Ghostbusting

Early adventures in ghosthunting

My son’s fifth birthday was yesterday. I’ve been thinking and writing about childhood, about birthday parties, about my own dad and about fatherhood. And about ghosts.

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The Birthday

The parents had been telling us this would happen, but we didn't know if they were serious. It seemed so unlikely and odd: at the tenth birthday party of a boy I barely knew, there were Ghostbusters. Yes, the Ghostbusters. As the Ecto-1, the white vintage Cadillac ambulance vehicle from the Ghostbusters movies, pulled up into the driveway of the house all the kids rushed to the window. It was nineteen eighty something, probably.

At the public school I attended in Trenton, Ohio, some kids didn’t finish high school. And of the ones that did finish, only a handful went on to college and then fewer still went to law school or dentist school or whatever. They say is easier for a camel to to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. It is even harder for someone born in Trenton Ohio to end up in graduate school; that person’s parents would really have to squish ‘em down. My father, who was then the only attorney in the mostly-agricultural town, was hopeful that I too would one day go to college and maybe grad school. One of his solutions was to introduce me to the sons and daughters of the few doctors, lawyers, and other professionals in the area. These were kids that my dad had correctly assumed were destined to earn advanced degrees one day. And so, I occasionally found myself with these kids, although I often had trouble relating to them.

“They're here! The Ghostbusters are really here!” the kids shouted. But to my surprise, when four khaki-clad men triumphantly exited their vehicle Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd were nowhere to be found. I’d watched the two Ghostbusters movies with my dad and I’d memorized Bill Murray’s face. The adults told me that these ghostbusters who had arrived at the boy’s house were other ghostbusters, not the ones in the popular film.

“Maybe there are a lot of ghostbusters all around the country, just like there are a lot of Santa Claus' helpers at malls in December,” my mom suggested. As the ghostbusters showed off their Ectoblasters, I had nagging thoughts. If the men were truly ghostbusters why were they spending their time at this birthday party? Shouldn’t they be out dealing with the ghost problem? I suspected the men were not actual Ghostbusters but had been paid to pretend to be Ghostbusters or more accurately, they had been paid to pretend to be the other men — the actors — who had been paid to pretend to be Ghostbusters. Although I did enjoy the movie and especially that big marshmallow guy I thought there was something very off about this whole situation. Although I was still young I had somehow, already, regrettably developed a distrust of wealth, birthday parties, entertainment and a lot of other activities that should have been, well, fun.

This party prefigured the themed-celebrations of consumerism that are now commonplace at birthday parties of kids of this century. Among the middle and upper-class families I now often find myself spending time with, birthday parties are chaotic showcases of abundance. Every kid who attends a birthday party gets presents — whether it’s their birthday or not — and the walls are usually covered in authorized, hyper gender-specific Disney Frozen or Cars decor from Amazon.com. Remarkably, the Ghostbusters are still with us (although maybe this is not such a good thing given the critical reception of the recent movies). My own childhood birthday parties, by contrast, were relatively understated affairs.

My birthday parties consisted of my immediate family, my grandmother and my aunt. My sister, my dad and my aunt also had birthdays in September and August, so we just put four names on the cake (literally half of the party’s attendees), ate a ham and that was that. I didn’t really have any friends anyway so this autumnal ham cake combo event was great, actually. Side of green beans, thanks!

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to have fun with other kids my age. I was just so far inside the tunnel of my cranium that escaping my own thoughts didn’t often seem worth the trouble. I was usually planning some semi-secret project (still am right now as I write this in fact, a ham is included somehow).

At that surreal Ghostbusters party late 80’s I was thinking, watching, and it occurred to me that that nobody was actually taking the possibility of ghosts seriously. A few weeks later I decided to take matters into my own hands. Having convinced myself that the men at the birthday party had been charlatans but that there might be some sliver of truth to the idea that ghosts were among us, I set out to solve the Trenton Ohio ghost problem, if it existed, by myself.

Ghost hunting

“Don’t forget to take your library card,” my mom said as I flashed it and headed out the door. I rode my bike to the Trenton Library to start reading up on ghosts. The library itself may have been haunted, I considered, given the fact that it was within a small victorian house constructed by a blacksmith over a hundred years earlier. I rifled through the shelves until finding the ultimate guide to ghosts entitled World of the Unknown: GHOSTS. Although most of the book was devoted to general knowledge about the origin of ghosts around the world, a two-page spread labeled “Searching for the Truth: Ghosthunting” provided the practical overview I sought.

“Many people claim to have seen ghosts,” the text of the book began in my head which I read to myself with a grown male voice like the guy from the show Unsolved Mysteries, “but very few can offer any kind of proof.” After a few more minutes of reading I checked the book out, tucked it under my arm and rode my bike home.

Later that day I told my mom, “you can call it ghost hunting but psychic researcher is the technical term. Me and Tommy were talking and-”

“Tommy and I,” she corrected.

“Tommy and I were talking,” I continued, “at the pool the other day and we were thinking that maybe Dad’s office could be haunted.”

My mom was a speech pathologist for a local elementary school. One of her favorite evening pastimes was correcting grammar and pronunciation and double-negatives when I, or one of my sisters, misspoke. Still, I do not know if my grammar is correct most of the time and even this sentence is a run on, oh well.

“Enunciate,” she would say, slowly, gently, annunciating every syllable and consonant of the word enunciate. This sometimes seemed to have the effect of making us kids all mumble even more, but at least we understood what the word “enunciate” meant at an early age and we understood how to enunciate the word enunciate! And maybe, we started to understand the value in articulating your ideas clearly or at least attempting to.

This emphasis on language was due in part to the fact that we lived in Trenton. Before I was born my mom and dad had moved from Lexington, Kentucky, where people had a particular kind of southern drawl, to Trenton, Ohio where people had an even stronger kind of drawl that was sometimes described as hillbilly, but usually in hushed tones. That my sisters and I would grow up to be hillbillies with hillbilly accents was something my parents were actively trying to avoid and they told us as much, although the fate didn’t seem all that bad to us. Still, I had developed a sense that some words sounded smarter than other words, and that I should pick the smart ones and avoid words like “ain’t” when possible (incidentally, J. D. Vance, who turned himself into the most famous non-hillbilly from the area, doesn’t say ain’t either, although it seems “ya’ll” has been redeemed).

“Alright then, I’ll take you down to your dad’s office tomorrow and you can look for ghosts,” my mom said. My mom was always saying yes to things which was both weird and great. She had agreed to let me do some ghost hunting at my father’s office building. The building was a big white house. It was on the same street as the library, and it was just as old. I figured all the victorian buildings on State Street must be haunted given their age and the fact that they had windows that looked like scary eyes. Furthermore, my mom had told me about the elderly couple that had been living upstairs just before my dad bought the building and turned it into his office. At least one of those old people had died there. The office still looked like a house, and when I was upstairs I often thought of that old couple I’d never met.

“How did they die, mom?” I liked to ask.

“Well Mr. Roberts passed away in his sleep,” my mom said, “when his heart stopped working. They got old. That’s just what happens, sometimes people get too old.”

I’d read in World of the Unknown: GHOSTS that ghosts tended to linger in places only if they had unfinished business on earth. I imagined that perhaps, one of the deceased old people hadn’t had a chance to say goodbye to their grandkids. That night, so excited about the prospect of collecting evidence of the ghosts, I had trouble sleeping. I thought about my own grandparents, who had both died before I was born. I figured a lot of grandpa ghosts might be hanging around in old houses trying to meet me and all the other unknown but likely extremely cool grandkids they had missed out on.

The next morning, when my mom and I arrived at my dad's building we I went through the backdoor into the kitchen so as not to disturb my dad in case he was meeting with a client. My mom and I walked up the back staircase to the upstairs of the building into one of the old bedrooms which was then decorated only with a simple desk and a typewriter. That bedroom, the one where Mr. Roberts had died, contained a door beyond which was an extremely narrow flight of steep wooden stairs that led up to the attic. The whole situation screamed ghosts.

“Go on up. I’ll wait downstairs,” my mom said to me as she went back down to the first floor. I opened the door and started up.

With each creaky step up it became hotter and hotter until I reached the attic. There, an oven-like heat helped hold the intense smell of wood and dust and age. Sunlight stretched itself through the small windows into parallelograms on the floor. I had brought a few things with me including a notepad and some flour, which I sprinkled around the floor in order to help preserve any future footsteps of ghosts — or humans pretending to be ghosts. After a while, I came back down and reported to my mom my progress.

A few days passed and I rode my bike back to the office this time by myself. I went through the kitchen again, up the stairs and up into the attic but found no footprints in the powder. The following day I went back yet again and this time entered the front door of the building. Dad’s assistant was out that day, so I continued over next to the room where my Dad’s office was. I could hear him talking about a case behind a big wooden sliding door. I poked my head in and he was on the phone facing his prized framed Abe Lincoln portrait print. My dad held his index finger up as if to say give me a minute.

“I know, Nancy. I am so sorry I have just been so busy” he told the person on the other end of the phone. “Did you contact the store personally?” After a pause, he continued, “I understand. Do you still want me to pursue it or would you rather come down here to the office and kick me in the bazongas?” By the end of the call, the woman on the other end of the phone was laughing so hard I could hear her. “Alright. I’ll call them today” he said and finally, “Thanks, you too,” before hanging up the phone and looking over at me with his too-big eyes and nose.

“Hey Joe you know you’re not supposed to come in here when I’m working,” he said gently.

“I know dad, sorry,” I said.

“It’s alright. What’s going on?”

“I am, um, looking for ghosts upstairs.”

“Oh that’s right!” He said, encouragingly. Dad tolerated me poking around his workplace occasionally, especially if I seemed to be involved, however impulsively or imperfectly, in some kind of empirical research. He understood and respected the connection between creativity and research, occasionally scribbling “Artist/Research Scientist” on envelopes containing a letters to me. “Well how’s it going?” He asked.

“Not great, I don’t think,” I told him. “Have you seen or heard anything?”

“I don’t think so” he said, then after a pause continued “Wait as sec—I did encounter a white figure this morning. She looked to be about thirty-five years old and was shrieking at me about spending too much time at the office,” he said waiting for me to smile before finishing “no wait, I think that was just your mom.”

“Alright, thanks,” I said with a laugh. “I’m going to go back up to the attic, okay?”

“Okay,” he said, looking at his watch. “Listen, I have a meeting in just a few minutes so when you’re done you can leave through the back.”

“Okay,” I said. I went back up to the attic for a third time. I had carried around a yellow notebook I had bought specifically for the purpose of recording ghost encounters. But I found no ghost footprints to record, not in the flour nor in the dust that had previously blanketed the wooden floor. Over the course of multiple solo excursions up to the attic I had heard nothing. Nor did I collect any reports of ghosts from my father who had been engrossed all week in his own kind of work downstairs. My dad’s assistant had no ghost sightings to report either nor did anyone else who came in or out of the building. If ghosts didn’t exist in that old building, I thought, ghosts probably did not exist at all. Except in the Ghostbuster movies.

* * *

A few years later I finally did see a ghost but it was in my own house, an unremarkable midcentury ranch-style home. The day after my dad died I came around a corner into the living room and I saw him sitting in the Lazy-Boy chair as he often did, scribbling away on a yellow legal pad. I fell to the floor and cried, and when I looked up he was gone.