Every year I say, "I don't have an appropriate Halloween post for this year," and every year, something falls into my lap. For 2023, I think this will do: Kennedy and I went to see a panel discussion at the end of August — Margaret Atwood in conversation with Mona Awad and Naomi Alderman on Gothic literature — and in the course of their discussion, each author told a personal ghost story. (And as many of my Halloween posts have involved reporting the ghost stories of others, I reckon anything shared in a public forum is fair game for my use.)
Mona Awad went first: When I was living in Providence — the land of Poe and Lovecraft — and working on my MFA, I woke up one night from a dead sleep and saw the shadowy figure of a woman standing at the foot of my bed. She was wearing a long, dark dress and I remember her hair was up and she had spectacles on — the spectacles really stand out in my memory — and I jumped out of bed to confront her. I remember standing there, saying, "Who are you?" and then I just fell backwards into my bed and woke up some time later.
Atwood asked if the figure had felt malevolent, benevolent, or neutral, and Awad answered that it was merely ambivalent — that the figure didn't really seem interested in her at all — but that it did frighten her at the time and gave her chills to even remember.
Naomi Alderman went next: Shortly after my partner's father died, we were at my inlaws' family home in rural Northern Ireland — think of fog and mountains; actually the mountain we could see out the window was used during the filming of Game of Thrones — and we were staying in the room in which my father-in-law had died. Being adult humans, we turned out the bedside lamp and started to engage in relations, when suddenly, the light turned on again. Once again, we turned out the lamp, resumed relations, and the light turned on again. So we unplugged the lamp, and when it turned itself on for a third time, we looked more closely at the lamp, and, yes, it was an old type of thing with some kind of transformer switch on the cord — it was maybe possible that it stored enough current to turn on by itself — but we ended up putting the lamp in the hallway and having words with what we were convinced was my father-in-law's ghost, explaining that we were sorry he had died but that we were still alive and were going to continue on with doing the things that living human adults will do.
Margaret Atwood explained that while she had never had direct ghostly experience, she lived for ten years in an 1835 farmhouse and many people — family members and visitors — had reported seeing a woman in a long blue dress who would climb the stairs and turn off the corridor at the top into a very small room that Atwood thought might have been used as a nursery once. She also shared the spookiest story that had ever been told to her: This woman from Georgia said that a friend of hers from college had committed suicide by "blowing her head off with the family shotgun". This woman went to visit the friend's family some time later and was disturbed to see that the dead girl's bedroom had been kept exactly the way it had been in life, with all of the girl's things still on display. She joined the family for tea, and as she sat in a little alcove that was not totally visible to the family, she was horrified to watch as the lemon on her saucer rose into the air, turning end over end before coming back down to rest. This woman said that she had to fight the urge to look behind her for the dead friend because she was terrified she would be there, and be headless.
And that reminded Alderman of one more story: I was in England and teaching a residential creative writing course at a building from the eleventh century — imagine, a building that has been continuously lived in for a thousand years — and while these courses are usually for adults, this time it was a special course for eleven and twelve year old girls. And what a magical and mystical age that is for girls! Before the course began, the instructors were all warned to never speak of ghosts — to deny that they might exist and to refrain from even using the word "spooky" to describe the old building — because these girls were at such a vulnerable and suggestible age. Even so, one morning, a pair of girls — who had been assigned a small former servants' quarters in which to sleep — came to me and said that in the middle of the previous night, they had both awoken to find themselves standing up in the middle of the floor, with the distinct and nagging feeling that someone had called their names. I had been forewarned that some of the girls might have this exact experience — it happens every time someone stays in that room — and I had been coached to explain that a creaky old place like that makes a lot of noises in the middle of the night and that it's perfectly normal to have nocturnal noises disturb one's sleep.
When this portion of the discussion was over, Atwood realised that her microphone was dead and a tech had some bit of trouble getting it to work again. (And at the end of the event, the host came out to say that Alderman had used the name of "the Scottish Play" during the sound check, and we could make of that what we would. Ghost or curse or complete coincidence, it added to the Gothic fun of the event.)
So, while this post feels a bit brief, it ought to serve as my annual reminder that there just might be something more to this world than what we can predict, poke, and measure; and isn't that worth thinking, talking, and writing about?
Strange stories from previous years:
Halloween I
