During this time of year, they say the veil between the living and the dead is thin. Autumn stirs up ghosts. I have a ghost story, a true one.
October, 1972. Memphis.
My friend Mary Ann was five years older than I. Thick chestnut hair, agile and big-boned, sensual, moody, impulsive, a surgical technician, a Naval dishonorable discharge in her youth, rough, dark wit, and not a shred of ’emotional regulation’—the favored term these days. Back then we called it “wild.”
I was a college theatre student and part-time waitress, renting a little house on the old road to Nashville. We called it the farm. One afternoon Mary Ann and I visited our friend, Kirby, a beloved college English professor, a charismatic gay man in his early fifties. The conversation veered into life after death and Kirby in his rich and professorial baritone announced there was no after-life. Well! Mary Ann and I had never heard of such a thing. Kirby led us into a large sunny room and pointed to a shelf filled with a row of lush green plants. There! That’s the only after-life we’ll have—feeding the plants. We did not care for our friend’s philosophy.
After a struggle with meth addiction and a stint seducing the young sons of wealthy Memphians, Mary Ann did time in a residential drug rehab, got clean, returned to Memphis and after a year or so earned her private pilot certificate.
On a crystal clear and windy October day, she begged me to go up flying. She could now take up passengers. I had a class and told her next time. That afternoon I returned from school and saw all the cars lined on both sides of the highway. Mary Ann had crashed on a wooded hill not that far from my house. She was seen “buzzing” my house, flying too low and lost her lift. Because of the wind gusts she had been unable to regain altitude. No drugs. The official report.
I sat in the cow pasture and sobbed. I did not visit the crash site until days later. All that remained—her crushed pack of Doral cigarettes and a rain-soaked polaroid negative.
Three days after her funeral, I was awakened by a loud tapping on the wooden table next to my head. A distinct sound of fingertips tapping. I froze. When the tapping ceased, I jumped out of bed, ran into the bathroom and stared in the mirror—I suppose I needed to reassure myself I was real.
After that first night of tapping, the paranormal, spooky stuff began. For example, I’d be sitting in the living room and without any explanation: no one else in the house, not a mouse, not a dish slipping against another, the dishes in the dish-drain would rattle for what seemed like a very long time. Rattling. During these times, the room became weirdly charged, an almost imperceptible electric current permeated the air. Each time, afterwards, I’d be scared out of my wits but excited and energized, as well, longing, yet terrified, for the next ‘visit.’
One afternoon Kirby visited me out at the farm. I joked with Kirby. “It seems like Mary Ann wouldn’t confine herself to tapping and rattling. Knowing Mary Ann, she would heave this piano bench across the room.” Kirby had come armed with a theory. He’d brought a big metaphysical book, The Betty Book, and had read it cover to cover. “It takes spirits time to develop their powers in a new dimension.” Kirby explained.
That night, Mary Ann stood on the porch. In the dream, the sky glowed crystal blue; fierce gusty winds blew like on the day she died. Her long hair rose in the air and whipped around her face. She was happier than I had ever seen her. The dream’s atmosphere shimmered and flowed like silver waterfalls all around us. I knew it was Kirby she was talking about. He’s wrong, she said. In the dream I understood and was amazed she knew of our conversation that afternoon. In a prophetic voice, her spirit spoke, Consciousness is liberation.
Iridescent wind and light washed over me and I woke out of the dream.
Because of work and school, I moved out of the farm house in the spring, convinced her ghost would follow me to my apartment in Memphis. A month passed. Nothing. I sadly began to doubt my own supernatural experience. Not long after I heard that Jeff, an acquaintance and architect for the start-up Fed Ex, had rented the farm house. One day in mid-town, I ran into him and asked him how he liked living in the country. Something weird had happened to him out there, he told me.
He was sitting in the living room across from the fireplace one night when he began to feel strange, like he was being watched. He grabbed a blanket and tacked it up over the living room windows. At that moment, WHOOSH, suddenly he was outside the house, in the pasture looking back through the eyes of whatever was watching him. He saw himself moving around in the living room, walking up to the fireplace then back to the sofa all through the eyes of this thing, this spirit, way out in the pasture. It did not feel malevolent, he told me, but really weird for as long as it lasted. He was definitely looking through the eyes of this spirit outside the house in the pasture. Soon after he moved out of the farm house.
He had never heard of Mary Ann.
I’m always on the hunt for psychological mysterious ghost stories. Henry James’s Turn of the Screw is one of the best of these. We don’t know is it real ghosts or the nanny’s deteriorating sanity. The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson, is a mix of supernatural and a psychological unraveling. Dicken’s beloved Christmas Carol and Scrooge’s redemptive hauntings.
I live in a three-story house built in 1854 on the confluence of the James and Tye Rivers. Lots of history. That’s all I’ll say. On my fridge is a print-out of black and white drawing—a Victorian woman combs her long hair at her dressing table mirror; a ghostly figure lurks in the shadows. The caption reads: The relief you feel when you realize the weird house noises are ghosts and not shit you can’t afford to fix.
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