Here’s my take on the myths:
HAUNTINGS ARE SCARY
In fiction, ghosts are coming AND THEY WANT TO EAT YOUR FACE. They are angry, or lonely, or just plain old jerkwads who want to possess your kids, explode your television, destroy your furniture, push you down the stairs, and ultimately set fire to your house before sucking it into a giant Hell Mouth.
In reality, I rarely came across an account of a person who was scared of a ghost. Some people were disconcerted, a few were mildly creeped out, but most were fascinated, or comforted, or even annoyed. I was surprised at how many people saw the ghost of someone they knew. I always assumed the afterlife was a big place where everyone had to wear a “Hello, My Name Is” nametag, but the accounts of hauntings I encountered that felt like lived experiences and not something being regurgitated from the movies, dealt with ghosts who had meaning to the people they haunted. Dead grandmothers and parents were a big one, and so were deceased pets. Dead spouses were another big source of hauntings and, most tragically, so were dead children.
People with no skin in this game love to “debunk” or just plain old act nasty to folks who’ve claimed they’ve seen a ghost. After reading dozens of letters from a woman in the 1930’s who lived on an isolated ranch in Montana whose son died when he was five, and who then visited her as a ghost for thirteen years, growing up, talking to her, learning to read and do math from her, and who then disappeared when he became an adult, I would feel like the deepest kind of insensitive jerk to tell that woman she was delusional. What would it gain me? How much would it hurt her? The ghosts I came to believe in were personal, subjective, and repositories for deep emotions, but the one thing they weren’t was scary.
HAUNTINGS HAPPEN BECAUSE OF SOMETHING BAD IN THE PAST
All the way back to the beginning of when we first started to tell each other ghost stories, hauntings happened in evil places. The Amityville Horror house is a classic. The house is cursed not just because of some mass murders that happened there, but also because it’s built on an Indian burial mound. How could this place not be totally cursed!??!? Well, it’s not. The Amityville Horror has been pretty thoroughly debunked. In movies from The Haunting to Poltergeist and The Blair Witch Project to The Conjuring, places are haunted because evil things happened on those grounds. In real life? Not so much.
I’ve heard about haunted condos, haunted woods, haunted sidewalks, haunted mobile homes, and haunted medical records filing facilities. Whether or not someone sees a ghost somewhere seems to have zilch to do with the history of the location. Besides, go back far enough and something “bad” has happened almost anywhere. If hauntings happen because of evil things, then why isn’t every single prison haunted? Why don’t we hear about the horrible ghosts of Dachau on a regular basis? What about the suffering that takes place in every single hospital? Hauntings happen because of people, not because of evil architecture or a shady past. However, there is more and more research being done to show that sites which are rumored to be haunted are often places where there are geological or electromagnetic anomalies. So it might just be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
HAUNTINGS HAPPEN BECAUSE SOMEONE MESSED UP
A common way to start a horror movie or book is for someone to make a terrible mistake. You shouldn’t have used that ouija board, you shouldn’t have bought that cheap house, you shouldn’t have stolen that Indian trinket, you shouldn’t have gone skinny dipping in that deserted lake. Often, in fiction, for horror to have resonance we have to invite it in, so that when the woodwork starts giggling, and maggots begin to rain down from the ceiling it’s our own damn fault. In real life, not so much. Hauntings just seem to happen and making people feel like they somehow “caused” it is insanely counterproductive.
Hauntings may be real or they may not, but the experience of being haunted is pretty common and it appears to be relatively benign, hauntings seem to be no one’s fault, and sometimes they’re even pleasant. That’s not very dramatic, and let’s face it, horror movies and books are all about drama. That’s why they’re so much fun. Horror fiction is a way to talk about the sins of the past, hubris, and how an ignorance of history doesn’t just doom us to repeat it, it dooms us to be beaten to death by it. That’s fiction and it works. But in real life, the haunting experience is deeply subjective, deeply emotional, and deeply profound. And let’s behonest, that’s simply not as exciting as someone peeling off their face or reanimated corpses bobbing around in the swimming pool.
Written by Grady Hendrix
Grady Hendrix does a job. His job is called “writing” which means that he is completely irrelevant and can be killed and turned into food at any time. He is one of the founders of the New York Asian Film Festival, but he is not responsible for the bad parts of it. He is also not Asian. For years he was a regular film critic for the New York Sun but then it went out of business. He has written for Playboy Magazine, Slate, The Village Voice, theNew York Post, Film Comment, and Variety before Variety fired him for writing about Asians. Variety does not like Asians.
His book Horrorstör came out from Quirk Books on September 23, 2014. Read our Review and then You can buy it here.
Do you have any ghost stories or experiences to share? Do so in the comments!
