One time my brother almost saw a ghost. He was in New Orleans, in an ancient bar, during a bachelor party weekend, I think. To be honest, I can’t quite remember all the details because this story was very long and he clearly didn’t have an ending in mind when he began telling a room full of people about this spooky situation that culminated in a bathroom where he almost saw something. Something invisible, it turned out, almost became visible by the urinal. But in the end, he didn’t see it after all. The ghost.
This payoff was met with derisive laughter, which is the normal response in my family if someone squanders your time with a bad story. I have three middle-aged brothers who like to roughhouse and my mom keeps a running tally of who’s the funniest Flaherty. She says she’s number one, and she’s probably right. But my brother who almost saw the ghost ranks high on that list, and he laughed at himself because he was hearing his tale for the first time too, as he was telling it. He’d started to say something about a weekend trip, when he realized that all side conversations had suddenly stopped and everyone was listening to him. A middle child, like me, he’s long known that attention can be hard to come by. So, rather than mention a strange bar and quit, he decided to go on and on. He’s a natural storyteller, after all, and in the past, he’d smoothly landed the plane after far shakier liftoffs than a freaky location in a city famous for voodoo and vampires. That night, though, he circled the runway until he ran out of fuel and crashed.
But I understand now that there was more to his story than nothing. And it wasn’t that he didn’t almost see something. It was that he felt something. Some kind of strange energy there that he couldn’t explain.
That happens in certain places. I once lived in Hawaii and did some camping on the Big Island, where new land is born every day. One night, I got lost hiking on a lava field and fell into a hole, the contents of which I’m still too frightened of to put into words here. But I felt an energy in that moment that wasn’t ghostly, per se, but like nothing I’d ever experienced. I knew there were unusual electromagnetic properties afoot because of the island’s volcanic activity, and maybe that’s what it was, but I don’t know. A friend there once told me that on a boat near Kaho‘olawe, an island the US military used as a bombing range, she suddenly just burst into tears and didn’t know why. It was some feeling from the land that just came over her, she said.
The place that has always affected me the most like that are the woods in the town where I grew up in northern Connecticut, which is the inspiration for the setting of my debut novel, The Dredge. The house we lived in was built in the 1820s and we had old photographs in a bathroom of past owners who’d farmed there at the turn of the century. We shared a home with these dead. We saw their marks on floorboards and hand-hewn joists with old bark still on them. As a kid, I saw one of their apparitions in my bedroom one night. Not almost, actually saw it, I thought. This is the first time I’ve ever mentioned that. And though I can rationalize it away now as an adult, a waking dream or an unusual refraction of moonlight, I still spent the majority of my childhood in a room that I believed was haunted and never told anyone about it before you.
Some of the details of that house and the surrounding woods I used in the The Dredge, including a tree along a brook bank where someone carved the highwater mark of the great flood of 1955, which killed nearly two hundred people in Connecticut. And there’s a version of a pond that I had a nightmare about nearly fifteen years ago. In its dark water, I saw a pale stick of birch that terrified me. Though it’s only a detail now, I felt the whole story in that image and it took me all this time to be rid of it.
Most of us can probably name a place that does some kind of mysterious thing to us. New Orleans, Hawaii, my little hometown, everywhere you look, anywhere you really are, there is strange history, layers upon layers of it piled up endlessly, as you know. Bones in the ground, marked or not. Oddities created by people, by nature. And energies that can’t be fathomed, much less explained. Often, we cannot articulate what can’t be seen. All we know is that we felt something in that setting. Something so unusual that it seemed in the moment that the next logical step would be for it to reveal itself to us, but it just didn’t. And that’s all it becomes. A spooky little blip that lingers. Do you remember? Have you ever told anyone? It’s true, isn’t it? That one time you almost saw a ghost.
