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Colin Dickey | Longreads | October 26, 2023 | 15 minutes (4,149 words)

Let me tell you a ghost story.

My street—East 21st Street in Brooklyn, on the border of Flatbush and Ditmas Park—is filled with ghosts. A block up from me, in late 2020, there began to appear a series of strange signs in the Japanese elms that line the street. They were made from tile of marble, 6 by 18 inches, strung around the limbs of the trees that lined the block. Someone had used a Dremel to carve words and pictures on them. One in white marble read simply, COVID took you. May l❤️ve keep you forever. In the corner, a small heart with the street name, 21st, superimposed on it. Another, in blue marble, had the faces of three middle-aged Black men, and read For the ones we lost, the two first. A third, in black, was hung vertically; on it, written in cursive: For the stolen ❤️s of COVID, for the ❤️s stolen by COVID of Two First, Amen. 

I walked by these memorials several times a day; I didn’t always need to, but I realized at some point I was altering my path to see them. They haunted me, in the sense that we often mean that word. “Haunted” as in a haunting melody, a haunting story—a thing that you cannot stop thinking about, that follows you like a ghost through your waking hours. Haunting like Hamlet’s father, reminding you what’s left undone, haunting like a vague blur, a noise or a whispered word, reminding you that the borders between us are porous, sometimes nonexistent. I saw the faces Dremeled into the marble—who were they? What stories did they leave behind?

By that point, I’d been thinking about ghosts, more or less nonstop, for months. In February of that year, I had been contacted by a magazine editor preparing a big summer issue on movies about New York City; would I, she inquired, be interested in writing about Ghost and Ghostbusters? I jumped at the assignment and the opportunity to write once more about this city I love and what haunts it. So I started writing about these two films. I wrote about them as the news each day got stranger and stranger, I wrote about them as a friend predicted “summer is going to be canceled,” I wrote about them as the city emptied out. I wrote about them after the magazine shelved its summer movie issue, I wrote about them after the editor stopped returning my emails. I kept writing; I wrote about them in cafés that were almost entirely empty, and I wrote about them at home when I realized it was no longer safe to write in cafés.

The usual idea behind a ghost is that they’re someone you shouldn’t normally see, someone who, due to some cosmic accident or injustice left unaddressed, has become visible again. The same, I understood, came to be true of pandemics: they are invisible until they suddenly become visible. The 1918 Spanish Flu had been more or less forgotten by history, a mere footnote to World War I, until we had our own pandemic and suddenly we couldn’t stop seeing the Spanish Flu everywhere. And watching these movies about ghosts as a new and terrifying reality loomed, I realized there were things there all along that I’d never noticed, that had, all at once, become all I could see.

So much lurks in the shadows of Jerry Zucker’s 1990 film, Ghost. At first, there is only Patrick Swayze’s character, Sam Wheat. The film’s title, after all, is singular. It’s hard not to root for him: he’s likable, successful, and has just started a promising ceramics internship before he’s tragically murdered by a hitman hired by his scheming business partner Carl Bruner. Once it’s clear his girlfriend (Demi Moore’s Molly) is also in danger, he enlists Whoopi Goldberg’s huckster psychic, Oda Mae Brown, to help save her from murderous  Carl. 

Sam sees himself as uniquely important. At first, he’s the only one Oda Mae can see, but after he unlocks her “gift,” she’s beset by ghosts, all trying to reach loved ones. (At one point she barks at him, “Did you tell every spook in the world you met about me? I got spooks from Jersey coming in here.”) But Sam can’t see beyond his own problems, even in death, and forces her to shoo these other souls (almost all of whom are Black or Latino) so she can focus on his problems. 

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In those early, terrible days, it became harder and harder not to see what Oda Mae saw, or forget these other ghosts as simply extras in Sam’s story. Who were they? What were their stories? We never truly know. The only other ghost whose story we get is Vincent Schiavelli’s subway ghost, who tells Sam, “Yeah someone pushed me. . . . What, you don’t believe me? You think I fell? You think I jumped? Well fuck you! It wasn’t my time! I wasn’t supposed to go! I’m not supposed to be here!” Beyond that, though, all we’re left with is the tantalizing idea of a city of ghosts, none of whom will get a chance to tell their stories.

In addition to the spirits that make brief cameos in Ghost are still others, even more obscured but no less vital. Sam Wheat, after all, is not the first to haunt 104 Prince Street, the loft he and Molly share at the beginning of the movie. In the film’s opening credits, a camera pans through the dusty, as-yet-undiscovered attic space: soft light catches dust in the air as we see dress forms and covered furniture, draped with sheets to suggest ghosts waiting to be found. Who might they be?

By 1990, the year the film was released, it was clear who these spectral traces belonged to—even if moviegoing audiences did not want to name them outright. A block from Sam and Molly’s fabulous loft is the former home of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art. During the AIDS pandemic of the ’80s, Charles Leslie and Fritz Lohman worked tirelessly to rescue and safeguard LGBTQ art—including, likely, the same detritus that Molly and Sam toss out to make way for her own sculpture. Indeed, clearing SoHo of its longtime gay population lurks in the background of Ghost like a ghost haunting Manhattan. As Sarah Schulman writes in The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Generation, “The process of replacement was so mechanical I could literally sit on my stoop and watch it unfurl. . . .Many died in their apartments. It was normal to hear that someone we knew had died and that their belongings were thrown out on the street. I remember once seeing the cartons of a lifetime collection of playbills in a dumpster in front of a tenement and I knew that it meant that another gay man had died of AIDS, his belongings dumped into the gutter.” You can watch Ghost now and feel this presence, even if it’s never named as such—how did Sam and Molly luck into such a cavernous loft in SoHo, its previous owner apparently vanishing, leaving a lifetime of possessions still lingering in the attic?

In 1990, though, no one wanted to think about this, especially not in an Oscar-winning major motion picture. If these ghosts are referenced at all, it’s as a joke. In an early scene, Sam and Carl do a routine in a crowded elevator: Carl begins coughing (visibly not covering his mouth), and complains to Sam about some mysterious but highly contagious illness that’s affected his penis. AIDS isn’t named outright, but it’s clear from the horrified looks of the others in the elevator what they’re afraid of catching—all to the delight of Sam and Carl as they exit the elevator and laugh their way down the hall.

It’s just a joke, but it became hard to unsee, particularly as I thought more and more about uncovered coughs, about social distancing, about the proximity to illness, about the dead left behind who would go uncounted and un-remembered.

Lucy Sante notes in Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York that the “ghosts of Manhattan are not the spirits of the propertied classes.” Rather, “New York’s ghosts are the unresting souls of the poor, the marginal, the dispossessed, the depraved, the defective, the recalcitrant. They are the guardian spirits of the urban wilderness in which they lived and died. Unrecognized by the history that is common knowledge, they push invisibly behind it to erect their memorials in the collective unconscious.” To watch any ghost story set in a city like New York requires this kind of sensitivity, an awareness that every building is haunted, and that these hauntings happen in layers: as much as each generation tries to wipe out the traces of those who’ve come before, those memories are always there. Ghost is a story about haunting that’s haunted by a pandemic just out of sight—and to watch it as the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded was to be reminded that cities have always been made and unmade by their plagues and epidemics, and it will always fall to the spirits to tell the whole story.

Ghost stories always used to work like this: the ghost lingered because something was left undone, or because the living forgot something or someone that should not have been forgotten. Ghost is atypical in this regard; it follows the same track as A Christmas Carol, Lewis Allen’s 1944 classic The Uninvited, and the 1980 George C. Scott vehicle The Changeling. These stories have their moments of terror, but they’re ultimately comforting stories about making the past whole. A justice is rectified, a wrong avenged, a restless spirit comforted at last. The ghost story ensures that even if one doesn’t have a satisfying conclusion in life, there may yet be narrative resolution waiting after death.

This works well for a single ghost, but what about a city? How to make each and every one of these stories whole? What do we do when there are whole cities full of ghosts, each one with their own unique story to tell, each one with something left undone? There is so much left undone when it comes to the dead. They bustle and jostle, they howl and they carouse and they interrupt and demand your attention. They never sleep, the dead. How to imagine the work of Oda Mae, beset with spooks, each with their own unfinished narrative, needing a slow and careful expiation to make the past whole so they can rest? 

One death is a tragedy, but as the bodies pile up, the ghosts and their stories become a problem to be dealt with en masse rather than one at a time. Ghost is rare as a New York City movie about a haunting that doesn’t stress exorcism, since usually ghosts are evicted against their will, like so many poor, queer, black, and brown tenants, their presence erased and their homes disinfected. It’s perhaps why the city’s most famous ghost story focuses not on ghosts like Sam but on the janitors sent to clean them out: 1984’s Ghostbusters.

Ghostbusters is the perfect fairytale of New York: a libertarian fantasy from the Reagan ’80s where the main villain is an EPA official and the all-powerful mayor has to turn to ordinary working Joes to save the city. (And after the bumbling government official shuts down the containment grid and unleashes these imprisoned spirits back into the air above Manhattan, you’re reminded that this, too, is a story about an airborne plague threatening to wipe out the city.) Their iconic coveralls are meant to remind us that the dead of New York are nothing more than pests to be exterminated. The fledgling start-up gets its start ridding the upscale Sedgewick Hotel of its iconic green ghost (later named “Slimer”), and much of their clientele appears to be the affluent, as they cleanse Central Park West condos. The moral of Ivan Reitman’s blockbuster is that the best thing for the city is to let unregulated small businesses wreak havoc and extort payments, mafia-style. (Who are the Ghostbusters, but a protection racket? After all, when the Sedgewick Hotel manager balks at the exorbitant fee, Bill Murray’s Venkman offers to release the ghost back in the now-destroyed ballroom.)

As befitting pests and vermin, hardly any of the ghosts in the Ghostbusters franchise get a backstory; they are nameless squatters and vagrants, marginal figures to be vacuumed up and put in deep storage. Who, for example, was this green gluttonous ghost in their previous life? Presumably someone with a soul, with a family, with a place in New York’s history? Like Patrick Swayze, someone capable of feeling love and longing even in the afterlife, someone with regrets and rage and confusion—someone who deserved an end more dignified than being trapped in a box by three fools. It feels absurd to try to empathize with this gross green thing, but why not? Ghosts were people, too. 

Our two options, it seems: the individual drama or the infestation. The solitary tragedy, the individual whose life we rescue from oblivion. Or: the mass to be removed, as quickly as possible. Ever since February 2020, as I’ve revisited these two movies a dozen times, I’ve asked myself in a hundred different ways: is there any way to write about death that is not as a single tragedy or as a mass cleanup operation? I care about ghost stories because I believe in them another possibility for storytelling, for understanding the past, and for processing grief. The ghost, perhaps, need not be exterminated or expiated. The ghost may not be a problem to solve. The ghost might be merely a gift.

Sam Wheat’s ghost is the kind Hollywood prefers: translucent and a little gauzy, but with a definite shape, features, and personality. They’re easy to visualize and demonstrate, and this form allows a star like Swayze to continue to be on-screen without being disfigured in some way. But as paranormal investigators (along with anyone else who’s ever reported an experience with the supernatural) will tell you, such a manifestation is exceedingly rare in the world of ghost hunting. What people describe instead again and again are invariably sounds, words, maybe a blur of color. Presence without shape. The ghost is disembodied: it does not have discrete form. It is not singular. 

In Ghost and Ghostbusters, the city and its multitudes are just the backdrop from which the narrow few protagonists emerge. But the reason I’m drawn to ghost stories is precisely because by its very nature the ghost blurs the edges of the individual. It flickers. It is and is not any kind of identity. It is and is not the subject of its own story. There’s possibility there.

To say I neither believe in ghosts nor fully embrace skepticism is also to say that I no longer believe that each of us is a discrete entity unto ourselves. The boundaries that separate you and I are porous, our lives not entirely our own. There is a line in John Berger’s 1972 novel G. that’s used as an epigraph in Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion, and again in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. In Berger’s G., the Casanova-esque protagonist is in the Alps as a friend attempts to pilot the first solo flight over the mountain range, but G is hardly paying attention, instead attempting to seduce a housecleaner. In Berger’s description of the seduction comes this line: “Never again will a single story be told as if it is the only one.”

I found the line first in Ondaatje’s novel, then traced it back to Berger, only to see it reappear in Roy’s when I read it after it won the 1997 Booker Prize. All three novels move between characters as they traverse past and present, reminding you that you can never tell the story of a single life without also telling the stories of all the lives that intersect. 

But ever since late winter 2020, whenever I read a story of a single individual in a novel or an essay or a news report, all I can think about are the ghosts at the margins, those begging  to speak. Every story of a single person is already embedded in a larger story, one where the writer has decided—consciously or not—to reveal or hide those other layers. It’s still the case, of course, that writers will attempt to tell a single story as though it is the only one. But having lived in this pandemic, I now see how impossible it is to read a single story as though it were the only one. Our duty these days is to enter the world of story aware of the ghosts in the background, to always be seeking their stories as well, coaxing them out.

More and more, to write solely about oneself these days has begun to feel to me like Sam Wheat bypassing the other ghosts in Oda Mae’s waiting room. A “post” pandemic means going back to our old ways when we could imagine ourselves as discrete individuals. But we are never going back; our lives are too interlaced now. Surely, by now, there are other ways to tell stories, other ways to acknowledge the other souls in the room alongside you and me, writer and reader, ghost and medium?

I went back, day after day, to the block where the trees were strung with memorials. The white one, which reads COVID took you. May l❤️ve keep you forever, called to me, demanding to be witnessed again and again. A sentiment so simple, and yet it ached with pain and longing and a story that I did not know, could not know. The first time I saw it, I broke in two. I stood there on the sidewalk and started to cry, crying for all that loss, all the grief from the entire year spilling out of me. In ways I still can’t put into words, it changed me, changed how I saw the city, changed how I saw those years. Not a day went by when I didn’t think of those signs, and the stories—unknown to me—behind them. This is what I mean by haunted. This is what I mean by a ghost story.

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And then, in early 2023, I was walking home one night and discovered to my horror that the white sign had been split in half, its two marble halves dangling from the wire that bound it to the tree. It was hard to imagine such an act—to imagine vandals so unthinking, so malicious, that they would destroy such a thing. Perhaps to console myself, I imagined it was some sort of horrible accident, that someone had backed up against it, or perhaps a fight where someone had been thrown against the tree. These objects were sacred. I couldn’t imagine anyone doing such a thing on purpose.

The blue one came down not long after. I don’t know if it was also broken, or if its creator feared for its safety. The vertical one remained; it would be months before I would learn why. 

How will we ever be the same again? To treat a death in isolation, to treat a story as though it is the only one—these are choices. They are forms of active denial, active forgetting, active erasure. You cannot tell a narrative of those years—of these years—as a single story, as a personal narrative of an individual. Our lives have always been intertwined, but “how to live?” is no longer a question that one can answer solely for oneself.

As the world tries to move on from a pandemic that has left us all scarred and traumatized, you can expect more ghost stories, because they’re one of the few available modes we have for dealing with the unresolved. Expect a language that allows us to see grief as a fleeting shadow out of the corner of one’s eye, there and beckoning, waiting for us to be ready. But beware the sleight of hand that would use a ghost to tell a single story, a homogenized or sanitized version, a discrete narrative. 

It was sometime in the summer of 2023 that I saw the fourth sign—not on a tree, but on the stoop of a brownstone on the same block. A larger slab, but the same carved sentiment: For the ❤️s stolen by COVID-19 of the Two-First. Leaning on the steps, nearly obscured by a garden in full bloom. Suddenly, it felt like I had the key to it all. An address, perhaps the artist behind the signs I’d come to know so well. On a late summer day, I happened by while the building’s occupants were out front, gathering herbs from their garden to give to a neighbor who was standing on the street with a granny cart. I asked them—their names were Emily and Andy—if they were the ones who’d made the signs that were hung from the trees.

“No,” Emily told me. But they knew who made them. Amber had lived in one of the apartment buildings on the block but had since moved to California. The mosque on the corner, they explained, was undergoing a renovation when the pandemic halted construction. That was where the marble tiles had come from: discarded building materials. Amber had taken a few of them and carved the memorials, and then hung them on the trees. 

“This block alone lost 13 people to COVID that first summer,” Andy told me. “And all while people on the television were saying it was made up.” One woman, he said, pointing to a house near the end of the block, survived both World Trade Center attacks, and then died of COVID, her first year into retirement.

He kept on gathering parsley while his neighbor waited patiently, happy to talk but focused on this act of generosity. Emily was picking spinach for a friend; she offered to let me have some as well, anytime I wanted to pick the leaves I was welcome. Our conversation was punctuated by the matter at hand: “Do you want some mint as well?” he asked the woman on the street, who nodded. Emily explained that the sign on their own stoop was not Amber’s work; Emily had made it herself, inspired, a way of keeping the story going, a way of keeping the ghosts alive.

I felt sheepish interrupting them at their work, this act of care for the living that is just as vital as the care we offer the dead, so I left shortly thereafter. But at the end of our conversation, Andy explained to me how the memorials had broken. It hadn’t been vandals as I’d feared, or even an accident. When they’d been hung around the tree limbs, Amber had bound them tightly with wire. But it had been over two years—the trees had grown, slowly, steadily, stretching the thick wire until something had to give, and the marble broke in half. The one hung vertically stayed only because the wire was looser and there was less tension on the brittle marble. What I’d thought was carelessness, or desecration, had been instead the stubborn reality of life going on, even at the expense of our memorials to the past. When I went back to the trees the next day, I saw how thoroughly the limbs had grown around the wire, still there—a vestigial remnant now bound inextricably to this living, growing thing. There may come a time when no one knows the story of that wire, how it got there, what it once held. But it will remain there nonetheless, a presence without a shape.

A slender thread—thin and sharp as a steel wire—connects each of us to these lives we lost, people we don’t know, will never know, but who stay with us every day. It connects you to the ghosts all around us, the ones that remind you that you are not singular, that you are not just the protagonist in your own story, that your own story is a part of a million other stories. That’s what makes a city a city—it’s that slender thread that holds us, the living and the dead, holding us even after we break.

The slender thread that reminds us that never again will a single story be read as though it were the only one.

Colin Dickey is the author of five books of nonfiction, including Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places, and, most recently, Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy.

Editor: Krista Stevens
Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

The spooky season is officially upon us. If you’re looking for reading recommendations to get you in the mood, we’ve compiled some of our favorite Longreads pieces below. Consider Lesley Finn’s “Final Girl, Terrible Place,” a sharp essay on horror films, the male gaze on the female body, and the American patriarchy. Dive into Jeanna Kadlec’s commentary on the witch/mother archetype in the Maleficent films, which is part of her Deconstructing Disney series. Or try “The Corpse Rider,” Colin Dickey’s piece about Lafcadio Hearn, the famous chronicler of Japanese culture, including its ghost stories and folk tales.

We’ve also gathered editors’ picks we’ve highlighted over the past few years about haunted houses, the ghosts of history and in our own lives, famous fictional monsters, and other monsters and figures of evil on our screens—and in our bedrooms.

They thought it best to leave town for a bit, and they asked Haley where she wanted to go. Her favorite thing she had ever seen in her short life was the Gateway Arch, which they’d visited on a family vacation, so they decided to take a short trip to St. Louis. During the drive up, Haley told them for the first time—told anyone for the first time—about her “imaginary friend,” Alecia.

From the moment Alecia first appeared in the story, Haley insisted on that slightly unorthodox spelling, although she did not yet perfectly know how to read. She also insisted on other specific details. Alecia was four years old. She had long, dark hair tied in pigtails. She wore a red shirt with purple sleeves, bell-bottom pants, and white sneakers. She had a flashlight. She guided Haley to the river.

“I never had imaginary friends before this experience,” Haley told me, “and I never had any after. And I never saw this particular imaginary friend again.” She did not think at any time that Alecia was a real child. “I was fully aware that this was a non-corporeal being that was with me. And she was a little girl, and we had conversations, we told stories, we played patty-cake, and she was just a very comforting presence. But I knew I was alone.” The hallucinations started later, after she’d already made it to the river. Alecia was not a vision of this sort. “I one hundred percent did not think there was another child with me. I knew, physically, I was alone.” But she also says that Alecia guided her to the river, which she didn’t know was there.

There is a phenomenon called third man syndrome, or third man factor: when some sort of unseen or incorporeal conscious presence seems to accompany people—often a person alone—going through a long, difficult, and frightening experience they do not know they will survive. It is not well understood. It may be some sort of emergency coping mechanism. It was most famously experienced by Sir Ernest Shackleton during one of his expeditions to the Antarctic; the mountaineer Reinhold Messner has also reported experiencing the phenomenon, as have the explorers Peter Hillary and Ann Bancroft. “During that long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia,” Shackleton wrote in his 1919 memoir, South, “it seemed to me often that we were four, not three.”

Mum fled Vietnam and came to the UK as a refugee a few years after the end of the war, along with her parents and siblings. They left almost everything behind except for the ghosts, and the language they spoke to them in. These were both the ghosts they had carried from birth — ancestors, old gods, the cursed spirits from stories — and the ghosts that rose from the war. The new ghosts were shapeshifters, most visible at night. Sometimes, they wore the faces of the soldiers who raided family homes for hidden gold and other valuables. Sometimes, they appeared as the old men who were taken away to re-education camps, or young girls after weeks of eating too little.

I wonder how Mum learned to carry such hunger, whether it felt like she too was turning into a ghost. I’ve never known how to fill the spaces that still exist inside her. All I can do is let her watch me eat.

I’d believed for years the presence haunting our lives was a specter dwelling in the yard. But this isn’t a ghost story. The abjection my mother endured was organized and funded by the city—from the police officers, to the judges, to the reporters who circled our house, hungry to add to their narratives. Tamara’s humiliation and punishment were profitable and entertaining. It was made possible by structures and a paradigm of surveillance fortified by antiblackness, which claimed her life—as an ex-wife, an addict, a prisoner, a main character, my mother. None of these were even stable identities for her to claim.

So ghosts were an established fact of my life when I was growing up, maybe the only real religious certainty we inherited. My grandmother—also a churchgoing Christian—accepted their existence with the same serene passivity with which she did everything. My mother claims to have seen a few. I have not. I used to think I’d never see a ghost because I wanted it too much, as though the spirits of dead people behaved like an underwritten man from an early season of Sex and the City. I’d even lived after college in a converted brownstone that was widely considered to be haunted—former tenants had seen apparitions and my roommate had had unsettling experiences with slamming pocket doors and rogue electronics. I never felt anything at all. But my faith is solid.

Deeper inland from Casey, the East Antarctic ice sheet rests mostly undisturbed, except for a few international installations. Drip. Locked up within the sheet is “tens of meters” of sea-level rise, according to Matt King, an ice sheet scientist at the University of Tasmania. If the whole thing were to melt, the results would be disastrous. Drip. Some of the world’s most famous cities would drown. Drip. There’s no danger of that happening anytime soon, but the East Antarctic ice sheet has received far less attention than the West. We’re only just beginning to find out how vulnerable it might be. There remain many “unknown unknowns,” King says. Drip. 

As I listen to the steady melt, my mind wanders back to the “This is fine” dog, to the scorched air of a burning country. I pull my hood over my forehead, zip my jacket up over my chin and drift off.

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Colin Dickey | Longreads | October 2019 | 14 minutes (3,729 words)

“The daimyō’s wife was dying, and knew that she was dying.” So begins Lafcadio Hearn’s uneasy and unsettling ghost story, “Ingwa-Banashi,” gathered first in his 1899 collection, In Ghostly Japan, and republished this year in a new Penguin Classics anthology edited by Paul Murray. As the daimyō explains to his wife that she is dying and preparing to leave “this burning-house of the world,” he offers her any final rites she may request. She asks him to summon one of his concubines, the nineteen year-old Yukiko, whom, she reminds him, she loves like a sister.

Yukiko arrives, and the dying woman tells her that one day she will rise in rank and be made the honored wife of the daimyō, a fortune that the low-born Yukiko cannot believe. As her last request, the daimyō’s wife asks Yukiko to carry her out to the courtyard to see a cherry tree in bloom — obligingly, Yukiko lowers her back and allows the old woman to wrap her arms around her, to carry her. Once she has grasped hold of Yukiko, though, the old woman laughs, clutches tight, and, with her dying breath tells Yukiko: “I have my wish for the cherry-bloom — but not the cherry-bloom of the garden! … I could not die before I got my wish. Now I have it! — oh, what a delight!”

Yukiko soon discovers that the woman’s corpse has somehow attached itself to her own body; doctors cannot pry it loose for fear of tearing Yukiko’s skin. They ultimately decide to cut it free, leaving only the corpse’s hands, which are cemented fast to young Yukiko’s breasts. “Withered and bloodless though they seemed, those hands were not dead. At intervals they would stir — stealthily, like great-grey spiders. And nightly thereafter — beginning always at the Hour of the Ox — they would clutch and compress and torture. Only at the Hour of the Tiger the pain would cease.”

“Ingwa-Banashi” is one of Hearn’s stranger tales, something that sticks with the reader long after you’ve put it down, fusing to your memory like a disembodied hand. It isn’t just the horrific state Yukiko is left in; it’s the baffling lack of any real reason offered. What accounts for Yukiko’s fate? She is a concubine, to be sure, but just one of many, and nothing in her personality singles her out for such treatment, nor does the story offer anything incriminating about her that might justify this monstrous calamity.

Hearn offers this in a footnote: “Ingwa is a Buddhist term for evil karma, or the evil consequences of faults committed in a former state of existence. Perhaps the curious title of the narrative is best explained by the Buddhist teaching that the dead have power to injure the living only in consequence of evil actions committed by their victims in some former life.” Whatever Yukiko’s crimes, they predate this life, and lie outside the borders of this short narrative. Nonetheless, she is bound to them and by them.

*

The stories in this new Penguin anthology (titled Japanese Ghost Stories) are why Hearn (who also went by the name Koizumi Yakumo) continues to have a lasting legacy in both America and in his adopted homeland, Japan. As Zack Davisson, author of Yurei: The Japanese Ghost, wrote, “When talking about yurei, all roads eventually lead to Lafcadio Hearn. In Japan, the two are almost synonymous. Say ‘yurei’ to a Japanese person, and the response is almost always ‘Lafcadio Hearn.’ Got to a bookstore in Japan, and ask the clerk for a book about yurei, and the first thing put into your hand will almost always be a copy of Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things. Any discussion of the history and cultural impact of Japanese ghosts would be incomplete without understanding the man who so diligently collected and published the mysterious legends with which he found himself surrounded.” As Davisson explained to me over email, “Hearn was instrumental in collecting and preserving Japanese folklore at a time when the Japanese government was actively attempting to eradicate superstition from the common people in favor of the new tools of science and industry.” Gathering up scraps and half-remembered tales, he forged them into an enduring corpus of eerie stories that have continue to linger.

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Throughout his writing, Lafcadio Hearn was fascinated by a recurring sense that we are but one step away from a massive precipice, and that we never know truly when we might misstep. In his earliest journalism, which made him famous and notorious, he focused on the underbelly of city life, the marginal spaces that were being suppressed by cities desperate to appear modern and forward-looking — it was here that Hearn sought out the secret gears of urban life, and brought them forth for his readers. Civilization, Hearn understood, could not exist without its uncivilized double, its underbelly that kept the wheels or progress in motion. And Hearn set out to find and write about those places where the veil between these two worlds was the thinnest.

Born in Greece and raised in Ireland, Patrick Lafcadio Hearn came to the United States in 1869, when he was nineteen years old. Penniless, his left eye disfigured from a teenage accident, it was clear, as one friend later put it, “that Fortune and he were scarce on nodding terms.” But his dogged work ethic and the curious charm of his writing style eventually got him a job at the Cincinnati Enquirer, one of the city’s two biggest newspapers. Starting with literary reviews, Hearn quickly caught the attention of the public after a deeply reported story that detailed a shocking murder in the tannery district, a gruesome a lurid mystery in a dingy part of town that most of the Enquirer’s readers had no real notion of. Catapulting to fame on the strength of this piece, he was given more or less carte blanche to write about whatever captured his one good eye.

With a wide and varied curiosity, he sought out the butchers, undertakers and spiritual mediums of the city, reporting on the strange comings and goings of a city bursting at the seams. Ultimately fired from the Enquirer for marrying a biracial woman, he found a job with a rival paper, but eventually headed south to New Orleans, where he remade himself once again. He spent another ten years as a journalist there (interviewing famed Voodoo queen Marie Laveau, among other subjects), before heading to Martinique for a spell and churning out two novels, Chita and Youma.

Throughout it all, he was never far from his fascination with the supernatural. Terrified of ghosts as a child, alone at night in his bedroom he would become convinced ghosts were reaching out for him in the dark. He would scream ferociously until an adult would come to check on him, a disturbance that inevitably resulted in being whipped. But, as Hearn would later recall, “the fear of ghosts was greater than the fear of whippings — because I could see the ghosts.” This sense of being surrounded by spirits never left him; and spirit mediums and other ghost stories were a recurrent feature in his journalism. Along with his stories of murder and mayhem, and his interviews with undertakers and butchers, Hearn built a corpus around that thin line between life and death, and our fascination with what lays on the other side.

His first attempt to seriously capture the allure of ghost stories came with his book Some Chinese Ghosts, written in 1887 while he was still living in New Orleans. A lifelong collector of folklore, he’d cobbled together the book primarily from secondary sources; he would later call it the “early work of a man who tried to understand the Far East from books — and couldn’t, but then the real purpose of the stories was only artistic.” It wasn’t until he came to Japan and immersed himself in its culture that he began to forge a style that united his prose with his interest in ghosts and folklore.

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Five years after a series of well-received articles on the Japanese exhibition at the New Orleans Exposition in 1885, an editor at Harper’s asked him offhandedly if he’d be interested in writing about Japan. Now 40 years old, broke and in need of a change, Hearn jumped at the chance: he relocated to Yokohama, and eventually Tokyo, where he took up a post as Chair of the English Language and Literature department at Tokyo Imperial University.

Supporting himself with a series of travelogues and observations about a country that fascinated Western audiences, Hearn became increasingly fascinated with the country’s ghosts. As the Meiji Restoration rapidly industrialized and modernized Japan, Hearn increasingly turned to out-of-fashion folktales and old stories of Yūrei: unfortunate souls that linger between the worlds of the living and the dead, and who return to torment the living.

Hearn gathered material from old sourcebooks that often contained only incomplete fragments, stories of strange demons and lingering visitations that sometimes made little sense. Having long taught English to make a living, he gradually recruited his stronger students to act as informants for him, gathering up folklore for him.

What would become a hallmark in Hearn’s ghost stories was that omnipresent sense that something was not quite right, even in the telling itself. He instructed his research assistants to “never try to translate a Japanese idiom by an English idiom. That would be no use to me. Simply translate the words exactly, — however funny it seems.” In doing so, Hearn may have helped further the notion of Japanese culture as somehow inscrutable or untranslatable — a not uncommon move by foreigners writing about Japan. But Hearn also managed to tap into something that resonated in his adopted country; Shimane University professor Yasuyuki Kajitani has said that while there have been many foreign authors who’ve written about Japan, “no man of letters before or after Lafcadio Hearn … revealed the beauty of Japan or the Japanese heart, or introduced Japan in such a beautiful style and with such understanding, observation, and deep insight based on a heartful love for Japan’s landscape.”

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In addition to his students, Hearn also turned to his wife. He had married a much younger woman, Setsu, out of convenience — marriage into her family gave him citizenship and legal status, as well as someone to care for him and keep house; in exchange, he was obligated to provide financially for her family. And though he had confessed to a friend at one point that all he wanted in a partner was “some simple, quiet creature who would look after his domestic comfort and stay meekly outside of his realm of thought,” Setsu’s own memoir (published after Hearn’s death) revealed a different relationship altogether. According to Setsu, her husband would ask her to tell ghost stories that she remembered from her youth, always in search of new material. “Hearn would ask questions with bated breath, and would listen to my tales with a terrified air,” she wrote.

When I told him the old tales, I always first gave the plot roughly; and whenever he found an interesting place, he made a note of it. Then he would ask me to give the details, and often to repeat them. If I told him the story by reading it from a book, he would say, “There is no use of your reading it from the book. I prefer your own words and phrases — all from your own thought. Otherwise it won’t do.” Therefore I had to assimilate the story before telling it. That made me dream. He would become so eager when I reached an interesting point of a story! His facial expression would change and his eyes would burn intensely … .

From these dreams and memories he forged some of his most enduring tales — writings that not only resurrected lost folklore in an era of Meiji modernization, but also created fully-fleshed stories out of mere fragments. Among his most famous, “The Story of Mimi-Nashi-Hōïchi,” tells of the blind musician Hōïchi, approached one night by a stranger who hires him to perform for his lord. Entranced by his music, they instruct him to return each night for a full week. One night, friends discover Hōïchi, alone in a graveyard, singing to the oni-bi, or “ghost-fires,” pale remnants of demons. Realizing he is bewitched, they drag him against his will to a priest who explains that, by once obeying the commands of the dead, he is beholden to them; if he obeys them again, they will tear him to pieces. The priest and his acolyte cover his body with prayers to render him invisible to the demons, but the acolyte forgets Hōïchi’s ears, and when the oni-bi return that night, they can find only Hōïchi’s ears, which they tear from his body, giving him the name Mimi-Nashi-Hōïchi, “Hōïchi the Earless.”

The story of Hōïchi the Earless is one of four tales that director Masaki Kobayashi chose for his 1965 horror anthology film, Kwaidan — a film based not on the original Yūrei stories but Hearn’s retellings. It is a testament to the power of Hearn’s writings that this foreign-born writer has earned a place in the canon of Japanese literature — his work is still celebrated in Japan to this day.

This celebration of Hearn is not uncomplicated: scholar Rie Kido Askew has traced the various iterations of Hearn’s reception in Japanese culture over the past 100 years and suggests that he is often held up as a critique against Japan’s rapid modernization. As a character in Uchida Yasuo’s 1991 book Kaiden no Michi argues, Hearn, “though a foreigner, seems to have understood the proto-scenery of Japan and the subtle parts of the Japanese spiritual structure better than the Japanese. We can indeed learn from Yakumo’s works about the ‘heart’ of the Japanese that [modern] Japanese have forgotten.” Askew argues that Hearn is often evoked “as a symbol to restore the ‘true’ Japan — the simple and innocent pre-modern Japan which … was lost in the process of modernization.” But regardless, it remains the case that for many native readers, when they imagine the ghosts of their culture, it is Hearn’s versions that come to mind.

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Like Hōïchi, Hearn himself often worked like an artist bewitched. His effortless style and his command of a storyteller’s art — the assuredness of his prose, the careful construction of suspense and mood — all stand at odds to the unsettled nature of many of these stories. A good many horror stories are, at their roots, simple morality tales. The promiscuous, drunk teenagers get serial murdered; the greedy rich man comes to a bad, ironic end. Such stories can be horrific, but they are ultimately reassuring — they present a rigid moral order, even if maintained in gruesome ways. The truly terrifying tales are the ones that follow a logic beyond our grasp, and Hearn’s best ghost stories lie in this strange abyss — the same abyss that we are perpetually and delicately suspended above.

Take “The Sympathy of Benten”: a young poet named Baishū is visiting a shrine of the goddess Benten when a sudden gust of wind blows a long strip of paper towards him, on which a poem about love has been written. Baishū is entranced by the calligraphy on the scroll, imagining the young, beautiful woman who must have written it, and prays to Benten that he might be allowed to meet this writer. His prayer is answered, and, through the intercession of the Old-Man-Under-the Moon, the god of marriage, a young woman appears — the writer of the poem — and they are soon married.

Baishū’s new wife does not talk about her past or her family, and he does not ask, afraid of angering the gods who bequeathed him this gift. “But,” Hearn continues, “neither the Old-Man-Under-the Moon nor any one else came — as he had feared — to take her away. Nobody even made inquiries about her. And the neighbors, for some undiscoverable reason, acted as if totally unaware of her presence.”

Some time later, Baishū is walking through a remote quarter of the city when he is summoned by a stranger, who confesses that he is acting under “an inspiration from the Goddess Benten.” This man has a young daughter who is a talented calligrapher, for whom he has sought a husband; Benten had come to him in a dream the night before predicting the arrival of Baishū, who is to be her husband. The man’s daughter, of course, is identical to the woman Baishū had already married: “She to whom he had been introduced by the Old-Man-Under-the-Moon, was only the soul of the beloved. She to whom he was now wedded, in her father’s house, was the body. Benten had wrought this miracle for the sake of her worshippers.”

This is the end of the tale, but not of Hearn’s telling, as he goes on: “The ending is rather unsatisfactory. One would like to know something about the mental experiences of the real maiden during the married life of her phantom. One would also like to know what became of the phantom, — whether it continued to lead an independent existence; whether it waited patiently for the return of its husband; whether it paid a visit to the real bride. And the book says nothing about these things.” He then quotes a Japanese friend who suggests that something of the girl’s spirit had flowed into the writing, and thus that the “spirit-bride was really formed out of the tanazaku.” Which explains some things, but not others, and doesn’t really get at Hearn’s original questions. The tale is told exclusively from the perspective of the Baishū, so it doesn’t concern itself with the real woman during the phantom maiden’s appearance, or the phantom’s life after the real woman appears. But Hearn is right: the echoes of these other lives ricochet into the main story, leaving unanswered questions.

Stranger still is “The Corpse-Rider,” which first appeared in Hearn’s idiosyncratic collection, Shadowings. “The body was cold as ice,” Hearn begins; “the heart had long ceased to beat: yet there were no other signs of death. Nobody even spoke of burying the woman.” Having died in anger, the townspeople fear that the dying wish of such a person can lead the corpse to “burst asunder any tomb and rift the heaviest graveyard stone.” So her body is left there, as the people wait for the man she was waiting for: the man who divorced her.

The hapless ex-husband soon returns home, and discovers the situation, terrified. “If I can find no help before dark,” he thinks to himself, “she will tear me to pieces.” So he seeks out the help of a Inyōshi, a holy man, who agrees to help him. He leads the ex-husband to the corpse, which is lying face down, undisturbed, and instructs the man to get on the back of the dead woman’s body, like a horse, taking up her long black hair in his hands like a bridle. “You must stay like that till morning,” the inyōshi instructs the man. “You will have reason to be afraid in the night — plenty of reason. But whatever may happen, never let go of her hair. If you let go, — even for one second, — she will tear you into pieces!”

He does as instructed, and the inyōshi leans forward and whispers some magic into the ear of the dead woman, and then tells the man that — for everyone’s safety — he has to depart, leaving the man astride the corpse of his ex-wife. For hours he sit upon the corpse of his dead wife, as the night turns black and strange around him. Then, without warning, the body springs to life, rising up as if to cast him off, the dead woman crying out, “Oh, how heavy it is! Yet I shall bring that fellow here now!” Reanimated, the she leads him on a horrifying night journey:

Then tall she rose, and leaped to the doors, and flung them open, and rushed into the night, — always bearing the weight of the man. But he, shutting his eyes, kept his hands twisted in her long hair, — tightly, tightly, — though fearing with such a fear that he could not even moan. How far she went, he never knew. He saw nothing: he heard only the sound of her naked feet in the dark, — picha-picha, picha-picha, — and the hiss of her breathing as she ran.

At last she turned, and ran back into the house, and lay down upon the floor exactly as at first. Under the man she panted and moaned till the cocks began to crow. Thereafter she lay still.

When the inyōshi returns at sunrise, he’s surprised that the man has lasted the night, and that he never let go of her hair. “But the man, with chattering teeth, sat upon her until the inyōshi came at sunrise. Pleased, he tells him, “That is well … Now you can stand up … You must have passed a fearful night; but nothing else could have saved you. Hereafter you may feel secure from her vengeance.”

So that, more or less, is the end of the story. But Hearn adds a small endnote in which he confesses that he does not find the conclusion of this story to be “morally satisfying.” He complains: “It is not recorded that the corpse-rider became insane, or that his hair turned white: we are told only that ‘he worshipped the inyōshi with tears of gratitude.’”

Hearn’s feeling of dissatisfaction with these tales runs alongside his clear love of the tales himself, and the gusto with which he throws himself into the act of storytelling. He has no answers, only tales. He speaks with a storyteller’s authority, plying all his trade from years of being a journalist, novelist, translator, and folklorist. But what gives Hearn’s yūrei their strange aura, their sense of discomfort is his own uncertainty about the stories he’s telling. In Hearn’s tales, the eerie landscape is the voice of the storyteller itself — it moves under its own power, guided by some unknown and unseen motivation.

Hearn, like his corpse rider, can do more than hold on for dear life.

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Colin Dickey is the author of Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places, along with two other books of nonfiction. He is currently writing a book on conspiracy theories and other delusions, The Unidentified, forthcoming in 2020.

Editor: Dana Snitzky