The Ghosts We Author Ourselves

A Late-Night Encounter

A while ago, on a walk late at night, I unwittingly wandered past a disused cemetery. It occurred to me that I was looking at tombstones left unkempt in grounds untended, ensconced between a road junction and a cluster of residences.

I was immediately in a heightened state of anxiety, expecting, through the power of mental suggestion, to see something, and yet dreading whatever it might be. My rational mind insisted there was no reason to run; and on reflection, I determined there was none to be afraid either.

An Impressionable Mind

Even so, I know how my impressionable young mind, in the past, has conjured apparitions, visible only to me, of dreadful things I find difficult to talk about.

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For this reason, I avoid anything that invites paranormal phenomena, including horror films, since I am perfectly capable of dreaming up anything without the need for a prompt.

Back in March, when our apartment overlooked a Jewish cemetery from the seventh floor, we would close the windows and draw the curtains once it grew dark, refusing to let our avoidance of the unknown take hold.

Why Fear the Peaceful Dead?

There is a strange irony here worth pausing on. A cemetery is, by any rational measure, among the most peaceful places we might ever be; quiet, still, and given over entirely to rest. And yet we fear it.

That fear, I have come to think, is not something the ground itself emits; it is something we bring with us, inherited from the tales, fables, and stories we absorbed long before we could question them. We frighten ourselves with a script written by other hands.

The unknown, in many senses, is precisely that: we have no inkling of what is out there, or of who that patch of land once harboured or memorialised. But that very lack of knowing should work in the opposite direction.

If I have no association with these graves, no bond with those who lie beneath them, no shared history at all, then why on earth would the dead, or any other world, take the slightest interest in me? Why would they trouble to cast me as the leading player in some living horror film, with themselves as the supporting cast?

Nothing Buried Here

Put plainly, the less connection there is, the weaker the hold it should have on us. Then I found myself wondering about the humorous placebo effect of a tombstone planted as a prank, with nothing buried beneath it, yet still exerting the full graveyard effect on anyone whose imagination readily runs wild. It is proof, if any were needed, that the fear lives in the beholder and not in the stone.

The least association, then, should leave no true affinity, only a sheer, willing victimhood scripted by a fearful mind. How hard it is to unlearn the tales, fables, and stories of ghosts, ghouls, and banshees. On that night, I also knew that if I were confronted with anything, I would engage with it and stand my ground.

The Voice in the Dark

Then, out of the recesses of a nearby building, someone appeared and said hello. This time I had the presence of mind not to jump out of my skin, and as I made sense of it, I realised it was a homeless man. He most certainly had not come from the graves; and if he had, it was nowhere near as bad as I had imagined.

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All Hallows Thieves

Never caught on

It is Halloween weekend this October with the last day of the month being today, a Sunday. This is one tradition I have never really adopted or related to, and it is not out of any particular interest or belief, I am just not engaged.

Pumpkins, costumes, fancy dress, and the commercial trends that greet this festival I do my best to absent myself from. Decades ago, I was invited to a toga dress party by my friend, John Coll, who passed on in December 2013. I could not be persuaded to go, my partner then did attend and regaled me to stories that left me somewhat nonplussed. Now I think about it, that was where he met the person that became the centre of our breakup just about a year after.

Blow it up

Whilst I would not predicate that situation to my disinterest in Halloween, it does not explain my engagement with Guy Fawkes Day, which is November the fifth, maybe because I liked his audacity in what he was trying to do and whilst he failed, we commemorate him with a bonfire that would have made a bonfire of the English parliament.

Halloween apparently started as a Christian holiday dedicated to remembering the dead, including saints (hallows), martyrs, and all the departed, but as it is celebrated today, there is no semblance of Christianity or dare I say Churchianity, rather, it is a time of revelling like ghouls, ghosts, the dead and anything scary, evil, or macabre.

That’s a ghost?

Watching Ghostbusters and the reboot Ghostbusters, yesterday and overnight, Western civilisations or maybe it is just the Americans have this strange idea of the supernatural, the paranormal, demonic or spiritual activity. Ghosts apparently leave an ectoplasmic residue of slimy green substance, when they enter our realm, they can be captured with nuclear-powered proton pack weapons.

In one scene as a ghost metamorphosed into a Godzilla creature of extreme mammoth proportions, a symphony played out as it wreaked destruction on the city, having a surfeit of imagination is one thing but along with the power of seriously doubtful fictional creations with a propensity for the absurd if not laughable is just beyond the paled. We might begin to believe if first, we believed in ghosts that Ghostbusters was art imitating life.

Chilling the bones

Then with painted faces and all those costumes, it is the ladies that have me a tad worried. October is not a summer month by any stretch of the imaginable, and though we are not at sub-zero, the temperature is not in double digits, yet they step out in the skimpiest of clothes braving the cold in the pursuit of fashion over function. It makes no sense to me as it does to them, especially when it was raining on Friday night.

I might be an alarmist suggesting that this is asking for a bout of pneumonia in the worst case, but they either have a rather thick blubber skin or their blood system is cryogenically predisposed to a poikilothermic adaptation that we naturally homoeothermic beings cannot endure. I find myself scratching my head and then trying not to overthink it, a little shivering and the clattering of teeth might well be the Halloween movie to watch again and again.

Then I learn there is another Ghostbusters film out, Ghostbusters: Afterlife, the original was really good, but all these rehashes leave much to be desired. Rather than give this a nod, I might just celebrate Halloween as Noddy.

Pirates from beyond the Cape

Curfews and crews

Last night we were out on the balcony playing Scrabble well after we were under curfew around 23:00 hours and looking towards the Cape Town Stadium on the Bay Road footpath there were three people involved in a racket before they moved on. Whether they might have been members of the public involved in essential services and exempt from the restrictions.

Meanwhile, the wind was boisterous, almost blowing the Scrabble board away, the clothes horse leaning on the wall fell on my foot and we had to close the doors to limit the effects of the wind.

Then out at sea was a well-lit ship, more like a galleon by its shape or promisingly a pirate ship apparently moving at speeds you will not expect at that time of the night close to the legendary shipwreck coasts of Cape Town. I did not think twice before I suggested it had to be a ghost ship.

Floating a ghost

From the comfort and safety of my balcony, I was not ready to scream in terror, but it soon disappeared from sight, obviously behind an obscuring building to be seen by others who could be more predisposed to fright.

However, maybe we were just a bit excited, the wind gusts from the historic weather charts of yesterday suggest it was just 29 km/h which on the Beaufort Scale just passes for a Fresh Breeze, any mariner and even Long John Silver will not have had any problems with a breeze. To the uninitiated, at the best of times, we had our own story of a ghost ship, any other logical explanation is curmudgeonly and boring.