ghost story, part two (in which I go a bit meta, in an attempt to appear rational)

I’ve never known how to tell this story, which is why I rarely tell it. Once, around a campfire in college, among friends and under the spell of flame in the middle of a dark, empty field, I told people about what I thought I saw in that river. Now and then, afterwards, a person who hadn’t been at the campfire would tell me that someone had told them my ghost story, and that it was one of the scariest things they’d ever heard. And I’d wonder what the story sounded like by the time it reached them. To tell a story like this is to release a hidden part of your self into the wild.

My impulse is to begin with a list of qualifiers. I’d like to tell you that I didn’t believe in ghosts before this happened, and I don’t know that I do now. I’d like to assure you that I’m mentally stable, that I’m not, as a rule, silly or credulous, and offer various other stories as means of proof. I’d like to write anything that would make me seem like a sensible person who knows the difference between real and make-believe.

But this is a story, which I will never get around to telling if I keep worrying about how it makes me look.

Which brings me back to the original problem, which is how to make a story of something that holds so little narrative shape in my head. I can set it up: I can tell you about how I came to be in a small Dutch town at age sixteen with two other girls my age, and how the three of us came to be at the banks of a river, after dusk, with two small, excitable dogs. I can tell you that when we got there, we were laughing, high-spirited, obnoxious, even, singing “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” probably because the stars made us think of it. (I should probably also mention that we were, in fact, completely sober.) I can tell you that there were no other people around. It’s easy enough to do this because my memory can produce a setting, and characters to move around within it. But once we settled in on the bank of the river—me, my two friends, and the two dogs—I lose track of the other characters, despite the fact that they were still there, reacting to something, just as I was reacting to something. From then on, I lose any sense of a credible “we.”

Color is what I remember, to start. I wrote that the sky was purple: a deep, dark, monolithic purple, the red of the sunset faded by then. I don’t know if there were clouds; I can’t remember a moon, and the only reason I think there may have been stars is the “Lucy” business—I can’t actually recall seeing any. I only remember the purple. The water reflected the sky, its surface shimmering purple as well.

I didn’t see anything rise out of the water. At some point I just became aware that there was a dark shape in the middle of the river, almost directly in front of me but a further distance than I could safely swim. It was a human shape, like a broad-shouldered man waist-deep in the water, but it lacked the meat of reality, and after a moment of panic, I understood that this was not someone or something that could be helped. It was a shadow with no person.

If desperation could cast a shade in the middle of a river, it would look and feel like this did. It came to me slowly that I was afraid—although by slowly I think I mean a few seconds. The fear wasn’t so much from the presence of the thing itself. It was the sense that I’d been plucked from the exuberance of the moment I’d been in and hauled into someone else’s emotional vortex. I felt a pull from the river, a grasping and clamoring.

I stood looking at the dark shape, and then—and this is the part that is clearest in my memory, and most difficult to articulate—it rose. It wasn’t as though a humanoid shape crawled out of the water. It was as though another shadowy humanoid shape shimmered out from the shape I had been watching, like a dark holograph, this one a full body with legs, and it began to run, but it ran as though through water, as though it couldn’t get anywhere, and yet it gave at least the illusion of forward motion, coming towards me. At this point I should say towards us, because actually I wasn’t alone through any of this, and while I can’t remember a thing that was said, I do remember that at the point that the shape started moving, the dogs started barking crazily, and that we all three turned and ran away, clearing several blocks before we stopped, panting, to say, “Oh my God,” and “What the hell WAS that?”

Here, the difficulty of the “we.” The fact that there were three of us might add credence to the supernatural element, were there any proof that we actually experienced the phenomenon in just the way I described it, individually, all seeing and feeling the same thing. But, while everyone claimed to have seen something, I can’t prove—to myself or anyone else—that we weren’t influenced by one another’s accounts or actions. And I have no real idea what either Jenn or B saw or felt.

I know that B, at least, has completely rationalized the experience away. Several years later, when we were both in college at different places and meeting over the summer, I asked her, hesitantly, if she remembered it. “Oh, that,” she said, and then made some comment about how silly it was that we’d thought we’d seen anything. I didn’t say anything else about it, because I felt stupid for still taking the experience seriously. I wanted to ask her: But what did you feel? Was I the only one who felt anything?

(I never talked about it again with Jenn. The last time we met was ten years ago, in a café in Ann Arbor. She told me that Anders and Natalia had gotten divorced, that her parents were thinking of leaving the seven-hundred-year-old house because they were getting sick of Anders, whose behavior was becoming erratic in the way one might expect of dubiously wealthy gentlemen of a certain age. Natalia called them one evening with a warning: “Anders is on his way to your house right now. With a WHO*RE.” Within hours, he was there, draped with a woman who was clearly not interested in his personality, announcing their plans to stay there for the night—an arrangement that made Jenn’s parents profoundly uncomfortable, to say the least. With gossip like that to get through, Jenn and I didn’t have time for much else.)

I called this a ghost story, but labeling the experience as a “ghost” feels presumptuous and a little cheap. My memory of the dark shape, the sudden powerful emotional shift, the running holograph, the terrible sensation of creeping Otherness—all of it’s still so vivid to me, even now, sixteen years later. But while the storyteller in me could make the interpretive leap needed to call it a ghost (a drowned man, locked in an eternally fruitless escape—oh, don’t think I haven’t gone there), other parts of me hold back.

Whatever it was, if it was anything, it is beyond my understanding. Every time I tell about it, I trust my memory a little less. When you turn memory into story, you loosen your claim on it. If the story takes on any life, eventually, you’ll lose the memory. Is it a good tradeoff, to gain a story in exchange for a memory? That’s a question for the ages, isn’t it?

And if we ever thought that memory was pure to begin with, we were probably fools.