Planet Soul
The Art of Catching Ghosts
The more I listen to my ghostly impulses, the more sensible my decisions become
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I met my first ghost when I was eight years old. She was hiding under the porch at my aunt’s house, stuffing handfuls of tart purple mulberries into her pockets. “For my rabbit,” she told me. “I only eat cookies and apples.” She was loud and funny and knew some bad words, and I thought she might be Pippi Longstocking come to life. Only black, like me.
Pip, as I came to call her, had deep gashes on her legs and a misshapen foot from being run over by a streetcar, but she said they didn’t hurt, and they sure didn’t slow her down.
Around a year later, I met a ragged old man with a missing eye who sat on the church steps every day. He never spoke, but his story hung in the air like a swarm of gnats. Union Army. Long walk home. Sweetheart lost. A terrible fight. His one good eye stared straight ahead, scowling fiercely at flowers and grasshoppers and little girls walking to school.
Then a woman in a fur coat who let me pet her dog. A boy delivering newspapers who showed me the hole in his chest. A baby in a basket who stopped crying if I sang.
None of the numerous theories about how or why people see ghosts — or what they believe to be ghosts — has ever resonated with me.
As I got older, I started to realize not everyone could see what I saw or hear what I heard. My parents found my prattling about invisible playmates and their wild stories charming. Having imaginary friends was proof of my creative genius and their superior parenting. But their pride gradually turned to concern and then worry, and finally they dragged me to a doctor, who turned out to be more fascinated than analytical.
“How does it feel?” he asked, as would every person in whom I confided for the next few decades. “How does it feel when you find one?”
It’s a sensation like walking downstairs in the dark, when you think you’ve reached the last step but there’s one more. That instant sense of being suspended in space while your foot touches only air and not the solid ground you were expecting. The rush of relief that you’re not falling, and those dizzy, off-kilter seconds while your breath catches up to your brain.
Then the smell. A mist of an aroma — sometimes strong, sometimes barely discernible. Raw and yeasty, like unbaked bread.
It’s all over in a flash. And then, there they are. Right in front of me.
Paranormal researcher and author Nicole Strickland believes where a ghost is found is just as important as who the ghost was. “One cannot separate a location’s history from its ghostly events,” she writes. “History is still alive, and still whispers to us.”
The importance of place and time fits my experience as well. My ghosts are tethered to the spot where I find them, unable to travel with me even a few blocks. Just before a hazy sunset is the optimal time for finding them. But other widely accepted ghost hunting traps, like tracking cold spots or light flashes or disembodied sounds, don’t work for me at all.
How I make the catch
- If at all possible, I need to be outside, in physical contact with nature. Barefoot in the grass, for example, or trailing my hands in the water off the side of a canoe.
- If I’m indoors, the space generally has to be very old — at least a couple of hundred years. Bare skin against old wooden tables or scarred stone walls or crumbling marble stairways. I’ve never had any luck in newly built condos.
- I stand or lean into the space where the scent is the strongest.
- I breathe in deeply, absorbing the aroma.
- I think of my body as melting, like a bit of butter on bread.
What I’ve learned to avoid
- Places saturated with historical pain and tragedy. I once toured a plantation in South Carolina where the slave quarters had been spruced up to look like gentle log cabins, and the Big House was meticulous in early-19th-century detail. Just walking the grounds where so many slaves were tortured was excruciating.
- Places without known trauma still require wariness. I had to be physically removed from the frigidarium in the Roman baths at Musée de Cluny, for example. The anguish of ancient ghosts crushed me.
- Tours of so-called haunted houses, like TV shows about ghost chasing, always disappoint. There are no ghosts — just wishful thinking (at best) and con games (at worst).
- Cemeteries can be peaceful or horrendous — there is no middle ground and no way to gauge it in advance. I stay away. Memorial services or funerals are fine, though. The newly dead don’t seem to need my attention.
None of the numerous theories about how or why people see ghosts — or what they believe to be ghosts — has ever resonated with me. Various faith traditions, for example, attribute ghost sightings to devil mischief or proof of afterlife. But I’m not particularly religious, and I don’t believe in hell or demons or damnation.
Other explanations point to chemicals, narcotics, and even intense meditative practices, all of which can cause altered brain activity and ghostly hallucinations, but I’ve never done drugs or been exposed to toxins. Never been hypnotized or meditated myself into euphoria. And even if I had, I couldn’t have done so before the age of eight.
Another theory is the sensed-presence effect — the feeling that someone or something else is with us. Often reported by thrill-seekers or people in extreme states of emotion, the sensed-presence effect usually occurs during periods of physical discomfort or isolation, such as being cold and dehydrated, fatigued and afraid. I’ve rarely been in this kind of situation, and I never see any ghosts when I am.
I have the same zillion neurons in my brain as everyone else. Why do my neurons fire up things other people find unbelievable, demonic, or just psycho?
A Vodou priestess in New Orleans told me at some time in my life, I’d been so close to death that the spirits had accepted me as their own, and I could now walk easily with them.
At the time I had never been sick or in a life-threatening situation — although I would be later — so I just shrugged. No one has ever given me any useful explanation.
“What do they want?” I asked. They never asked me for anything.
“To be remembered,” she said.
In 2015, while walking the Camino de Santiago, I found two little girls hiding in the medieval fort in Valença, Portugal. One was small and sick; the older one was determined to protect her.
“The soldiers are coming,” she whispered. Her small voice was filled with such dread and resignation that I shivered in sudden recognition. The truth stared at me from her watery eyes.
Yesterday is running in the background, an endless, glitchy app, just behind today.
Wasn’t this long trip to Europe my very own self-designed turret? Hadn’t I, too, squeezed myself between stone blocks, closing my eyes to my crumbling relationship back home, pretending I could evade the inevitable death of yet other love?
Her delicate green smock fluttered around her ankles like grass blowing in the breeze. She had wrapped a deep green piece of velvet around her waist, pinned with a sparkly metal animal of some kind. Her hair was long and dark, pulled back severely with ivory combs. I sat with the girls for a bit, until they fell asleep.
The soldiers, like my looming breakup, were marching forward, and there was no safe place to hide.
I went back to the guest house and poured a glass of white port. I was 4,000 miles from home talking to dead people, and if alcoholic indulgence isn’t justified then, when is it?
For the first time, I wrote down the ghost story. The writing made it real. The writing settled my jittery soul. Where do you turn when logic and science and reason leave you scared and alone?
I knew, finally, I could trust how I feel, even more than I trust what I see or hear or touch. I knew I’d have to stop hiding and stand up. And unlike the girls in the fort, I would survive my grief. The more I listen to my ghostly impulses, the more sensible my decisions become.
The ethereal girls — like all I’ve ever encountered — had been dead for a long time. Decades. Centuries. I’ve never bumped into my own mother or grandpa, or that neighbor from Shelby Street who jumped off the bridge.
What they have in common is they all perished in some horrific event — and I catch them right there, in that odd scrap of space just before they died. As if yesterday is running in the background, an endless, glitchy app, just behind today.
Since that sunny afternoon in my aunt’s yard, I’ve caught them in the nick of time, in museums and theaters, in grocery stores and hotels and other people’s basements. They tell me their stories. Sometimes, like in a Portuguese fort on a legendary path, listening to them shines a spotlight on a problem I’m facing, and the extra wattage helps me see the right path to take.
What happens after I catch them and listen to their stories?
I am safe. I am seen. I will be remembered.
And that may be all there is. For any of us, alive or dead.
This story is part of The Art Of, an ongoing series that supplies you with instructions for living.
