My childhood home in rural Tennessee was built in the late 1800s and was, to put it mildly, rundown when my family moved in. It was the kind of place a real estate agent might describe as having “good bones.” And in its state of neglect, critters had moved in. There were mice in the cupboards, squirrels in the attic, and even once a rat snake draped casually across a doorframe. Many of the bumps in the night that frightened me were animal rather than spirit in nature. To be fair, I don’t remember the place looking like a house of horrors. I was too young, and by the time I really started forming memories, my parents had turned the place into a lovely albeit unique place to grow up. But odd, unexplainable phenomena never went away.
I remember voices one afternoon, high-pitched and staccato, coming from our downstairs hallway. Not words, more like giggles and shrieks. They suggested children playing some sort of game, hide-and-seek maybe or simply tag. I was in my bedroom, around nine or ten years old, and at first, I froze. I called out to them, but when I received no response, I crept toward the bannister and peered over. Empty. Completely empty. A few decades have passed, yet I can still remember the chill I felt as I realized that I was alone. Intrepid—or foolhardy—I went exploring, but no matter how many closets I opened or curtains I peeked behind, I couldn’t find the source of the noises, now fled. This mystery didn’t derail my day, though I did spend the rest of it pausing from time to time, straining to hear the laughter again. It didn’t derail my day because strange occurrences happened regularly, and I’d learned to live with ghosts.
Several members of my family have ghost stories about our house. My mother talks about the time she heard boots in the foyer. My great-aunt Polly once heard glass shattering in the middle of the night, and my grandfather recalled someone—something—placing an icy hand on his shoulder while he helped us with plumbing work one hot summer day. I remember that our heavy, antique doorbell would ring on occasion without anybody on the other side. White lights liked to dance on our walls periodically, but in retrospect, they were probably distant car headlamps, cresting a hill in the right position to send them into our living room. Even now, though, I can’t quite come up with a reasonable explanation for the small, blue orbs that floated like soap bubbles one evening.
You’d think these memories meant I spent my formative years in a state of abject terror, but that wasn’t the case at all. In fact, I rather liked the mysteries and made up my own stories about the unseen faces. I imagined the ghosts as around my age, kids born in the house rather than ones felled by typhoid or scarlet fever. I never played with them like imaginary friends, but I thought about their lives, perhaps not so different from mine minus the electronics. I liked the wonder of unexplained music suddenly heard in the middle of an otherwise unremarkable day. It was another detail for my ghost biographies. Although nothing unnatural ever occurred outside, my adventures extended into the countryside where one July I convinced myself that a mythological beast roamed the land. I even found the prints (presumably bovine) to prove it near a neighbor’s creek. Basically, I invented my own chupacabra, and I couldn’t have been more elated. Would you be surprised to learn that I was a reader? I was a reader, and in the fifth grade my favorite book was Wait Til Helen Comes by Mary Downing Hahn about siblings who deal with an evil spirit.
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When I think back to these parts of my life, it almost seems inevitable that I would become a writer. My childhood was training for a creative life, its own sort of master class in flights of fancy. My imagination was unchecked, free to embrace whatever make-believe I desired. It helped that I grew up in a region devoted to its ghost stories. At sleepovers, nobody I knew was ever brave enough to say “Bell Witch” into a mirror three times lest the infamous poltergeist appear and torment us. There’s also Pigman who lurks in the Meeman-Shelby Forest as well as a bevy of angry frontiersman and soldiers. I was a well-behaved kid, so I never had a lot of rules, but ouija boards were absolutely verboten.
It all went hand in hand with the tradition of Southern Gothic literature, which includes some of my favorite authors: Flannery O’Connor, Toni Morrison, Carson McCullers. In an afterword to McCullers’s Reflections in a Golden Eye, Tennessee Williams creates a conversation between a critic of the genre and himself. He argues that “the true sense of dread is not a reaction to anything sensible or visible or even, strictly, materially, knowable. But rather it’s a kind of spiritual intuition of something almost too incredible and shocking to talk about.” Of course the word “almost” is important there because the Gothic tradition is alive and well. What Williams calls dread also carries with it a hint of excitement, of anticipation. We don’t want to encounter an angry spirit per se, but we also don’t want to be the only camper without a campfire story.
There’s a burgeoning movement in parenting circles to let children be bored sometimes. It’s a pushback to the helicopter approach—not to mention the expense—of constant classes, scheduled fun, and carefully monitored screen time. Some experts propose that if we fill every moment of a child’s life, their minds won’t develop as much creativity or as much resilience. Earlier this year in The New York Times, the editor of the Book Review Pamela Paul maintained that “[w]hen you reach your breaking point, boredom teaches you to respond constructively, to make something happen for yourself.” She cited Lin-Manuel Miranda as someone who benefited from free, unmonitored afternoons, and it’s hard to argue with his success. But I don’t need famous examples. Intuitively, this makes sense to me. I’m grateful for the hours I spent unsupervised, letting my thoughts gallop into the unknown. I pretended that I had a pet jaguar and a pet pegasus. I pretended that I was an explorer and a superhero. Although I somewhat regret jumping off our shed with a makeshift parachute I cobbled together with pillowcases, I miraculously didn’t get hurt.
The traits I developed then have served me well, not only as I start to imagine my next novel, but also as I sit in a doctor’s waiting room or stand in line at the DMV and project myself into a daydream. On a recent, longish bus trip, I stared out the window for over an hour, and it felt like time had hit the fast-forward button. I can’t recall what I was thinking about so intently, but it wasn’t the wall in my living room that needs new plaster. It was something more pleasant than the broken electrical outlets and the porch rails that need yet another coat of paint. My husband and I didn’t intentionally look for a fixer-upper, but somehow one found us anyway.
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To be completely honest, our real estate agents weren’t as taken with the place as we were. I saw the pretty, gray rowhome first without Adam, and one agent in particular was skittish on the deck, worried that it might collapse with too many guests. He mentioned the work that needed to be done in the kitchen, pointed out the worrisome crack in a bedroom ceiling, and stated bluntly that it would take a fortune to redo the floors. Nevermind that I was googly-eyed over the floors, not wanting to improve anything about the original pine, not even the cracks or burn marks. That’s what rugs are for, right? Adam’s unwavering practicality balances my optimism, and I wondered if he would see as much charm as I did in the space. I’m not sure if he saw charm, but he definitely saw potential. Now our weekends are spent with caulk, varnish, and saws (not to mention bandaids), and my parents repeat that it reminds them of our old Tennessee place. It feels like coming full circle, my imagination now running wild with renovation plans as well as dark, little tales.
Once when we lived in Florida, I talked Adam into going on a Key West ghost tour by convincing him that we would learn about the history of the area as well as some local folklore. Instead, we ended up on a spirit-hunting expedition, and I somehow got volunteered to hold the equipment. I found myself standing in front of a small group of strangers, arms outstretched, clutching what amounted to deconstructed coat hangers wrapped in tin foil. “Do you feel anything,” the tour guide asked, his serious face in stark contrast to my husband’s. It was, without question, the cheesiest of the ghost tours I’ve taken, culminating in a haunted dining room at the local Hard Rock Cafe, conveniently open for business after the seances concluded. Not exactly the kind of night to convince supernatural skeptics. It had none of the genuine spookiness of my childhood, though who doesn’t like to imagine Ernest Hemingway lurking around his old home, cavorting with the cats.
If there’s one trick to being a writer, it’s this: you have to find a way to be receptive, to tune out the noise and raise your little antennae, hoping for something more than static.I often think of my strange, young experiences as the root (at least in part) of my writing. There’s little I enjoy more than sitting down with my notebook and pen in the morning, waiting for the fuzzy shapes in my head to turn into images or characters. Waiting, if you will, for the ghosts to come back. If there’s one trick to being a writer, it’s this: you have to find a way to be receptive, to tune out the noise and raise your little antennae, hoping for something more than static. Recently I’ve realized that my childhood experiences also taught me to be comfortable with the unexpected, to not fear what I don’t understand or even what seems beyond my abilities, what seems impossible. Sometimes there’s an explanation for what troubles you, sometimes even an obvious solution. But other times? Other times you have to wander around in the dark for awhile, clutching some aluminum foil.
So far, there haven’t been any murmurs from the hallways of our new home. The only noise in the night we hear is our off-balance dryer and the cry of the real baby next door. And if we get a few strange noises, I’m prepared. There’s something thrilling about the uncharted, about things existing in the world beyond our current level of understanding. Whether or not ghosts are real, their stories give us inspiration, a way to live more alert to possibilities. Despite—or even in part because of—the mysteries of my childhood home, I loved it there. And I hope to bring that love of the unknown into my new, adult house. Ouija boards, nonetheless, are banned.
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