A Ghost's Story

“Sorry, I didn’t see you there,” I said, unsure if in that moment you could hear me. But, judging by the shocked look on your face, you could more than sense that I was in front of you. Your color had receded in such a way that we looked almost similar. Because, contrary to popular depictions, ghosts aren’t ethereal white specters floating through walls. My skin and clothes kept most of their color. I just look a little faded, like an old photo from a time before digital cameras could capture everlasting moments. In that way, I’m less scary than you might think. I could almost pass for the living if we ran into each other on the street—a fact that made me reflect on my former life and the number of ghosts who had probably been hiding in plain sight. It’s just that most people ignore passing ghosts.

“Sorry,” I repeated, waving my hands in front of me. “I was lost in my own world again. But really, I guess I have nothing better to do than get lost these days.” I chuckled and then proceeded to rant.

“You know how, when you have your phone, you’re always looking down at it while walking? You never look up. You just sense obstacles in your path and try to avoid them. And the world around you becomes invisible, almost like it isn’t there.

“Well, let me tell you, after everything settles, the first thing you notice when you, you know, become a ghost, is that you don’t have your phone. It’s almost like—and excuse the pun—a phantom limb. You reach down to pick it up, and it’s not there. Never mind that you can’t really pick up anything anymore, at least not without draining a week’s worth of energy, and even then you can maybe tip over a glass or change a channel. No, it’s really the phone thing that makes death feel real, at least for me. Like I couldn’t fully grasp it until I noticed the absence of my phone.”

Again, I wasn’t sure that you could hear me, but it felt cathartic to get that off my chest. You’d be surprised at how unwilling other ghosts are to engage in conversation. Especially if they’ve been dead for years longer than me. You’d think they’d want to talk all the time. Interacting with other people is such a fundamental aspect of human existence (something about our community-driven origins as a species). But I guess socializing is one of the first things to go when you become a ghost, a reminder that you’re no longer truly human.

I continued, “Without my phone, all I do is look up. At the clouds and the birds and the trees. Being able to walk through things makes it a little easier because I don’t have to worry about being hit by a car or walking into a wall. And most people either can’t see me or don’t notice me.”

We had almost collided. For the first time since I became a ghost, I could feel another body’s energy as it approached. Its presence was almost physical, like the weight of its aura projected a tangible field emanating three or four feet out. That’s how I knew you were approaching (because I, true to form, was looking up at the sky). But I assumed we’d just walk through each other, so I didn’t bother to look down. And then you screamed.

I’m so rarely startled these days. Being a ghost gives you a sense of invulnerability. I mean, the worst thing that could happen in life already happened, so there’s not much use for fear. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t dread. When you’re a ghost, everything is slow. I’m sure time itself hasn’t changed. But the experience of time is fundamentally different because it exists in an unlimited quantity. In the same way that time seems to drag on when you anticipate something, like the hours in a doctor’s waiting room or the days before a final exam, time as a ghost stretches to its maximum length. Walking anywhere takes forever. After all, there are no ghost cars or bikes or planes. And there’s no urgency to arrive at your destination because there really isn’t a reason other than it’s something to do during the day. Speaking of which, the days are indistinguishable because you’re not really experiencing them. They’re just there, like blades of grass in a field, each identical to every other. So I force myself to think of places to go. But I don’t know how much longer I’ll be here (does the afterlife really last an eternity?), so I try to ration them. Each new place loses its luster after the first visit. So why walk to the mall and the zoo and the lake all in the same year? Why not spread them out and prolong the fantasy of each journey, the wonder of each unexperienced destination?

The nights, though—those I truly dread. There’s nothing to see when the world is asleep. I can’t even watch people in a park or sit in an empty seat at a movie theater. I think maybe that’s why you hear so many stories about ghosts in houses at night. That’s where the people are. It would be truly miserable to spend the hours between dusk and dawn in the dark outdoors with nothing but the stars to keep you company. If a family is watching TV, I’ll join them from the corner of their living room. If they leave the lights on in their bedrooms, I’ll snoop through their closets and drawers. More often than not, they’d dismiss the sound of my footsteps as a draft circulating through the hallway. Or when I’d misplace a dish or trinket, they’d blame their own absentmindedness. The few who could perceive me assumed that I was there for a reason. They’d call out to me but could never hear my response. So I’d sit in a chair and watch as they’d light a candle or cover their mirrors. Sometimes, I’d save enough energy to knock over a stray book just to hear them scream. What else am I going to do? Hauntings are the only way to pass the time at night.

Because while we may no longer be afraid of death, boredom has become the new villain of every ghost’s existence, an enemy that spends centuries stalking its prey, pouncing at the first sign of ennui. Neither fire nor cold nor virus can afflict us because we don’t have physical bodies to destroy. But we can still atrophy. I’ve seen it: ghosts who are rooted in one spot, staring aimlessly at nothing in particular. Like statues, they don’t move. They don’t speak. Whether they’ve given up or they’ve succumbed to the weariness that comes with permanence, they are stark reminders that even ghosts can be harmed. I lied before about not being afraid of anything. I’m afraid of them, of becoming a statue ghost.

So I try to move around, to notice the shifting clouds and the range of colors that paint the sky. It was while observing the sky that your scream startled me. My own skittishness is a lingering vestige of my human days, one I’m unwilling to relinquish. I used to jump every time something unexpected happened, like when someone would walk into a room or break an extended silence. In the battle between fight or flight, my flight would always win. Growing up, my brothers used to love hiding behind corners, waiting for the opportunity to jump out and scare me. I’d scream and cry, falling backward as I’d scramble to escape. And they’d laugh at my expense. I used to hate when they did that. But now I want nothing more than for them to appear from behind a wall. I’d scream and cry and run toward them, embracing them in a prolonged hug. I wouldn’t let them go until my eyes were dry and their shoulders were damp with a combination of my snot and tears.

I think that’s why I felt so comfortable with you when you screamed. You were like a ghost from my past, and it felt good to be haunted by an unfamiliar memory again, to be reminded of my days alive. I usually wouldn’t just start talking like I did, at least not to a stranger (who, again, I wasn’t sure could hear me).

“Anyway, I’ll let you get on with your day,” I concluded.

You stared back at me, more confused than scared now. I was probably not the first ghost you’d ever seen. Most first-timers dismiss the initial shock with disbelief, as if they don’t trust their own senses and assume their mind is playing a trick with a combination of light and shadows. In those moments, you can see their emotions morph on their face, the fear turning into relief (and sometimes anger at themselves for their momentary fear), and then they walk right through you. Even though you’re still standing there and you haven’t moved. They just ignore you, having convinced themselves that you’re not really there. That you’re not real.

“I wasn’t looking at my phone.” That was the first thing you said, which caught me off guard because you’d actually heard me. That was a first. And, clearly, you thought our near-collision was my fault.

Then you asked, “Why are you here?”

I didn’t know how to respond. Why was I here? Setting aside the “why” for now, the harder part was the “here.” Here as in on this sidewalk? Here as in this town? Or country? Or existence. And, on the other hand, am I even here? Certainly not in the same way you are. But, in a sense, I am more here than you because I will remain long after you’re gone. Whether it’s because you move away or pass on into the other place, you will eventually leave. And I will remain here. So maybe I needed to volley the question back to you: Why not?

I also knew the emphasis wasn’t on the “you” because I didn’t recognize you. Neither from my life nor my wanderings. You weren’t a resident of this town, so you must’ve been a visitor or returning home to see family or friends. Dates are no longer important when you’re a ghost, so I usually don’t know what day it is. I can tell the seasons apart with context clues—budding flowers for spring, shorts and tank tops for summer, dying leaves for fall, and holiday decorations for winter. I know it’s fall right now. And one of the houses I visited the other night had a turkey in their freezer, so it’s probably around Thanksgiving. That may explain both why you’re here and why I’ve never seen you before.

The “why” was the most challenging part. I grew up in this town. But I didn’t die here. I became a ghost in Boston, the city I was living in up until my death. Not immediately, like it’s sometimes portrayed in movies. I didn’t float out of my body and look down at my corpse. I just knew I wanted to linger, and then I suddenly appeared in my adulthood bedroom. Which makes sense because you spend most of your life in your bedroom (even if a majority of that time is spent asleep). It must’ve been several days after my death because I didn’t usually make my bed and I rarely put away my clothes, and yet my room was tidy, almost like a showroom. I had left both my blankets and my laundry in piles that were now missing, replaced with hospital corners tucked tightly under my mattress and shirts organized by color hanging in my closet. Someone had reimagined my life, such that if anyone paid homage to this shrine of my former self, they would mistakenly believe that I had been a neat person. And that’s how I knew I was dead.

The first thing I decided to do as a ghost was to return home to Placerville, a small town east of Sacramento where my childhood memories felt both fresh and faded. So I picked an approximately correct direction and just started walking. For thousands of miles, I hoped that I was going in the right direction. But during those countless days spent wandering westward, I looked up and fell in love with this country’s scenery, really for the first time. Like most things in life, I took the vastness of the U.S. for granted, flying over its rolling hills and checkered farmlands between Massachusetts and California. But traversing the American countryside on foot gave me a deeper appreciation for the subtlety of its natural beauty. From the ruggedness of the Appalachian foothills to the symmetry of the endless cornfields in Nebraska.

The sky, however, was the best part. It almost looked painted by the way the colors would blend as the sun made the same westward journey, clearing a path for the numerous stars to populate a glimpse of the infinite universe, its vastness unfathomable even to the dead. Because the universe was constantly expanding. Even if I remained forever and found my way to space, I would never reach its edge. I’d always have new places to explore. But if ghosts eventually expired, then the stars were our closest proxy. They exuded an impermanence relative to, and therefore understandable in, ghost time. Stars gave us hope because one day we too might combust, leaving behind nothing but dust and the memory of our light. A bit closer than the stars were the clouds, which represented a different kind of transience. They would form countless shapes and patterns, each one unique in that no combination of form and placement could ever be replicated. A cloud is a snapshot in time, and like seconds in a day, the same cloud will exist only once.

I didn’t have a sense of how long I spent walking, but I knew I wouldn’t attempt that particular journey again. It was something I should keep as both unique and memorable. When I finally made it home, my childhood house felt smaller than I remembered and dull compared to the vividness of the countryside I had just left behind. I recognized then that, in death, the destination would always be a disappointment. The journey had this frenetic energy sustained by the excitement of anticipation, an energy that the destination couldn’t match. So I focused almost exclusively on the journey, spending my time walking through town in a circular pattern radiating outward from my childhood house, which felt like the natural starting point. Even though by the time I arrived, my parents had moved away. The new owners replaced our decor with their own. But the memories of my family lived in the walls, reverberating like echoes trapped in a cave. Certain details would spark a familiar scene in my mind, like a scuff mark on our stairs where I had thrown a lightsaber at my dad as he was chasing me in a Darth Vader helmet or the slight indent in the backyard where my brothers and I had once dug a hole so we could build a pool, only to reenter the house muddy and wet, and our mom yelled at us to get out and fix her yard. The new owners had even painted over the pencil marks on the kitchen wall that tracked my height over the years (my brothers and I each chose a different room to immortalize our growth spurts, and I chose the kitchen because I wanted to be closest to the food).

I used these reminders to maintain an incomplete copy of my former life, one I could revisit and relive at least my early years. If I was being honest, I would say that these reminders kept me here. But they were less like an anchor and more like a friend grasping my hand as he dangled off the edge of a cliff. I held on because I didn’t want him to fall into the abyss and be forgotten. Even before I became a ghost, I had a tendency to hold on to mementos, as if I didn’t trust my mind to manage my own memories. Letting them go would erase fundamental parts of my personal history, like abandoning a box of discarded treasure mistaken for junk on the side of a curb with a sign that said “Free for anyone to take.” My childhood house was just another memento, a reminder full of reminders.

So I began haunting my hometown. Most people in Placerville would never see me, and the few that did dismissed me immediately. Before you, no one listened to me when I spoke. No one could hear me. And because of that, I wanted to give you a complete and truthful answer. But the more I thought about it, the more I didn’t want to say it. Not because you didn’t deserve the answer but because I didn’t want to reveal it to myself. The act of saying it out loud, of speaking it into existence, would force me to confront it. Thus far, my reason for staying had been ever-present but intangible, like gravity. And much like gravity, I couldn’t provide details on what it meant or why it’s here, but it kept me earthbound nonetheless. It imposed a set of defined rules that I couldn’t break, under which I could spend my days walking around, unable to escape its control. The why was so elusive that I never sought it out, content to spend my days wandering through town.

There are some things only other ghosts can understand, and one of them is the reason we stayed behind. To linger is both an instantaneous and unchangeable decision. Most people choose the other option. And those who remain don’t like to second-guess their choice. So after giving it some thought, I finally said, “Gravity.” Although neither complete nor truthful, it was the most appropriate answer I could think of.

Because you seemed unfazed by the fact that you were talking to a ghost, I wasn’t sure if you’d have any follow-up questions, so I waited as you mulled over my response. Then you said, “I guess gravity’s as good an answer as any,” and walked right through me.

Now it was my turn to be stunned, as if I had seen a ghost’s ghost for the first time. You continued down the street, turned a corner, and disappeared from sight. I never saw you again. Even though I’ve searched. It’s like you didn’t exist. To this day, our encounter still haunts me. And like any first-timer, I’m not entirely sure it really happened, as if I still don’t trust my mind. The details in my memory of you are fuzzy, like the shape of your face or the clothes you were wearing, their colors and textures and even type. Were you in jeans or shorts? A T-shirt or button-up? For some reason, those specifics weren’t important enough to collect and retain, leaving me to wonder if I fabricated the whole thing, crafting a story and attaching a purpose to cope with my current existence. Or to entertain myself and thereby ward against the dreaded boredom. After all, as I now know, there usually isn’t a deeper meaning behind a haunting.