Ghosts
We are bearing down on Halloween here in New England. There are some great stories from campus, about a haunted suite in one of the curious old buildings.
I’ll give you the short of it; which is to say that a sad girl killed herself there and never left. The college is a small and intimate place, a women’s school in the way that is powerfully good, and yet there is such a concentration of womanhood that it should not be unexpected that there was a powerful spirit there.
Space was at a premium at the college. The daughter of a President offered to stay in the suite, just to prove that the stories were nonsense.
She left before the night was done, long before morning, shouting “Close it up!”
When I looked up at the quaint old brick structure, sure enough, even the windows were blacked out with paint.
Curious. My sister had ghosts here, too. A house she rented near bold little Hampshire College had an unsettled spirit, given to the poltergeist side of the spirit house.
The dead are everywhere here in this part of the blue-est county in the red-est portion of a very Blue state. They take their Halloweens seriously up here, every house with some decorations of pumpkins or skeletons on the lawns. and maybe it is because the veil that hangs between the living and the dead is thinner than elsewhere.
The encampments of the dead are at the side of each road, at old meeting houses, near places where a meeting hour might have stood, in the midst of subdivisions and in the second growth trees that once had been farms.
They seem comfortable, and so must I be, though my concern has now transitioned from ensuring that it was a good visit to whether or not I can get home.
It looked a little problematic last night, but this morning dawns crisp and clearly on the winter side of the demarcation of Fall.
What sounded like thunder could just have been the buffet of the wind against the structure.
The rain sheeted against the window of the Hilton Garden complex, nestled snuggly between the Pizza Uno and the Basketball Hall of Fame.
The cheery orange ball in the sky above the great silver dome clearly emits optimism. It is a basktball, not a pumpkin.
I think the train will run on time, or close to it, and I will be able to ponder the Blue-ness and the ghosts from a safe distance later today.
Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com