Ghost Writers: Us Haunting Them

By Keith Taylor

Tales of the ghostly and supernatural by some of Michigan’s finest fiction writers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Release date: Sep 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9780814335949

Keith Taylor

Keith Taylor is a retired U.S. Navy officer and was a longtime columnist for The Navy Times.

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wsupress.wayne.edu

© 2011 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission. Manufactured in the United States of America.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ghost writers : us haunting them : contemporary Michigan literature / edited by Keith Taylor and Laura Kasischke.

p. cm. — (Made in Michigan writers series)

ISBN 978-0-8143-3474-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Ghost stories, American—Michigan. 2. Ghosts—Michigan—Fiction. 3. Supernatural—Fiction. 4. Haunted places—Michigan.

I. Taylor, Keith, 1952–II. Kasischke, Laura, 1961–III. Title: Us haunting them. IV. Title: Contemporary Michigan literature.

PS648.G48G49 2011

813’.08733089774—dc22

2011002994

Typeset by Maya Rhodes

Composed in Dante MT, Archive Atlantique, and Avant Que

E-book ISBN: 978-0-8143-3594-9

contents

Preface: Grim Reader

Laura Kasischke   |   Ghost Anecdote

Steve Amick   |   Not Even Lions and Tigers

Elizabeth Kostova   |   Thin Air

James Hynes   |   Backseat Driver

Nicholas Delbanco   |   Pier Road

Laura Hulthen Thomas   |   Bones on Bois Blanc

Anne-Marie Oomen   |   Bitchathane

Kelly Fordon   |   Estate Sale

Lolita Hernandez   |   Making Bakes

Eileen Pollack   |   The Devil in Cross Village

Keith Taylor   |   The Man at the Edge

Elizabeth Schmuhl   |   Belief

Contributors

GRIM READER, DID YOU EVER SEE A GHOST?

NO; BUT YOU’VE HEARD—I UNDERSTAND—BE DUMB!

AND DON’T REGRET THE TIME YOU MAY HAVE LOST,

FOR YOU HAVE GOT THAT PLEASURE STILL TO COME.

Byron, Don Juan

preface: grim reader

When the editors first started talking about ghost stories several years ago, we talked for a quite a while before we asked each other if we actually believed there were such things as ghosts. Even when we finally popped that question, we equivocated. Sure, we’d both heard pretty convincing stories about something strange that happened, once, to someone who seemed sane—someone not known to be a liar or prone to hallucinations—under circumstances that lent some credibility to the strangeness, the possibility that what had happened was not easily dismissed as a prank, the shifting light, the physics of wind in the hallway of an old house. We didn’t try to explain those stories, although we admit that we saw them more as windows into the minds of the people who reported them than as descriptions of reality. We recognized a need to tell the story and our own desire to listen to it.

Then we realized something else. Many of the ghost stories we knew—either the ones told around campfires or those collected in volumes, whether intended for a popular audience or for an audience that considered itself literary—were centered on a particular place. A house, often an old house with a long family history. A park or a field. A particular town. The ghosts either inhabited these places or were desperately trying to get back to them. And we lived in Michigan, so many of our ghostly references were entirely local. We knew of a house on the west side of Ann Arbor that seemed to carry a horrible history and, possibly, the ghosts of dead children. We shared a former student who, while professing not to believe in such things, is heir to a house above an orchard outside Benton Harbor where some of her relatives see things. We’d heard stories of apparitions on Belle Isle in Detroit, in the towns of Niles, Alpena, Cross Village, or Trout Lake. The ghosts in Michigan, perhaps like ghosts everywhere, seem to stay close to home. While editor Keith Taylor was discussing this phenomenon with his eighteen-year-old daughter Faith, a young woman who has grown up through troubled economic times in her home state, she said, Well, good for the ghosts! At least they still call it home.

Some of those homebound ghosts seem to be benign, even protective. Others might be tied to places that frighten the teller of the story, or the created characters who must confront those places. Others appear when the living are going through significant changes in their lives or are overcome with anxieties. Others appear for no reason, when they are not needed and when they are certainly not wanted.

We thought we might be able to find some new stories out there in our state, so we asked some of our best writers—some very well known and others just at the beginnings of their careers—if they knew or imagined something ghostly they might want to write about. We came up with the dozen stories here, some of them eerie, others funny or bittersweet, some even a bit troubling in their picture of things happening here now. Some of the stories are true tales written by non-believers, pieces their authors call essays, although we have tried to keep from labeling them. Others are clearly fiction, and are meant to be a bit frightening. There are a couple where we aren’t quite sure of the author’s intentions—true or not? We will let the readers figure out which ones are which.

The dictionaries tell us that ghost can refer to anything of which there is only a hint, a suggestion, a vestige, a trace—the ghost of a smile . . . the ghost of a chance . . . the ghost pain felt in the limb after its amputation . . .

But the Germanic geist is a cognate of the word guest. Probably the tradition of the death’s-head at the table grows out of that connection, as well as the superstition that the wrath of a ghost will be directed toward the one who refuses to welcome it. It appears that when or if we are visited, the ghosts will either be in the places they knew when they were alive, or else the ghost is a wanderer, a lost traveler, a soul sidetracked or snagged, desperate to get home. Sometimes—and it seems as if we are blessed, perhaps more than most, with ghostly presences—that home is here, on a couple of peninsulas surrounded by enormous amounts of fresh water. Our home is still theirs.

The Editors

GHOST WRITERS

laura kasischke

GHOST ANECDOTE

When I was sixteen, I saw two girls, my age, slip through a fence in my backyard.

When I say slip, I mean that they did not walk through the fence, or climb over it. There was no gate or hole in the fence. It was chain link, the fence, and separated our yard from the Ratterinks’, and these girls walked across the backyard and slipped through it as if it didn’t exist.

When I called out, Hey! they turned to look at me, and then at each other, and then they disappeared.

I stood up.

I’m sure I said, just under my breath, Shit.

They were pretty girls. Teenage girls. The smaller of the two had been wearing one of my old dresses. I’d tried that dress on myself one afternoon a few months before, and, realizing that it was too small, tossed it into the box my mother was planning to take to Goodwill.

Because my mother never made it with that box to Goodwill, I had no idea what happened to that dress.

Maybe this girl had found it in the garage?

The other girl was prettier than the smaller one. She had black hair down to her waist, and she was wearing tiny cutoffs and a halter top. I was fairly certain that if I thought about it long enough, I could remember where I might have seen that one before. The pool? The mall? Kids for Christ?

Yes, Kids for Christ.

I hurried into the house after I stood, swore, and they vanished.

The reason I was sitting in the backyard in the middle of the night was that I was smoking dope. Even with my father fast asleep, and even with the way he slept like a man in a coma those days, I couldn’t very well smoke marijuana in the house. He’d have had no idea what I was doing. He’d have been alarmed, smelling that, if he’d woken up to that smell. He might have thought I was burning my dresses, or fruit, or old love letters soaked in my mother’s perfume.

But this was some very good weed, which, after the funeral, my cousin Chris had rolled into twenty slender joints for me and put in a beautiful old-fashioned cigarette tin that said Tobacciana on the lid.

I was being conservative with it. Chris lived in New Jersey with my aunt and uncle, and had only come back to the Midwest for the funeral, so I knew I wouldn’t see him again any time soon, and he would not, obviously, be sending me any refills in the mail, so I allowed myself only one joint per week, parceled into a puff or two Monday, Wednesday, Friday. This was Friday.

I had to make it last, I kept telling myself. I was definitely not the type of girl to get on a bus and head downtown in search of a dealer, and these days I could only stand to open my eyes after dark when I was high. Luckily, it was summer, so it stayed light late, but what would happen—?

I tried not to think about that.

In the past, I’d only gotten high with friends, smoking whatever they had, but I hadn’t had any friends since the fight.

The only friend to come by in all that time was Mary Bacon, our resident teenage ambulance chaser.

The first time, she’d brought flowers and a card so sentimental I couldn’t get past the second line, the one about how loved ones live on in the memories of . . .

The second time, she brought a loaf of bread her mother had baked. My father and I devoured that within about an hour. That time, she was actually on her way to her volunteer job, wearing her candy stripes and a little thing like a stiff wing in her hair.

I doubted she was going to come over a third time with some drugs.

The girl I’d had to fight was a senior. A big fat bitch with glasses. I broke the glasses; she gave me a nosebleed. Even in the sobering span of time that had passed—two months to be exact—and everything that had happened since, I still didn’t see what it was that I’d done that was so bad that they’d all scattered from my life, and so fast. I still believed, until a few weeks afterward, that when the obituary ran they’d start stopping by and calling.

But let’s not even get into that, and all those sad facts. They didn’t. No one did. One or two moms, sure. But I could tell, even with them, they’d heard:

She’s a psycho now. She tried to kill this perfectly nice fat girl.

It was surprising how solid that girl was, and the sound she made, the shocking inflexibility of her skull when my fist made contact with it. I didn’t know that the glasses had been shattered until much later. I heard her crying. I do remember that. And Tony’s expression of surprise and distaste. It was as if he’d been waiting the whole six months of our being together to show me that face.

Can I just say a couple of things in my own defense?

First.

Well—

Oh, forget it. There’s no defense. The only thing that girl did was elbow me accidentally in the restroom line.

But what I’d started telling you about were the girls.

The ghost girls.

The one in my dress.

And the other one.

That one I swore I might have seen with a tambourine during that last meeting of Kids for Christ, which had been my older sister Bethany’s idea. She’d gone off a few years before to a Christian college and come back looking like a cleaner, happier, stupider version of herself.

You’ll need something solid to cling to in hard times, she’d said.

I know you’re probably asking yourself why I listened, since I wasn’t, it seemed, the kind of girl who would be easily talked into Kids for Christ or anything else. But I suspected, really, that Bethany was right. Maybe not about Christ, but about the hard times, about solidity. Then, I made the mistake of hesitating at the door, and the next thing I knew I was in her car, listening to Amy Grant, driving off to someone’s cookie-cutter house on the other side of town.

"Oh, hel-lo!" the mother of that night’s host-Kid for Christ said when she opened the door.

My sister—the one who used to slap mannequins in department stores and then laugh so hard she’d wet her pants—embraced this woman, and then turned and offered me to the woman, whose smile froze, eyes widened, before she gave me a gentle pat on the back.

There were some Bible verses, and a lot more hugging, the smell of cookies getting overcooked on an aluminum pan, and then the music. And that dark-haired girl staring blankly into the distance as she tapped a tambourine with the meat of her palm, and then against her hip.

Bethany went back to college and only breezed in for our mother’s funeral before shipping off with her fellow missionaries to an island somewhere in the Pacific—that vast steel wrinkle where I knew the island that would want my sister’s advice would be perfectly at home.

I overheard her telling the cousin who’d given me the cigarette case of joints that she’d had a personal encounter with Jesus, and that she wasn’t going to grieve for our mother because it would be insulting to Jesus.

Wow, our cousin Chris had said. They both looked up at me when they saw I was hovering, eavesdropping. My cousin smiled. (Stoned?) My sister scowled.

I never went back to Kids for Christ, although my sister must have given them my phone number because some girl called the following Monday night to see if I needed a ride to the next meeting. When I said no, that I couldn’t go, the conversation ended with Jesus loves you, you know.

Thanks, I said.

I had to hang up the phone, finally. I could tell she would be willing to hang on to her end of the line for a hundred years just listening to me breathe.

Well, I had the fight a few nights after Kids for Christ night. Blah, blah, blah. My mother died. Just before she did, she asked me to please help her put on her strand of pearls.

Of course, she was delirious. I should have told her she was already wearing them. She would have believed me.

But, stupid me, I fished around in her hospital bag until I found them. They were there, along with her underpants and her Bible, because she’d been wearing them when she’d been admitted for the last time. I don’t know why she was wearing the pearls then, or why she wanted to wear them when she died, but I reached around her neck to try to clasp them behind her, and something happened when I did, and the string broke, and the pearls scattered all over the linoleum, bouncing and snapping around like a hailstorm or the roll of a hundred tiny dice—and while I was down on my knees trying to pick them up, my mother died.

A rattling, a gasp, my father and a nurse ran into the room.

They looked at her, and then at me.

I was holding up a handful of pearls, trying insanely to smile.

Would you hate me if I told you what I did with the pearls?

Well:

I held on for a long time, but after they wheeled my mother out of the room, and my father signed all the papers and made the arrangements, I let them slide off the ends of my fingers in an iridescent trickle into a trashcan. They were body temperature by then. They clattered into the empty can. It was like letting go of a beautiful handful of cancer.

I never saw any of those Kids for Christ again, except for the one with the dark hair who slipped with the one wearing my old dress through the backyard that night.

They looked at me, and then at each other, having clearly seen me for what I was before deciding not to turn back, before simply passing through the fence. Then, they vanished.

They saw me, and I saw them that night—that very dark night in the earliest and worst part of my life.

They were ghosts, and girls. I’m quite certain of that.

But why should you believe it?

I was young, I was grieving, I was stoned out of my mind, I believed in nothing, it was the middle of the night in my backyard, and I was alone—

You would never have believed such a story. Just as I would not have believed you if you’d told me that one day we would be married, live together in a little house, have a child.

Just as I would not have believed you if you’d told me that, one day, those ghost girls would seem more real to me than the girl at the picnic table, the one who was me:

Hey! she called out, weakly, even sweetly, full of longing, thinking she was calling out to those girls, when, in truth, she was calling out to the future, calling out to you.

Obviously, that night, you were somewhere else entirely—maybe kissing a stranger, or falling off a balcony, or watching television with a child—and someday you would have an anecdote of your own to tell about that.

Your anecdote would be full of meandering, and contradiction, and passionate sighs, and I would listen—not without interest or sympathy, but never fully believing it, either, or understanding it, lying in bed beside you, listening to the breeze in the trees outside, our child asleep in the next room, and your past a dark, intangible drifting between there and here.

I would be beside you, listening to the story of that time—if you managed to survive it, to tell me about it, and if I lived to hear it.

I would be trying and failing to imagine it, maybe even many times, before I told you my own story again—this one and the next one, and so on and so on, back and forth, back and forth, until the first light.

Hey!

She was calling out to you, who didn’t

Reviews for Ghost Writers

[terk71 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

The two editors, both contributors to this collection, have brought together ten other Michigan writers to produce some form of ghostly writing. All twelve pieces have Michigan settings, and each tale represents a varying degree of spectral—not spiritual—speculation. The editors challenge the reader to judge whether a piece might be a true tale, pure fiction, or personal essay.When considering Michigan, most readers probably will consider the hard economic depression and depopulation that the State might have suffered. If there is a prejudice about the decay of inner-city Detroit, then a reader can appreciate what drives the story of “The Man on the Edge.” There is a hysterical promenade through Michigan’s economic history provided in “Not Even Lions and Tigers,” wherein haints may not be the only reason for a well-fortified bunker. A layoff provides the impetus in “Thin Air,” where a mysterious ride might lead to a possible job referral. And “Estate Sale” offers more than a chance encounter with a vintage chair.Some stories can be seen as perhaps the result of, or propelled by, mind-expanding stimulants: booze in “Bitchathane,” prescription drugs in “Backseat Driver,” or marijuana in “Ghost Anecdote.” Plus, some form of psychosis could be attributed to these stories as well as to “Making Bakes,” or “Belief.” These tales involve some form of spirit apparitions.Nevertheless, “Pier Road” is a humorous debunking of ghosts in the attic, and “The Devil In Cross Village” is a grand writing in the “faction” genre, which I define as fiction wrapped within historical details—whether those facts of true, somehow twisted, or simply fabricated.These stories will not qualify for inclusion in Tales From the Crypt. The array may not be chillingly spooky, but it could prompt some reflection or discussion about any personal paranormal happening. On the other hand, this slim volume does evidence that there are no mean-spirited haunts in Michigan.