This shan’t be my exclusive Post about Ghosts, consequently I shall endeavor to constrain my Focus; indeed, it is with a Resoluteness absolute that I set out a Circumference of two Novels, from which any Materials referenced shall be presented in perfect concert with a single dignified Theme, and yes it shall be the one Theme, for I darest not maintain the erratic Lens and Length of my previous few posts. Also, I darest not maintain this Composition style.

I beg your Pardon, but i’m easing back into my homey blog by taking a crack at writing like a late 1700s lady. How’d i do? Did i sound hoity-toity and way old? 

For Reasons i shall reveal in due course, lately i’ve been gay for ghosts. Now, before i go whole hog on this phantasmic topic, please don’t assume a ghost is a dead person’s spirit or a demonic haunt, that’s really fucking rude actually. You know, i’m something of a ghost myself. And so are you! Ghosts are all of us. 

I bet you think i’m writing metaphorically when I call us ghosts, but i’m not. Couldn’t be more literal. People haunt each other and themselves all the time. There are whole social structures allowing us our haunts.  

Exhibit A, the title character of The Little Stranger, a 2009 novel by Sarah Waters. Spoiler alert this ghost is property (even more spoilers incoming). Specifically, the property of Hundreds Hall. Property is a real life ghost people take upon themselves all the time. A haunting every good Capitalist welcomes and appreciates. 

In The Little Stranger, the little stranger finds manifestation thanks to the pesky psyche of our narrator protagonist, Dr. Faraday. The good doctor is a 1940s Englishman and gentry wannabe. He grew up a lower-middle class lad who idolized this grand estate. Hundreds Hall left an impression on him when he managed a tour during the estate’s celebration of Empire Day. The other kids didn’t get to go in, but Faraday, an extra special boy, gained indoor access because his mommy still enjoyed contacts with the servants, her former coworkers. 

It’s this potent combination of coddled superiority and material inferiority that fuels Faraday’s lifelong entanglement with Hundreds Hall. He’s low class enough to modestly sublimate himself to a property’s upkeep, and he’s high class enough to value, nay cherish, such a foolish thing as property. 

Technically, the property belongs to the Ayers, and if we weren’t listening carefully we might hear that surname as the heirs. By the 1940s, the Ayers royally suck at their job of being rich people. After the tragic death of Susan the young good girl of the family, and after the devastations of World War deuce, and after the labor government, hooray, raises taxes on the wealthy gentry, we find Hundreds Hall is in a wretched state. Like many wealthy people, the Ayres don’t even have money anymore. 

They’re a shabby family, led by a dotty old lady (Mrs. Ayres), with a miserable drunk for a son (Roderick), and a disassociated, bleh daughter who i foolishly like to think is a closeted lesbian (Caroline). Dr. Faraday has so very many spicy opinions about how these hapless rich jerks are mismanaging Hundreds Hall.  

Just like when he was treated to a micro tour as a kid, as an adult Faraday gains access by chance and thanks to the good old-fashioned help. The family requests a doc for their maid Betty, but he quickly insinuates themselves in the crumbling lives of the Ayreses. 

A banal class striver of a doctor is scary enough, but wait till you meet his manifestation, who’s this little stranger i keep bringing up because it’s the title of the book. The little stranger is a nasty guy. A vicious, mischievous, and disembodied force, it’s out here slicing up Mrs. Ayres, unzipping Roderick’s mind by doing shit like knocking over his shaving kit in front of him, pranky gaslighting the guy, lighting fires, inspiring suicide, scaring maids with faint childigh laughs and killing the remaining Ayers one by one.  

Mrs. Ayres crazily insists the little stranger is the ghost of Susan. We always want to bring back the dearly departed. Desperate for resurrection, we may try to force a ghost into the box of a dead person’s soul.  But the book is pretty clear that the little stranger is a psychic projection of Dr. Faraday’s.

The doc doesn’t care about some old dead kid Susan, or any of the Ayres. He cares about Hundreds Hall. His motive is the perpetuation of fine, noble, and altogether proper property. That’s why he courts and attempts marriage of Caroline, and that’s why his psychic manifestation kills her when she eventually declines him. These are practical ghost killings. Hit jobs. It’s impersonal, because property’s impersonal. 

In non-fiction reality, people may not astral project kid assassins to maintain property, but property remains a real ghost. It’s a disembodied force upheld by people’s willingness to devote their identities to it. 

There’s a much crueler homicidal property ghost in the Rivers Solomon novel Model Home.  This novel just came out last autumn, pretty fresh so if you want to read blissfully ignorant of its twists skip exactly six paragraphs after this one. But maybe go back to it after you read Solomon’s amazing novel? I have some good lines in this spoiler-ridden section, like “ghosts are more about unexplained absence than they are about unexplained presence.” Look, i’m quoting future me. That’s kind of different, yeah?

In Model Home, spoiler alert the ghost is property à la white supremacy. Like The Little Stranger, Solomon’s book plays with ambiguity, toying with possibly supernatural manifestation. Unlike The Little Stranger, which pretty much requires at least a little magic or else we get the boring interpretation of everyone’s simply cuckoo bananas, in Model Home there’s firmly concrete reasons behind every ghostly occurrence. It’s the local banal white racists torturing a black family for residing in their affluent neighborhood, Oak Creek Estates. 

Our narrator protagonist, Ezri, along with xer siblings and xer daughter Elijah, are beckoned homeward by scary texts sent from their mom’s phone.  Back in the high life again at Oak Creek Estates, Ezri and co discover their parents have been killed in an apparent suicide. Or were they killed by the ghost/s that terrorized their childhood in this home? That’s what Ezri’s youngest sib, Emmanuelle, believes. She’s all in on a supernatural explanation. But by the novel’s end, we unequivocally learn the elder Maxwells’ death is the final, grim culmination of decades of neighborly harassment. 

There’s a heartbreaking scene where Emmanuelle goes public. Our girl heads to the press, going off on tv about the ghosts she thinks she knows are real. She knows they’re real because they attacked her, tricking Ezri into burning her with acid when the elder sib was supposed to be helping her with a bath. It’s an easier truth to handle than the real: if only it was a supernatural entity’s ’s fault that she was badly burned with acid, and not the machinations of everyday whites.

At this point in the story, Ezri doesn’t know the ghost was always and entirely the devious work of their neighbors. Xe thinks it was a manifestation of Maxwell craziness and xer own craziness. To Ezri, Emmanuelle is flaunting their shameful family abuse. It’s like how when you look beyond the sensationalistic details behind The Amityville Horror, the far more likely explanation than demonic haunts is a toxic family dynamic.    

Early on in the book, Ezri refers to xerself as “a vessel for ghosts.” This isn’t an abstraction merely, these ghosts manifest in tangible ways, they have effects on Ezri’s life, from how they treat and view xer daughter, Elijah, to xer life choices of favoring squalor chic over anything that resembles the vicious affluence of xer childhood.

Perhaps the most insidious aspect of the Oak Creek Estates ghost is the way it reduces everyone into vessels for racist property. The whites are the willing vessel, and the Maxwells are the unwilling ones. This ghost orchestrates the black family into abusing each other physically and emotionally. Ghosts are more about unexplained absence than unexplained presence. We’re all too familiar and cozy with the  presence of racist property, we feel its effects, but how can it be so slippery incorporeal? Where is the physical thing called racist property values?  

Ghosts are ultimately other people and ourselves. In real life and in fiction, they’re our own projections. We’re the vessels for other people, and we live through other people, in tangled, intangible ways. A good ghost story will dig into this eeriness. 

Since my previous post last summer, i’ve lived through the saddest year of my adult life. Two very dear people to me have died, among other horrible events. Grief has many unpleasant knots to it, but a lot of it is like living with a ghost. In my aggrieved brain fog, my absent-minded self haunts myself. I’ll put away groceries in weird spots, or i won’t remember reorganizing my room. I could almost believe a ghost was moving my stuff around.   

I’ll go more into it in my next ghost post, but in all my writings on ghosts i want to focus on how these guys are manifestations of living people and our messy psyches. This promised future post will concern specters of the baby variety. Ghost babies, baby. What a tease right?  

That’ll be in a few months, or maybe next year, or maybe next week, it’s actually possible in a week who knows.  Check out all my archived posts from the previous five years if you’re so inclined. Lots there.