t see them now but once in a while.”
Zack, the youngest, looked up from his plate and nodded, “we had to move from the last house cause of ’em. Some were evil and—”
“There was an old hanging tree in the yard of the last house, still alive from when the land was a ranch,” Pete interrupted. “The things we saw, well, it was scaring the kids. The place was infested.” He emphasized that final word, allowing it to ricochet off the Spanish tile and vaulted ceiling.
It took me a moment to understand what he meant by hanging tree: having grown up in the Northeast, where such terms would only be associated with poetic descriptions of weeping willows, or perhaps an oak with a particularly good branch for a tire swing. Now, stiff corpses of horse thieves and bandoleros swung gently from ropes in my mind. A desert wind wrapped itself around the house and the dogs shifted under the table. Pete began assembling carne asada and rice on a new tortilla. “When we moved here, some of ’em followed. Been here ever since. They’re not malicious, but they’re around. We’re pretty sure there’s three of them: a child, an older man, and one other—but we don’t know what that one is. They’ll make noise and move stuff—heh, they used to get a real kick out of the pool table. Sometimes you’ll feel cold spots in the house, or like someone’s in the room with you.”
“Sometimes they scratch me—” Zack chimed in nervously. “Well, I’ve woken up with scratches on my back and neck before.”
Heather looked sadly at her teenage son; then at my own boys, her grandchildren. “The babies will be fine, though, don’t worry. The ghosts don’t really hurt anyone.”
In my study of witchcraft, the occult, curanderismo, and various interpretations of haunting while writing my dissertation for my PhD in Literature, I spent a large amount of time looking at ghosts. Though in my line of work, we don’t study paranormal entities. Ghosts and hauntings are spoken of in academia as metaphors for larger societal issues, or they’re explored anthropologically in the study of shamanism and witchcraft across the globe. Though my interest in all this comes from a place far away from libraries and lecture halls: starting when I was a child visiting my mother’s family, who’s lived for generations in the remote, smoky mountains of Appalachian Georgia. I heard plenty of stories of what really lurked in the hills growing up. Demon creatures, vengeful spirits of wronged women, guerilla Civil War soldiers looking for lost limbs, murdered moonshiners, and even the devil himself roamed those murky forests—at least, according to my uncles, aunts, grandparents, and cousins. Ghost stories can be a way of protecting and insulating impoverished and often vulnerable communities, like the ones my family came from. As a collective, we were not readers. In Appalachia, where orality is king, good yarn spinners double as public service announcers. Stories of the ghosts of betrayed women, searching the woods for their vengeance, indirectly informed us about the cruelties of the patriarchy and why it’s important to never to wander alone at night: no one can hear you scream. Tales of ruthless Confederate soldiers, and the terror they inflicted upon my family’s unionist mountain community instilled a sense of togetherness and helped teach the family’s young ones about injustice, even generations down the line. Events that had once made the local news, slipped into legend, passed from cousin to cousin over time until each narrative was only a shadow of its original. But their lessons remained unchanged. One constant ran through each, however: there was always a degree of separation. In those crackling evenings of my childhood near the fireplace, I heard plenty of whispers of things that happened to a neighbor, a great uncle’s buddy, or the daughter of a friend. Nothing ever happened to us. Never to me.
In my twenties, living in Ohio, I rented the first floor of a sagging Victorian that had previously been a hospice for patients with dementia. When signing the lease, the landlord openly admitted that strange occurrences had been reported in my unit, but I ignored her warning, assuming that nothing would ever come of it. And, mostly, nothing did. Except the TV liked to turn itself on and off with enough frequency that I began to leave it unplugged when I wasn’t using it. After the device found ways to plug itself in and turn on when I was out of the room, I sold it and lived without a television until I moved out, years later. But that wasn’t a ghost, right? That was just an unexplainable inconvenience.
And I should mention my son often saw what he called “shadow people” when he was little. He’d laugh and play with them in his room as a toddler, pointing to a corner or down a hallway and saying “Look, Mama, fire eyes!” I thought nothing of it and was annoyed when the art teacher at his Catholic preschool called me one afternoon, frantic, to tell me that Atreyu kept talking about a “shadow man with glowing red eyes” standing behind her. She asked what I knew about these devils he was seeing.
“I have no idea, it’s just something he says,” I answered, wondering why I was being bothered at work. “He’s three. There’s nothing there,” I reminded her. And that’s what I told myself for years, through Trey’s giggling and pointing at empty corners, offering these invisible friends food or candy, sometimes refusing to go in one room or another because the shadow people were bothering him. That’s what I told myself every time I let him sleep, curled in my arms, because their burning red eyes kept him awake. I mean, psychology assured me this was a child’s imagination. All in his head, right?
The sounds of footsteps and the echoing pool game in my husband’s parents’ home might have been all in my head, too, in theory. But at around 4:00 a.m., an old-fashioned landline began to ring through the house, unanswered, over and over, waking my husband and me. He sighed and turned over, pulling the covers up around his ears. Several minutes later, an alarm I never set went off on my phone. In the dark, I fumbled for the device on the nightstand, silenced the beeping, and climbed back into bed. “Weird, huh? All this noise?” my husband said as we both drifted off again. Only a short time later, we were jarred awake once more by the tinny sound of pop music and voices. A radio? Or maybe Alexa playing a random song? —no, it was my phone again, playing a TikTok video—though I’ve never downloaded that app or used it. I stopped the video, deleted the app, and returned to bed. “This is the weirdest night ever,” I said.
“Yeah, I have no idea what’s going on,” he grumbled. That was when I asked him, in person this time, if anyone had come back into the house after I said goodnight. I told him about the opening can of soda, the sounds of walking, and the loud noises of a game of pool. He thought for a minute, then answered “Nope. No one was in the house: we were all outside until I put the boys to bed after midnight. Plus, didn’t they get rid of the pool table?”
The next morning, over a breakfast of chorizo eggs and fresh tortillas, we told Heather and Pete about the events from the night before. When I asked about the pool table, Pete cut in and said that they’d had so many problems with the ghosts in the game room, they got rid of it a while back. “No pool table in this house, nothing like it” he insisted.
“What about a landline?” my husband asked. “One started ringing at about 4 a.m.”
“Darling, we’ve never had a landline in this house,” Heather answered. “But 4 a.m. is when they do their thing most often, so it’s no surprise that’s when they woke you up.” She paused, hesitant to continue, but finished her thought, “with all the different noises, and so soon after you arrived, they must have been really eager to get your attention. You’ve only been here a night.”
“Yeah,” Pete chimed in, “usually guests talk about feeling cold spots or like someone is standing next to them. We’ve never seen so much happening all at once.”
“They must know I’m writing a book about ghosts,” I half-joked, referring to the haunted poetry collection I’d just finished, and the literary horror novel I’d just begun.
“They really want to talk to you,” Heather said, serious as a heart attack.
The anthropologist Lévi-Strauss asserted that in a given population, magic becomes “real” if all three components of that population—the target, the larger population, and the practitioner—believe in its effectiveness. I’ve seen this in practice among my religious family members, as their churches and temples prayed away dementia, and in support groups during my mother’s battle with terminal cancer, when healthy eating seemingly beat back inoperable tumors. Entire universes perch on the power of belief alone. Maybe the rowdy ghosts in my in-laws home were simply another manifestation of this belief triangle: I was open to them, the family supported my ideas, and ghosts were offered as the most reasonable answer for some truly unexplainable stuff. But I didn’t exactly run to my academic colleagues with my “proof” of ghosts after the weekend ended. The disconnect between theory and practice was maintained, despite what I’d seen and experienced in real time.
For years now, I’ve had lively debates with my colleagues at UT Dallas and other universities, exploring sociological theories of haunting and the use of ghosts as metaphors— particularly in the South. We’ve had long discussions about the evolution of shamanism, and the role of indigenous medicine and folk remedies, or curanderismo, in Latin American neighborhoods in Texas, like the one in which my family and I live. But none of our theories and philosophizing can account for a ghost loudly playing pool in my father-in-law’s house, a TV deciding for itself when to turn on or off, a toddler who sees menacing spirits; or, after years of paranormal incidents, my in-laws collectively choosing to relocate to a new house in hopes of ridding themselves of the entities. Ghosts, in theory, should be literary devices, symbols, or cautionary tales. These weren’t. Instead, I was left with no real answers for what happened that night in my husband’s parent’s home.
Before leaving, we made plans to return for the holidays, and I promised my mother-in-law I’d visit my neighborhood botánica (a Latin American spiritual remedy shop) and speak with a curandera, or spiritual healer. We both hoped the curandera might offer insight into any of these occurrences, and perhaps some guidance. As I said goodbye, an alarm was ringing, ringing, ringing in my head, unable to be shut off or silenced. I’ve always recognized the otherworldly and magical, in theory, but the time had come for me to really see all I’d been refusing to look at; to move beyond hypotheticals and acknowledge what haunting and being haunted meant, not just in my life, but in the lives of my family and in my larger community. And so, unable to reconcile these unexplainable events, I did what writers often do when confronted with the truly miraculous and unexplainable: I sat down to write, hoping answers would make their presence known on the page.
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Artwork sourced from Public Work by Cosmos