How to See Ghosts
(or Surely Bring Them to You)
Outside, the haunted houses are loud, garish, crowded. The night air smells like kettle corn and cotton candy and the reek of stale smoke. A werewolf stalks by, ten feet tall on hydraulic stilts as Lily squeaks and points, grabbing Gavin’s arm. I’m not looking at the werewolf, though. I’m looking to Gavin, as always, watching to see how he reacts.
The line shifts forward and everyone jostles ahead a step. The dark is made light by the sodium glow of streetlamps and the bare bulbs of trailers selling funnel cakes and hot dogs.
Every Halloween, we do this, or something like it. Me and Trent and Gavin and whatever girl Gavin is dating; Lily this time. We’ve done it since high school. Sometimes Trent brings a girl, sometimes not. I’ve never brought a guy, though, and if Gavin or Trent have ever wondered why, they’ve never asked.
Inside, the haunted houses are all smoke machines and blasts of sudden air and animatronic puppets lunging out of dark nooks. We go to them almost every year, and they’re a little bit different every time.
We shuffle around in dark labyrinths, laughing, coughing, reaching out to grasp one another by the sleeve or a fistful of material from the back of a shirt. Even when the lights are up, the smoke is so thick that visibility is limited to a few hazy feet. Weird shapes lurch out of the smoke, only to be revealed as fake trees or pillars or other lost patrons. There’s a slide that leaves us all smelling of baby powder and, at the bottom, two men to pull you to your feet and shove you out of the way before the next person comes down. Trent accidentally kicks one of them, the heel of his boot hitting the guy high on the shin. He tries to apologize, but is shoved out of the way—maybe a little harder than usual—and then the moment is gone, left behind in a frenzied rush, as all moments are inside the haunted houses.
“What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.” That’s the saying, right? What happens in a haunted house, though, doesn’t seem to stay anywhere. It gets lost in the smoke, in the dark, among the mirrors, and then it’s just gone when you come stumbling out the other side.
It’s hard to watch someone in the dark, when you don’t know where you’re going, when there’s always something bright or loud or sudden vying for your attention. Doesn’t mean I don’t still try, though. Sometimes, one of us gets separated when we turn a wrong corner and then we’re caught standing alone in the smoky dark, walls on seemingly every side until a hand comes from somewhere impossible and plucks at our shirts and pulls us back into the group.
Every time that happens, every blind corner I take, I hope that I’ll find myself alone somewhere with Gavin. Someplace small and cramped, where we have to stand too close together. In one of the pitch-black hallways, a hand brushes mine and I know that it’s his from the electricity that travels across my skin and up my arm. It’s nothing, just his fingertips across the back of my hand, an accident, a reassurance to both of us that we’re still there in the dark, but it leaves my skin feeling warm and strange.
Then, suddenly, too late and too soon, we trip and stagger and stumble out into the night, as though the houses are expelling us. We’re out in the lighted streets again, where everything can be seen, and there are no chances of secret touches in dark corners. Where Lily is once more clinging to Gavin’s jacket, and his dark eyes are once more turned down into hers.
The smells outside are the same as before, but after being in the houses the air seems as fresh and clean as the breeze on top of a mountain. A wagon passes by, pulled by a tractor and filled with bales of hay, hauling prospective haunt patrons from the parking lots to their destinations.
Lily is laughing, too loud and forcefully, or so I imagine. Trying to dispel the lingering nervous energy from the houses, or to convince Gavin that she’s having a good time. Trent lights up a cigarette, proffers it to me and I shake my head, taking the opportunity to just breathe, now that I have it. A headless horseman rides by in pursuit of the wagon. In the distance, there is the sound of people shrieking.
After the haunted houses, we go to the hotel. It’s only a few blocks, across the big, decaying overpass that connects the warehouse district to downtown. Ours is the oldest hotel left in the area that hasn’t yet been renovated into a more modern edifice. There’s a newer hotel across the street, a Marriot or a Hilton, with valet parking and lights on the side of the building that flash different colors to warn away airplanes and awe tourists.
I picked it because it’s supposedly haunted; one of about half-a-dozen such options in the metro area, including a promising-sounding former convalescent home where thirty people burned to death seventy years ago.
I chose this one partly because it was close to the haunted houses—the reason I shared with the others—but really because its ghost was the most immediate. All the other places in town that claimed to be haunted and yet still rented out rooms had old stories, mostly forgotten and dusted off only for the odd newspaper article every year around Halloween. At this hotel, though, every employee I talked to knew about the ghost, and all but the very newest had some personal account of seeing or hearing it.
In every telling, the ghost’s appearance was the same: a rough and indistinct figure, its head smothered in some pale cloth with uneven holes or smudges for eyes and mouth, bound all over in chains that can sometimes be heard dragging along the halls at night. Much more Dickensian than any of the comparatively prosaic murdered gangsters or spectral newlyweds on offer at the other establishments.
The best part, though? It has no history. No tale of specific woe or pain. No name. Though everyone agrees on the ghost itself—on its appearance and manners—no one has any idea who or what it is the ghost of.
Inside the hotel, our room has been renovated into a suite arrangement, with two bedrooms extending off a central sitting room that looks considerably more modern than the halls or the foyer. One bedroom is for Lily and Gavin, one for Trent and myself. Nothing but sleeping will happen in the bed I share with Trent. He’s straight and, even if he wasn’t, he’s not the one I want.
There’s a minibar and I offer to go get ice. Gavin stands up to come with me and I don’t stammer, I don’t even think I blush, but I can’t stop myself from wondering why. Is there something he wants to tell me in private, away from the others?
As we let ourselves out, I hope for a quiet aside about how annoying Lily is being tonight, but I don’t get anything except a breezy comment about the quality of the haunted houses. As we’re walking down the hall, over the red-and-green carpet, I imagine seeing the ghost. My ears strain for the distant clanking of chains as I picture that shuddering form slipping around the next corner.
I wonder, if it did appear, would it change anything? Would Gavin touch me? Grab me? Would he be angry if I grabbed him?
Too soon, we’re back at the door of the room, the ice bucket full. Trent is pouring drinks as I get out the stereo we brought along, the CD I burned for the occasion. It’s mostly spooky ambient music, but the first track is something else. Something I found just for this.
It crackles, like an old record played on a phonograph and then the unmistakable voice of Vincent Price comes on. “How to see ghosts or surely bring them to you,” he says, followed by some ominous music. “This part of the book is for children who were born in the morning or around lunchtime. If you were born at midnight—some say just at twilight—you were probably born with the gift of being able to see ghosts and other spirits and don’t have to be told how.”
The track is taken from an audiobook that Price released in 1976, its title borrowed from an Arkham House book of weird poetry by Leah Bodine Drake. A Hornbook for Witches. I know these things because that’s my role in the group.
Everyone is quiet as Uncle Vinnie speaks. Lily starts to giggle, but Gavin moves and she stops. I’m hovering near the stereo and everyone’s eyes are on me but, for the moment, I don’t care. For the moment there is only Vincent Price’s perfect voice, coiling out of the speakers like narcotic smoke. This is what I planned everything else around, the moment I’ve been waiting for all night, and I let myself treasure it, closing my own eyes to let those words curl up around me in the dark.
“Just say you aren’t scared,” that famous voice finishes, after a few minutes. “Just say how brave and nonchalant you’d be if you ever saw a ghost, and see what happens.”
Once the track is over, I bring out the Ouija board. Lily is actually the one who brought it. She turned out to be the only one of us who already owned one. It’s not a real Ouija board. It’s a “talking board,” off-brand, one of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer ones they put out when the show was still popular. It’s not optimal—the YES and NO are at the bottom of the board, and I had to glue felt onto the legs of the planchette so that it would slide—but it should do.
We all pull the chairs closer together and sit with the board across our knees. Gavin’s knee brushes against mine, and the touch burns through my jeans. The lights are dim, the music is playing quietly now, barely there. We place our hands on the planchette, draw in our breath, and wait. Nothing happens.
“Maybe we need to prime the pump,” Trent says, and I nod, knowing he’s right.
“If there are any spirits present in the room,” I say, “we reach out to you now. We are open to you, receptive. We are here for any messages that you may wish to impart from the other side.”
There’s a quiet, nervous titter from Lily, a deep breath from Trent. Nothing. Then, a sound? Was that breathing one of the others, or something else? Did they hear it? Was that distant dragging in the hall outside, or only on the CD? I wish, now, that I hadn’t included the music, but I had thought that it would help make the others more inclined to sit the séance out.
“Aren’t we supposed to, like, ask it a question or something?” Lily asks, after a few more heartbeats, and the planchette shudders, moves. “Are you guys doing that?”
Of course, I know how Ouija boards work. Combined suggestion, subtle muscle movements, expectation, all working together in the service of simulating intelligence where there is only a hopeful longing. But I forget all that as the planchette shifts, stutters across the board, reaches a letter and stops.
“I,” Lily reads aloud.
The planchette jerks, jumps again, slides along, moves to another letter, stops. Have the lights gotten dimmer?
“M,” Trent says.
“I’m,” I proffer faintly, half-afraid that to speak any louder will be to break the spell. ...
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