Ghost Stories!!

Living Houston-adjacent, October is one of my favorite months. We don't really get a solid winter, but this is the time when the year begins to cool and suddenly you can go outside:  whatever oven has been left open for the past four months is finally firmly shut and someone has cracked the fridge door open. :)

Or maybe it's a different door, because it's also the beginning of ghost story season (which pretty much runs through the beginning of the year for me). Ghost stories are one of my favorite genres and I'm looking forward to lighting the candles and listening to stories with the windows open in the evening.

Ghost stories work just as well as other holiday stories to link me to past celebrations and I think they have a unique potential to demonstrate the ways that the past soaks up through us and affects behavior and expectations--also, I'm not into blood & gore, so ghost stories are a good way for me to edge into scary reads.

While I enjoy ghost stories (particularly listening to them), I find that the very characteristics that I enjoy are obliterated by the way that "ghost hunter" tv shows tend to handle them. Watching people infect each other with nerves, try to convince themselves that they are seeing and hearing things, and then treat ghosts as just another form of extreme hunting...really, any time you have to pull out an instrument with blinky lights and wave it around you might as well as be discussing the latest model of fishing rod for that giant fish you are JUST ABOUT TO CATCH...frustrates me.

I can't imagine how, particularly if you need a translator to talk to the locals about their experiences, you would expect to pick up English phrases from the local spooks after asking inane or irritating questions. I imagine ghostly hotel stewards floating around "Welcome, Bienvenue, Wilkommen..." trying to make sure that the ghost hunters who have graciously barged in are properly greeted and then pinched or flitted at with the appropriate gusto.

Ghost stories, and how we manage to keep remnants of yesterday and Great Aunt Betty Ann Helmswood close but not so close that become dangerous, are part--for me--of navigating a world where the present pushes forward just as graciously at the average ghost hunter rather than another trophy to snag for the shelf and the dust. Welcome, Wilkommen, Bienvenue. Happy Autumn.