Welcome to Ghost Sightings

Ghosts are real. 

They exist at the edges of our minds to help us deal with the reality that one day we will die and no longer exist as we do right now. We might go our whole lives without ever seeing a ghost, but that doesn't mean we aren't followed by them.

I've never seen a ghost. I probably never will. But I know they're there to keep histories and memories alive for just a little longer.

About a month ago, I wrote a blog post about how ghost stories (at least the best ones) are rarely about the ghosts. You can read that blog post by clicking this link. 

That post primarily focuses on fictional stories and the ones that get passed down from generation to generation as a way to preserve culture or history. It wasn’t my first post on ghosts, nor was it the first time I brought up the fact that ghost stories are a good measure to discover what a culture values. This post will likely not be the last either.

Today I was feeling under the weather. Thankfully nothing COVID related (at least I haven’t heard of a crumbly stomach being associated with the virus). I ended up spending most of the morning under a pile of blankets with a cat curled up next to me and Unsolved Mysteries on in the background. I came back to full awareness when the episode playing was entirely in Japanese.

The episode in question was on the aftermath of the 3.11.2011 earthquake and tsunami. At first I was a bit confused as to why this was on Unsolved Mysteries as I hadn’t heard of anything unusual happening after the tragedy. Then ghosts were mentioned and things began to fall into place.

The episode wasn’t about a murder or disappearance that occurred in conjunction to the day, but about the trauma that happened to the people after over 15,000 were swept away by a wall of water. People began to see ghosts.

I don’t think this is all that unusual after such a horrific disaster. Though the episode does mention that ghost sightings are a rare occurrence in Japan after incidents of mass death (natural or man made), there is a cultural explanation for why this region of Japan had a high number of ghost sightings in the months and years after 3.11 (as the day has become known as).

Mass death isn’t normal. Sudden mass death is traumatic and leaves a gaping impression like a bullet hole.

The amount of death going on right now because of the pandemic feels so much worse. It's like a stab wound that hasn't closed properly and became infected. It'll likely leave a massive scar, if the wound ever heals.

I’ve been lucky. I haven’t seen the mobile morgues. My family has managed to avoid the worst of COVID. I’m still incredibly stressed by the situation.

We’ve seen how humans of the past dealt with pandemics and it was filled with images of death. The great plague that ravaged Asia and Europe in the Middle Ages left us with tons of paintings which featured dancing skeletons and iconography we still closely associate with death. The Dance of the Macabre is familiar enough to most modern people - even if they aren’t aware of its exact origin.

That particular disease really did look like something out of a zombie movie. COVID doesn’t have the tell tale disfiguration or gross puss filled boils like Bubonic or one of its similar plague buddies has. It’s not flashy and easily hidden away from the public eye. 

But the stress and trauma is all around us. I do wonder how our modern world will deal with it.

In the mid-2000s there was a huge uptick in paranormal investigative shows. I won’t deny that I enjoyed them back then. Although, now I much prefer seeing the story unfold rather than watch 40 of people wander around in the dark and then spend 10 minutes trying to tell me that there was a “ghost” on a recording. I like to think I’ve matured in taste since then, but it’s unlikely.

I’m not saying that the trauma of 9/11 was the reason for this sudden splash of TV shlock, but the timing is there. Kind of like how it wasn’t necessarily the counter culture of the 60s and 70s that led to the satanic panic of the 80s and 90s. 

But after traumatic events, we as humans seem to be drawn to what comes after life. Many times the trauma takes the form of ghosts.

I think there’s a reason Gettysburg is known for its battlefields and ghosts more than any other US city. The town and surrounding area was bombarded for three hot days in July. It’s the bloodiest battle to take place on US soil. And the town is filled with ghost stories about those three horrific days.

Will COVID correlate to another surge in live action ghost shows? Will we get more shows or movies like The Haunting of Hill House or Bly Manor? 

If anything, I do hope that the pandemic brings the end of the zombie. For years zombies were equated to disease and that we could fight our way out of it. Nothing remotely like the zombie apocalypse has happened. Please creative types, make zombies go away.

I’m still feeling a little queasy. The only other time I’ve felt like this and didn’t actually get sick was when I had a horribly stressful month at work while I was still new to my career. I couldn’t eat for a couple weeks. COVID has wrecked my nerves in a similar way - don’t know why this was the week for my body to freak out.

I have never seen a ghost - though I wouldn’t mind the experience. I think it’s important to understand that ghosts are very real. Whether or not seeing them is a response to trauma or a suggestion of the mind to rationalize the unknown or they are in fact real is up to you the individual. Right now my body is physically responding to the stress of the pandemic. Years from now, my mind might process the trauma differently.

And boy has my generation lived through a lot of traumatic events. 

If you enjoyed this post or it really (pissed you off), please like, share, and/or leave a comment. I love hearing from my readers and I hope y’all like hearing from me.

Stay safe everyone.

Welcome to the Tragedy in Horror

 This past week, I watched the Netflix original The Haunting of Bly Manor. Based on the classic gothic horror novel, The Turn of the Screw, and a spiritual successor to the fabulous The Haunting of Hill House, I was excited to see how this mini series was going to do. 

I wasn't disappointed. 

Though I don't think The Haunting of Bly Manor is nearly as good as The Haunting of Hill House, I did enjoy watching it. And like the first miniseries, it left me crying my eyes out by the end.

Ghost Stories are Never Just About the Ghosts

At least good ghost stories are never just about the ghosts. 

At their heart ghost stories are about people. Their actions, their emotions, and what they leave behind. My favorite ghost stories not only scare me, but also leave me in tears. The tragedy is part of the horror. 

One of the first ghost stories I remember watching as a kid was The Others (2001). I'd seen other horror movies as a kid (Arachnophobia might have hindered my interest in spiders for a few years), but not many serious ghost stories.

And boy did I have an interest in ghosts and haunted houses as a kid.

One of my favorite shows as a kid was the History Channel's Haunted History series. They'd go to cities, visit some haunted locations and explain the history with some ghost stories thrown in. It wasn't like the ghost hunting shows that are on now. You can find a lot of them on Amazon Prime (though it takes some digging to find them) and a few channels on YouTube.

So, when I watched The Others, my kid self was expecting a haunted house story. I was not ready for the twist ending or how much I was going to cry (and I was one of those kids that cried at the drop of a hat). 

I freaking loved it.

The Others is a ghost story about ghosts not knowing they're dead and their need to come to terms with that. Their feelings of isolation, hopelessness, and guilt permeate the film. The horror isn't that there are ghosts haunting a house, but how they handle the stressful situations they are in. 

Going back to The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor, much of the horror is realizing who was fated to die, how they were unable to prevent it, and the response to those deaths. Nell's death in particular ticks all of these boxes. 

We learn that Nell is dead in the first episode of The Haunting of Hill House. Her spirit is waiting in her brother Steve's apartment when he gets home. He grumbles to her for a bit, then he gets a phone call from his dad stating she's dead, and finally we get that awesome jump scare. Much of the rest of the series that takes place in the present focuses on how her death brought her family back together.

However, we do get a full episode dedicated to Nell's life. We see her falling in love, getting married, and then losing her husband to an unforeseeable health problem. We see her pain and deepening depression as she struggles with her husband's death. I wanted to see her get better. I wanted her to be happy.

Throughout the episode, we also see the bent neck lady haunting Nell. She shows up at some of the worst moments of Nell's life - including the death of her husband. Right before going back to Hill House, Nell sees her again. I don't know if this vision was the final straw for Nell to go to the house or if she would have gone regardless of seeing her, but she goes back to the house. And she relives some of her happiest moments with her family. She even dances with her husband again like she did on her wedding day.

She seems so happy, even though we, the audience, know it's not real. We want Nell to be happy. But she's destined to die. We've known this from episode one. When she does die (and we find out who the bent neck woman is) we're horrified. I was so upset that I burst into tears. 

Same thing happened at the end of the series, when Steven is learning the whole truth of his mother's death. The ending of Bly Manor also left me in tears between the lady of the lake (though I honestly didn't need an entire episode dedicated to her), Hannah, Rebecca, and the inevitable death of Dannie.

I was horrified and full of sorrow.

I seem to like these types of horror stories a lot.

A couple of nights ago, despite knowing that I was going to cry again anyway, I decided to put on the movie Paranorman (2012) after finishing Bly Manor. Paranorman is one of Laika studio's best all around animated films. It's got horror, humor, and one of the biggest tear-jerk moments in a movie about witches and zombies. 

If you haven't seen the movie, I recommend going and watching (because I might spoil a couple of key plot points) it. Norman is a little different - mainly because he can talk to dead people like the kid in the Sixth Sense. He's given the responsibility of reading the spirit of a witch a bed time story to keep her asleep for another year. He fails, zombies rise from their graves, and the town descends into chaos.

The resolution and ending is so sad.

(Spoilers - next paragraph)

Nothing bad happens to Norman. It's the witch's story that's depressing. Because of course the witch wasn't actually a witch. She was a little girl like Norman - a little different. She was killed because they were afraid of her.

(Spoilers - ended)

No matter how much I'm enjoying the movie, I know that I'm going to be in tears by the end. That doesn't stop me from watching, but I do have to prepare myself for it.

Go watch Paranorman, it's great. Plus there is this hilarious scene where you find out one of the characters is gay and it's one of the best reveals I've ever watched. 

But this is my opinion on horror stories. I can't just be terrified or in a state of anxiety the whole time. Tragedy rounds out the story and adds depth to characters' back stories...especially if they're ghosts. 

Why are some of my favorite horror movies also ones that make me cry?

Probably because I like ghost stories, where the ghosts aren't what's really doing the haunting.

If you enjoyed this post (or it really pissed you off) please like, share, and/or leave a comment. I love hearing from my readers and I hope you guys like hearing from me.

Until next week.

Welcome to the Hauntings of the World

Please note that this blog posts includes sensitive topics including but not limited to: violence, murder, and suicide. If any of these topics make you feel uncomfortable please read with caution. 

Yesterday, I decided to roll myself into a blanket burrito and not move from the cocoon I’d made on my couch all day. Okay, that’s not entirely true. I had bills to pay and food to make, but otherwise I was nice and toasty under some of my warmest blankets. I was perusing the family’s Amazon Prime Video account when I came across the show “I Wouldn’t Go In There”.

Now I’m all about TV shows and documentaries that take a peek at the paranormal or include a good ghost story. However, I’m not all that interested in watching people wander around with night vision cameras looking for proof of ghosts (unless it’s Buzzfeed Unsolved Supernatural with Ryan and Shane - I will watch Ryan freak himself out until the end of time). What I am interested in are the stories themselves.

The host of “I Wouldn’t Go In There” is a blogger and urban explorer named Robert Joe. He takes a much different approach to the paranormal stories he hears while traveling around east Asia. For one thing, he doesn’t believe in ghosts. What he does believe in is that ghost stories are a type of oral history keeping the memory of lesser known or generally forgotten events alive. At the beginning of each episode, Robert interviews someone with a ghost story. He then goes to the site in question (if he can) to explore a bit. Then, he digs into the history of the site to determine what could be the cause of the haunting,

More often than not the stories he dug up were about violent or traumatic events that the people in the area where still processing, sometimes centuries after the inciting incident occurred.

Robert Joe would also go to local experts to understand the culture and customs surrounding death, superstition, and ghosts. This information helped give better context of how the stories started and why people were experiencing these hauntings.

Overall I enjoyed the show and binge-watched all ten episodes while wrapped up as a blanket sushi roll. It was a Saturday well spent and it made me long to explore the same countries Robert was visiting, or at the very least learn more about their history. I think the episode that stuck out the most was the episode about a haunted house in South Korea. I won’t spoil the ending, but the emotional story that is presented at the end about a battle during the Korean War is heart wrenching.

And to be honest, this is the kind of show that got me interested in history and learning about other cultures as a little kid.

Back in the 90s and early 2000s there was a show on the History Channel called “Haunted History”. They tried to reboot it a few years ago and it wasn’t nearly as good. The original had multiple episodes about hour long, focusing on the spooky stories from one city and how these stories tied into actual historical events. It was a little cheesy and dramatized at times, but it was entertaining and somewhat educational.

You can watch episodes from this show on both Amazon Prime and YouTube with a little search savvy ingenuity.

This show led me to picking up books on hauntings, which then led me to doing my own research into the subject. As this was going on, I became less sensitive to horror movies and book featuring ghosts and hauntings (gory horror movies are still a bit hard on me), eventually leading to me becoming a horror writer mostly interested in the paranormal (insert shameless plus about the anthology I’m featured in).

During this obsession to understand the unknowable, I came to a couple of conclusions. Now these are my own personal conclusions and in no way reflect how the world may actually work nor do I have a degree in anthropology, sociology, or history (I do in fact have a fancy Math degree written in Latin, but I don’t think that counts here). My conclusions are these:

1) Places, people, and objects can all be haunted.

2) Ghost stories, superstitions, folk lore, and legends often reflect the emotional needs and values of the community they come from.

3) The reason ghosts exist isn’t to frighten the living, but to help deal with death, trauma, cultural norms, and the unknown.

A lot of ghost stories are traumatic. Some aren’t. There is the occasional sweet ghost story about someone’s grandma or great uncle visiting them or haunting their home because of how much they loved the place, but those aren’t the majority. And those touching stories help people grieve and recover from the loss they suffered.

I find that a lot of hauntings deal with violent or sudden deaths. They might also occur because someone disturbed a grave site or because they weren’t given a (culturally recognized) proper burial.

And culture matters a lot in what causes a haunting.

Take for example Salem Massachusetts and the ghost stories surrounding the Salem Witch Trials. There are a lot of ghost stories and plenty of ghost tours you can pick from when you visit. I personally prefer the tours that focus more on the history and the whys of the story versus the actual ghost parts and Salem has a lot of history full of explaining those whys.

Salem is haunted by the trauma of the Witch Trails, even over three centuries later. In fact, for a long time the town of Salem didn’t want to even acknowledge what had happened, but the community did remember. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s book “The House of the Seven Gables” is full of allusions to the community guilt plaguing Salem. The author even changed his name to distance himself from an ancestor who was one of the main leaders behind the Witch Trials.

Salem of today embraces what happened. It’s become one of the witch capitols of the world. People come far and wide to learn about one tiny piece of Salem’s history and to possibly see a ghost specifically from that time. The trauma of innocent people imprisoned and being put to death hasn’t gone away, but it is being processed (even if a lot of it is for financial gain).

I’ve never personally experienced a haunting. I’ve been to places that people say are haunted or that I thought should be haunted, but aren’t. My grandfather’s house comes to mind. As a child I really wanted it to be haunted, so my grandfather concocted a story about a chocolate eating ghost in the kitchen. There was no ghost, it was just my grandfather messing with me.

I currently live in a house that’s over a hundred years old. My sister insists that it’s haunted. The only haunting I’m aware of is the grumpy twenty-something job hunting on the second floor and maybe one or two squirrels trying to break into the attic. Because of the house’s age and somewhat spooky disposition (the floor’ uneven and a couple of the doors don’t like staying shut), it seems like an excellent spot for a ghost or two.

Seriously, it’s not haunted. No ghosts reside in my house.

However I did attend a college full of ghost stories. All of which have been passed from student to student over the years. In fact many of the stories I know, I learned from another student attending the college.

The two stories I am most familiar with from my time on campus deal with some of the darker history of my school. In some ways I think these stories continue to be told as a reminder that our school wasn’t perfect for everyone.

The first story has to do with colonialism and the shameful history of kidnapping Native American children and forcing them to conform to European standards. It’s said that on cool nights in the dead of winter, if you’re walking by the sunken gardens you might catch a glimpse of a (possibly) murdered Native American boy running a good five feet off the ground. The sunken gardens didn’t exist when the child was forced to attend the school and would often escape to run free in the surrounding woods (which also no longer really exist). One night he never returned and is thought to have been murdered by someone near where the sunken gardens now are.

Pretty spooky, right? But this story also keeps the shameful memory of an often overlooked period of American history. Native American children were kidnapped and “civilized” well into the 1900s throughout North America. The fact that my school participated in this practice is an uncomfortable truth that should be acknowledged more.

The second story is a lot more gruesome in my opinion and speaks on one of the lesser well known reputations about my beautiful alma mater. To give some background , when I first applied and was accepted, one of my friends (who went to an equally prestigious but rival school) said this: “Oh, you’re going to Suicide U”. I was a little taken aback by this comment. Why did my dream university have such a reputation. I knew it was a tough school, but I didn’t think it had that kind of reputation.

Until I heard this story:

One year, during finals, a young woman was studying in the top most classroom of one of the older academic buildings. Things weren’t going well. In fact things were going down right bad for this woman, so she left all of her thing in the room, walked into the lady’s room across the hall, and killed herself.

A year passed and it was time for finals again. A different student decided to study in the same location as the woman who committed suicide the previous year had. It was getting late and this student was really getting into the study groove when there was a knock on the door. The student looked up to see a woman sticking their head into the room. The woman looked around, saw the study materials and asked how finals were going. The studying student said that everything was going great. This angered the woman. She stormed in, ripped apart all of the study guides, and left as quickly as she came.

Soon other sightings of this woman started being shared. If the woman showed up and things weren’t going well while studying she would try to tempt the other person into killing themselves. However, she only ever showed up at this one classroom and only if a person was studying alone late at night. From what I heard people stopped studying there all together unless they had a group, so the ghost turned to tempting the lady’s who used the restroom where she died instead. According to the stories I heard, the hauntings in the bathroom got so bad that the school switched the genders with the idea that guys didn’t need to use the restroom as often as the ladies, so they’d avoid that one all together.

I have no idea how true this story is or isn’t. But it was one of those stories whispered about on campus. Personally, I think it spoke to the very real anxieties the students had as well as the stress and mental health problems not being addressed on our campus (I’m hoping things have gotten better, but that’s an entirely different post). We all wanted to be the prefect student. Most of us had been so in high school. Our university, though, was tough and proud of the academic rigor, which knock a lot of us down a few pegs (or in my case down an entire level of the multiverse).

And the truth is, my campus wasn’t unfamiliar with the pain of suicides. There were at least three suicides that I can remember happening while I was a student. Each suicide was sudden, shocking, and traumatic.

I can’t help but wonder if the story about the girl studying for finals is also a warning to the students to take care of themselves or if it’s is a way for the other students to deal with the shocking loss of suicide. It seems morbid when phrased that way, but we humans need closure and explanations for when things like this happens.

Ghost stories, hauntings, myths, legends, they stick around because we as humans need them to. They offer explanations for the unknown and help us deal with the raw emotions that come with living in a dangerous world. These stories keep the very human tradition of oral history alive.

What do you guys think? Do you know of any ghost stories that might tell a bigger story?

I know this was a long post and I took it to a bit of a dark place, but I wanted to give some insight (and maybe review my own thoughts) on what makes a places haunted. Because places, people, and even objects can be haunted. They carry the memories and emotions of past events. The stories are a way for us to remember the past and process the difficult emotions and traumas that occurred. I recommend checking out “I Wouldn’t Go In There” if you’re interested in learning about hauntings, the supernatural, and historical events in Eastern Asia.

I also recommend watching Buzzfeed Unsolved with Ryan and Shane, but mainly to see Ryan freak out and Shane be so done with Ryan.

Until next week.

Before I give my usual closing please know that if you or a loved one is suffering from mental illness your not alone. Don’t ever hesitate to reach out for help. If you ever feel suicidal please remember that there is a national suicide helpline (1-800-273-8255).

If you enjoyed this post (or it really pissed you off) please like, share, and/or leave a comment. I love hearing from my readers and I hope you guys like hearing from me too.

Welcome to the Gothic: the Appeal of Darkness

The Gothic genre is filled with tales of mystery, macabre, and dark atemosphere. There are plenty of ghosts, monsters, and victims. Though not exclusively tied to the horror genre, most Gothic tales include elements of horror (as I have written in previous blog posts), but why?

What attracts us to that dark atemosphere?

I can only answer this question for myself. Personally, I find the dark side of life to be just as fascinating and beautiful as the dramatic and comedic, sometimes even more so. However, there’s one element that shines through above all else in Gothic tales and that’s mortality. Horror and Gothic stories bring audiences to the edge of death, whether through tragedy, mayhem, or the supernatural.

Everyone dies - it’s a guarantee of life - but we don’t often like to acknowledge it.

Young people often think they’re invincible, that the seductive hands of death won’t touch them for a long long time. Why should the young worry about death? Yet in the Gothic genre, it is the youth who are often facing the most horrific and tragic of situations. They must confront their mortality before the end of the story...or succumb to it.

I haven’t a clue how older people feel about death. I doubt that there is a collective feeling on the subject. Some might welcome it at the end of their lives, others might continue to fear it. I’d rather think of death as the end of one journey and the start of the other. The older individuals in the Gothic stories I’ve read were occasionally the victims of the younger generation’s ambition, such as in A Tale Tale Heart. There are other older people in these stories who help guide the younger generation, such as Van Helsing in Dracula.

Death is the overly dramatic lurker in these stories. It’s not quiet. Most characters know that it’s around, but not how to avoid it.

But death isn’t the only dark figure lurking around. The more Gothic tales I read, the more I feel like I’m being drawn into a twisted fairy tale. Ghosts, ghouls, and fairies all have the potential to pop up in Gothic tales. Magic, spells, and curses all seem more real in the Gothic setting. If I were to guess why, it would be because the main setting of these tales feels so different from my modern world.

Things weren’t nearly as clean and sterile as they are now. Indoor plumbing wasn’t common until the 1900s. Medical sciences are constantly improving, they feel so much more advanced than a hundred years ago, let alone two hundred. We know so much more now than ever before in human history.

I often feel that our modern world takes some of the mystery out of life, whereas the height of the Gothic period seems so very mysterious by comparison. I don’t know if people in the 1800s felt that way as well. Especially since they would have felt that their society was the panicle of modern science and technology.

Yet, superstitions and interest in the supernatural remain, even to today. People continue to try to spot the paranormal during historical ghost tours in some of the world’s oldest cities and as does the fear of crossing a black cat. Some people might laugh at the idea of witches casting spells in today’s modern world, but witchcraft has grown a large following since the early 1900s. Scientists agree that Earth is billions of years old, but some people are still convinced that the earth is actually flat.

I’m very curious as to how the decades surrounding the new millennia will be remembered. What will people a hundred years from now think about our superstitions and omens. Will they think the vampire craze of the mid 2000s meant that people actually thought vampires were sparkly?

But getting back to the topic at hand...

Darkness doesn’t have to be frightening. It can be a chance to conqure the unknown or hide within its mysterious embrace.

Humans have this uncanny need to be both uniquely special and a member of a group. Understanding the mysteries of the unknown, being able to see in the dark so to speak, can make us feel like we’ve stumbled onto information that is only meant for a select worthy few. It can make someone feel more knowledgeable and thus more powerful.

Sure, embracing the darkness in life can mark you as an outsider, but most people don’t go it alone. They have friends who are also interested in these topics, who want to know these secrets. People form their own group who accept their interests and share in their knowledge.

Regardless, it can be fun to Hear stories about the darker side of life...as long as I don’t live them.

If you enjoyed this post (or it really pissed you off) please, like, share, and/or leave a comment. I love hearing from my readers and I hope,you guys like hearing from me.

Until next week.