I have tried to haunt like the masters. In my lifetime, which now seems so long ago, I watched every Poltergeist, every 13 Ghosts with my face shrouded in the safety of warm blankets, unaware that I should be taking notes. When I saw Linda Blair scream “Pazuzu!” mid-orgasm, I was too distracted by the bloodstained crucifix to admire Capatin Howdy’s masterstrokes. Now I could not muster the courage to pitch a priest from the balcony if my un-life depended on it.
Hollywood would have you think that a ghost knows no fear, but I say that perhaps only after death, when you drift about in half-existence with only your past nightmares and neuroses as company, can anyone know what it is to be frightened. Frightened not for your life, which you left behind, but for your credibility. You feel too meek to manifest, worried that you cannot possibly follow in the floating footsteps of the silver-screen spooks.
When I was ten, still red-cheeked and capable of respiration, my father pushed back the flap of the VCR and blew away the dust, pushing in the tape, mimicking the plastic clicks and thunks with his mouth to make me laugh. I could see the tattered label on the cassette for only a second before the words “The Haunting” disappeared into the machine and were replaced by a quavering orchestral score and the rapid-fire delivery of actors who seemed amazed by every ominous bump from offscreen.
I have tried to haunt offscreen, to become an idea more than a visual, to pay homage to the chain-rattling specters of old. Yet I am always dismissed as faulty plumbing or attributed to the wind. I even tried to write “GET OUT” in the fog on the windowpanes, but without warmth in my fingertips I could do nothing.
Sometimes I sit and wonder, and would place my forlorn head in my hands, if only they had substance to hold it up. I wonder why I want these people out, and whether I am not just a slave to the expectations instilled by the more gifted ghosts. Why do they rage so much that a poltergeist can’t find as much joy in rocking a baby to sleep as throwing the crib across the room?
HOW DOES THIS END?
Hollywood would have you think that a ghost knows no fear, but I say that perhaps only after death, when you drift about in half-existence with only your past nightmares and neuroses as company, can anyone know what it is to be frightened. Frightened not for your life, which you left behind, but for your credibility. You feel too meek to manifest, worried that you cannot possibly follow in the floating footsteps of the silver-screen spooks.
When I was ten, still red-cheeked and capable of respiration, my father pushed back the flap of the VCR and blew away the dust, pushing in the tape, mimicking the plastic clicks and thunks with his mouth to make me laugh. I could see the tattered label on the cassette for only a second before the words “The Haunting” disappeared into the machine and were replaced by a quavering orchestral score and the rapid-fire delivery of actors who seemed amazed by every ominous bump from offscreen.
I have tried to haunt offscreen, to become an idea more than a visual, to pay homage to the chain-rattling specters of old. Yet I am always dismissed as faulty plumbing or attributed to the wind. I even tried to write “GET OUT” in the fog on the windowpanes, but without warmth in my fingertips I could do nothing.
Sometimes I sit and wonder, and would place my forlorn head in my hands, if only they had substance to hold it up. I wonder why I want these people out, and whether I am not just a slave to the expectations instilled by the more gifted ghosts. Why do they rage so much that a poltergeist can’t find as much joy in rocking a baby to sleep as throwing the crib across the room?
HOW DOES THIS END?
