Will Ludwigsen

I’ve loved the Weird Fiction Review site ever since it started, and now I’m lucky enough to appear there with an interview AND a story, “Remembrance is Something Like a House.”

Take a look! Adam Mills is an incisive interviewer, the Studs Terkel of genre fiction.

In the days leading up to the March 1st release of my collection In Search Of and Others, I’ll be sharing some of my idiosyncratic questions on the so-called “paranormal”…and their idiosyncratic answers.

Ghosts are my favorite paranormal phenomenon, so much so that I’m not even sure I’m up to the task of writing an appreciation of them.

Here’s my appreciation: “THEY’RE GHOSTS, THE GOSSIP OF THE DEAD! THEY’RE AWESOME!”

I have never seen a ghost and that fact really pisses me off. If I’m walking in the wilderness someday and I see Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster or a trio of gray aliens dry-humping a cow carcass, I’m going to fold my arms and say, “Really, universe? This is what you’ve got for me? Fuck you.” And I’ll walk away and never report it to anyone out of sheer petulant bitterness.

Hell, for all you know, that’s already happened.

Anyway, ghosts.

I’m pretty skeptical about heaven. In fact, I always have been. I once asked my Lutheran pastor grandfather what went on there and he said, “You live in total comfort and happiness, singing hymns to Jesus and praising His name forever and ever.” To which I replied, “That’s it?” He sputtered in a fury about how that was my final reward and my grandmother had to explain that a ten-year-old boy doesn’t want to spend eternity singing about Jesus.

Indeed I don’t. I do want a debriefing like I wrote about in the “In Search Of” story, but I don’t know that I want to hang out with ANYONE for all eternity.

But I don’t like the idea of my consciousness dissipating completely when I finally collapse into a puddle of my own juices someday, either. That’s one of the reasons I write, to haunt all you people forever.

That’s what ghosts are all about, right? The return of stories, imperfect and garbled by time, hazy at the edges, distorted by human transmission AND human reception? The question, of course, is who is transmitting and who is receiving.

Do you hear a story and haunt yourself? Or do the stories somehow stick to the places they happen?

I can think of no mechanism by which a place can “record” strong sensory impressions, but those are the only paranormal phenomena I’ve ever personally encountered. I have gotten bad feelings about places, leaving immediately under the weight of dread, only to find out later that my impression was justified.

Once, I passed a row of old houses nestled back among oak trees with long Spanish moss beards — a common sight in most Florida towns, not particularly redolent with significance. But when we got to the second or third house along the line, I saw a strange flash almost BEHIND my eyes, and there was a silhouette of a house that looked far different than the one that was standing there. It was narrower and more rickety-looking.

I screamed, of course, because that’s what you do. And my mother screamed. And my stepfather, driving, screamed. And my friend beside me in the back seat screamed. And we peeled away in a great surge of the engine and a spraying fishtail of gravel.

We compared notes and discovered that we’d all seen more or less the same silhouette. And after some research among the old-timers, careful not to reveal quite why I was asking, it turned out that yes, there was a history to that place. They’d been narrow shotgun houses once, and a murder had occurred in one of them.

Dunh dunh dunh!

Did that lot somehow absorb the great human passion and pain of that assault? It seems impossible.

Or did I perceive something very subtle, maybe the traces of an old foundation or the same melancholy atmosphere that might make someone more prone to murder in the first place? Did I assemble all of that in my brain in a fraction of a second and play myself a ghost story?

Either way, that’s amazing.

That’s what makes ghosts wondrous.

• If they “exist” as we commonly believe them, spirits or echoes or whatever, that’s an extraordinary sign of the universe’s sense of narrative.
• If they don’t “exist,” if we make them up from fragments and signs and sensory impressions, if we can tell ourselves these stories of great timeless human emotion in a flash behind the eyes…then that might even be better.

Ghosts by definition are the most human of paranormal phenomena. One way or another, on perception or reflection, we wish them into being and use them to tell ourselves stories.

In that way, we’re all ghosts.

In the days leading up to the March 1st release of my collection In Search Of and Others, I’ll be sharing some of my idiosyncratic questions on the so-called “paranormal”…and their idiosyncratic answers.

Disappeared on Investigation Discovery is probably my favorite show on television, but I have to admit that it doesn’t always scratch my itch for the truly mysterious.

Here’s my Disappeared drinking game.

• Oh, the guy got lost in the woods and died. Take a drink.
• Oh, the woman was killed and buried in a shallow grave. Take a drink.
• Huh. A dissociative fugue. Awesome! Take two drinks.
• Someone says, “She was so vivacious and full of life!” Take a drink.
• Someone says, “She would NEVER leave her children willingly like that.” Take a drink.
• Someone says, “Sometimes he just did that, went off for a few days to think things over. In the wilderness. All alone. Without telling anybody. That’s why it took us a few days to call the police.” Take a drink.
• An attractive but troubled teenager takes a Spring Break roadtrip with a vanload of meth-addicted serial killers and somehow ends up missing. Take a drink.
• An elderly man or woman with fifty-dollar bills spilling out of his/her pockets and enormous diamond-encrusted jewelry gets conned. Take a drink.
• Someone says, “Until I see a body, I’ll never believe she’s dead. It’s been fifteen years and they found her bloody shoes floating in the resevoir, but I hope she’s happy somewhere.” Take a drink.
• The police ping a cell phone. Take a drink.

Is it too much to ask people to go missing with a little more panache?

You’re driving with your significant other. It’s late at night and you’re a little drowsy, struggling to stay awake as mile after mile of yellow line slithers past your wheels. You’re having those time-dilating moments when you snap your head upright and wonder where the last ten minutes went. After one of those, you reach to put your hand on your lover’s leg but he or she is gone.

Come on, admit it: THAT is what we’re hoping to see on these TV shows.

Or you’re hiking with your family and Dad, eager as always to make the summit of the trail, lopes on ahead, waving everybody else on. You trade a sullen glance with Mom or your siblings, take a big pull from your water bottle, and finally stagger up the ridge where you last saw your old man. He’s not there. He’s not on the other side. You can see in all directions, but there’s no sign of him.

That’s what I always wanted from my books of missing people, but let’s face it: Jimmy Hoffa is embedded in concrete somewhere, Glenn Miller crashed in the Atlantic, and Amelia Earhart was gobbled up by those enormous scary spider crabs on Nikumaroro. The sad fact is that most missing people end up in the stomachs of bears or the basements of their angry lovers.

They DON’T end up shuffling through the secret hallways of reality, alas, at least not often enough.

When they do, we call them ghosts.