Ghost Stories I haven’t known

What is it about ghost stories that make them so much shivery fun? There is something thrilling and scary and comforting—yes, comforting—about ghost stories.

Maybe they are comforting because they suggest mysteries beyond our comprehension. Maybe I like them because they point to the possibility that death isn’t the end of me. Whatever the case, ghosts are much more fun to contemplate than serial killers, the current most popular horror story genre. Ghosts can be really scary but they rarely hurt us, which is why I prefer them. Am I just a horror story whimp?

Most of my friends seem to love good ghost stories too. I hope that doesn’t mean we’re all horror story whimps. Whatever the case, we agree that there is a dearth of good novels about ghosts. And this doesn’t make sense when most of us have a ghost story or two that actually happened to us. Think about it. We aren’t talking urban folktales here. These are not stories that we ascribe to a friend of a friend. These inexplicable doings really happened to us.

The house my family rented when I was a child for our annual summer vacation was in Wellfleet, Massachussets. It sat a bluff called Pleasant Point. There was an unsubstantiated story that the house originally came from an island called Billingsgate that slowly eroded into the sea during the late nineteenth century. The house ended up in its present location after being floated aross to the low end of the point then dragged up the bluff by teams of horses. (The Victorians had a penchant for moving houses—but I digress.) Wellfleet was a prosperous whaling port and the the blubber was processed on the island, also home to taverns and brothels. So this house had had another life, though we didn’t know exactly what kind of life that had been.

I first became aware of the house’s spectral resident one summer when I was in my teens. The rest of the family had gone on a shopping excursion while I stayed home with Doug, the son of friends who shared the house with us that summer. I was downstairs and he was upstairs. Or so I thought. He certainly made enough noise, walking back and forth up there—that is until he piled out of the car some time later with everyone else. Freaked out by the realization that I had not shared the house with my “Purple Haze” crazed acquaintance, but with a ghost of dubious origin, I also discovered that I wasn’t the only one to hear his footsteps. Mom had heard them too, and so had other family and friends. At least we all agreed, he—the weight of the tread was definitely masculine—wasn’t unfriendly. He wasn’t one way or another; he was simply there.

As an adult I met some people who also rented that house. They heard the ghost too.

The ghost at my husband’s family’s summerhouse was not as easy a presence. The old farmhouse in Hampton, New Hampshire, dated back two centuries. This ghost, whose presence was felt by all, rarely made itself manifest like the Cape house ghost. Yet, its company was much more oppressive. Lucky for me, it didn’t seem to haunt the living room and so I spent most of every visit there. When home alone, especially at night, I hated leaving that room. If I could, I never entered another room without switching on the lights first. But light was never enough to keep the shivers away. Even so, I comforted myself with the idea that at least I’d be able to see the haunt should it come for me. I have no idea why that was a comfort. My sister in-law told me that once with the house already closed up in preparation for their leave-taking, her family was outside packing the car. Inside the house they could hear someone going up the stairs over and over again.

So, with personal stories like these out there waiting to become the root of someone’s creative flight of fancy, aren’t writer’s offering up more great ghost stories? The only ones I can think of are The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James, and The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson. Peter Straub wrote the fairly shivery Ghost Story. Other than these, I haven’t read other great ones. The movie industry does better. “The Sixth Sense,” “Ghost Story,” and “The Others” are entertaining and VERY spokey.

Do I have this wrong? Are there great ghost stories out there that I have missed? It is a cold Sunday afternoon in January. I am home alone. It is the perfect time for a cup of tea and a good novel with a ghost at its center. Anyone have one to share?