The Absence of Haunting

I’ve been writing about ghosts a lot recently – or the lack of them. I’ve been working on a poetry collection called ‘Planchette’ after the small, heart shaped piece of wood that is used to deliver messages from the dead to people using a Ouija Board. The problem is I have never been haunted. Midnight visitations, faces appearing in windows and mirrors, things going bump in the night – none of this has ever happened to me. The conditions are ripe for it too. Perhaps not when I was growing up in a 1970s council house, of which my parents were the first owners. As much as I tried to convince myself that the house had been built on an ancient burial ground (or was I just watching too much Poltergeist in the 90s?) no amount of will or desire would get my little makeshift planchette to move on my bodged together Ouija Board that my friends and I made out of scrabble tiles. But since then, surely I am owed a haunting; my new house was built in the early 1900s, it had no less than 3 previous owners, one of which I’m certain died here, I’ve lost a multitude of relatives over the decades since my first Ouija Board attempts. Yet even when I’ve attended to my hungry babies in the dead of night, with the doors wide open and the empty corridor in full view for a lonely ghost to wander, my house remains absolutely and completely un-haunted.

It's a subject I’ve been reading a lot about too and I was absorbed by Jeanette Winterson’s latest collection of short ghost stories, or an instruction manual on how to be haunted as I like to think of it. Night Side of the River is made up of thirteen fictional ghost stories, punctuated with four of Winterson’s own tales of her experiences with ghosts. The stories fall into four categories: Devices, Places, People and Visitations. In each of these parts she weaves tales of hauntings, both traditional and technological, tales where people can use apps to communicate with their loved ones after death and tales of malicious ghosts, intent on doing harm to anyone who happens to notice them. Winterson’s ghosts are varied: some appear to be harmless and exist harmoniously with the living, some pervade the space they exist in with foul smells and antisocial behaviour. Most understand they are dead, while some tread the line between dead and alive unsure of which category they fall into.

It was the story entitled ‘No Ghost Ghost Story’ which really captured my attention. Finally, a ghost story that seemed to understand my predicament of being ignored by my dead relatives! The story follows the journey of Simon who is suffering immense grief after the death of his partner. Simon attempts to navigate life alone, pondering the after life as he goes. Frustrated by the lack of haunting, he wonders whether his partner loved someone else more before him, and whether it is this old flame that he has decided to haunt. Ghost-jealousy is something I can certainly relate to – how would I feel, for example, if one of my siblings was visited by the ghost of our father but I wasn’t? I understand that this is irrational and perhaps a bit strange for people who for the most part would be absolutely terrified at the prospect of seeing a ghost. I was once that person…now I have ghost FOMO.

There is a big spoiler here but the next story in the series reveals that in fact Simon was being haunted by his partner all along. ‘The Undiscovered Country’ is narrated by Simon’s partner as he explains what happened to him after death and what he has observed from watching Simon grieve. So why can’t Simon see his devoted ghost? It’s certainly not through lack of trying, he even goes to see a Medium. It throws up two complications, neither of which are comforting. The first is that there are forces at play that mean some people just do not have access to ghosts. This conclusion would mean that my house could be swamped with ghosts, but I just don’t have the power to see them. This throws up a secondary, slightly uncomfortable idea that ghosts have a voyeuristic advantage which means that I can be observed unknowingly. Neither are going to stop me hesitantly checking the other side of the room when I mysteriously wake up at 3am or waiting to see a face in my rearview mirror when I’m driving down a dark country lane at night.

So, this brings me round quite nicely to this month’s prompt which is ‘absence.’ I’m keeping this deliberately loose to allow your own ideas to come through. If you are stuck, perhaps some of these ideas will help: absence makes the heart grow fonder, absent friends, absent minded, absence from school. Write for 5-10 minutes, or longer if you want to. Join the conversation and share some of your writing over on my Instagram page @words_and_wine_ashford

Surprisingly, absence makes me feel hopeful. The absence of ghosts for me does not deny their existence. Absence means I am yet to be proved wrong.