The Desire for Ghosts

In the past month, a certain maritime museum in the northeast has been featured in two news stories. The first story regarded the use of Mississippi live oaks felled by Hurricane Katrina to restore one of the museum’s featured historic vessels, the whaler Charles W. Morgan (Bark). The second featured a paranormal investigation of ghosts on the same vessel. While the first story is more pertinent to the museum’s mission to preserve and exhibit maritime history, permitted some good to come from the tragedy of Katrina, and allowed two diverse groups to assist one another, the second story received the most extensive coverage and airtime.

Personally, I do not believe in ghosts or an afterlife or even, really, a god (although I would not be too upset if I was proved wrong). I will even admit an element of disdain toward those who do. I will be openly contemptuous of those who insist, as a director at the museum did in a meeting, that paranormal investigation is a legitimate science like any other. Science has certain rigorous standards of investigation, and has detected many unseen phenomena such as atoms, germs, clinical depression, and so forth. Science has not detected ghosts as of yet. Nevertheless, I am fascinated by ghost stories as phenomena unto themselves.

Everyone seems to have a ghost story. If they have not seen a ghost, then they have a cousin or a brother or a friend, or know of a friend of a cousin or brother or friend, who has seen one. If they have not actually seen a ghost, then they have had a “weird feeling” somewhere. At the museum, one or two interpreters swear they have had an “experience” in another structure on the grounds; and one of the museum’s administrators insists that her own home is haunted. My sister-in-law says she saw a ghost in a suburban home when she was a kid. My mother has a friend who owns a house that “everyone knows” is haunted.

Ghost stories are big business, too. Most old cities, particularly on the eastern seaboard, have ghost-theme tours. In Charleston, S.C., house values increase if a ghost story can be connected to the property. New Orleans, La., had a thriving business in ghost tourism. Even somewhere as urbane as Houston, Texas, which allows nothing to stand for longer than 30 years, has a ghost connected to the oldest building in the city. The fact that this building is also now a bar is not considered a variable. The maritime museum in question itself already capitalizes on ghosts with a “Haunted Happenings” tour held in October each year. In fact, one employee wondered why the Morgan ghosts were getting publicity now, in the late spring, rather than in the appropriate season, six months hence. “Summer tourism” was the answer.

Perhaps ghost stories are some human urge to comprehend death as an experience and to defy death through some concept of immorality. Humans, arrogant beings, need to believe that we endure beyond the obvious and undeniable end of death. Humans, in their grief, cling to the belief that their loved ones live on in some way beyond death, in a place where they will be reunited. Humans may identify with the vengeful ghost who inflicts a form of personal justice or retribution from beyond death. Humans also want the comfort of permanence, even in the face of the very thing that proves impermanence. If the body is not permanent, then some animating spirit in the body must be. Ghosts are the evidence of this permanence, this spiritual immortality. They are a sociological study in irrational human desire; and irrational human desire is the most fascinating of all phenomena.

The Christmas 'Possum, part 2

By mid-December, Amy and I had developed a habit of going over to Bob’s house on Sunday nights for dinner. On one of these evenings, about a week before Christmas, we finished another tasty meal of ravioli and adjourned to the living room to watch the Simpsons. As I curled up on the sofa, a rank odor wafted around me. “Bob,” I said, “I think you got the ‘possum.”

“What do you mean?” he asked, safely across the room, next to an open window.

“I mean that it smells like something died over here,” I said.

“Oh, that’s just the musk from the ‘possum’s nest,” Bob insisted.

Another pungent wave swept over me. I gagged. Jane sat down next to me and inhaled. “Yep,” she said, “it does smell rather nasty over here.” Amy joined her and took a deep breath through her nose. “Well, it does smell pretty bad,” she agreed, “but it is probably just the musk.” The stink overcame me once more. My stomach heaving, I chose to sit on the floor as far from the origin of the scent as possible.

Later that week, as I was about to head out for Baton Rouge, where I would spend Christmas with my aunt, I found Amy in our living room. She sat slumped on the edge of the easy chair, looking as if she, too smelled the opossum’s alleged lair. She shook her head. “The ‘possum is dead,” she announced.

Amy had awkened that morning to a phone call that began, “You’re from the country. You know how to get rid of dead critters.” Bob, apparently, had decided to take a nap on the sofa the evening before. The smell had become so powerful that his grip on his musky nest story had weakened. The next morning, he moved the sofa away from the wall, and began to pull away the boards in the nook to find a grim sight.

Much as Bob had originally planned, the opossum had taken the bait, eaten the poisoned ball of dough, and began to crawl out of the house. Unfortunatly, it had died before reaching the outdoors. Its body had expired in the gap between two boards, hind end up. Bob gripped the opossum’s butt and gave a tug; but nature had taken its course. The corpse had swelled and was wedged into place. So, he called Amy.

Amy arrived at Bob’s house to be greeted by such a wretched scent that she swore she could see the air turn brown. “And not just the usual Houston brown, either,” she added. Bob and Kelsey stood in front of the nook, wearing bandanas over their mouths and noses like two bandits. The opposum’s rear stuck up and its tail looked a bit loose.

“Isn’t it disgusting!” said Kelsey, gleefully.

“You know, they have people who will come out here and take care of this for you, dumbass” Amy told Bob.

“I’m not paying some guy $50 to haul off a dead ‘possum when I can do it myself,” said Bob.

“And I can see you’re doing a damn fine job of it, too,” said Amy. “How long have you been working on this?”

“Shut up and pull,” said Bob.

So, Amy pulled her own blue bandanna over her face, held her breath, and gripped the ‘possum’s tail. “Please tell me that the tail did not come off,” I begged her, when she relayed the story to me. “Oh, no, it didn’t come off,” she said, “I wasn’t about to pull on it that hard.” Kelsey’s enthusiasm had to be reigned in, however. Bob tugged on the hind feet. Then, Amy had a go at the tail again. Around and around, they took turns for the next hour or two. Then, they ordered pizza. The delivery boy tried, experienced at delivering to crack houses, dorm room, and flop houses, blanched, but said nothing.

After lunch, Kelsey got bored and went to a friend’s house to play. A phone call from him a few minutes later announced that he would be spending the night over there.

Finally, at about four thirty that afternoon. Amy handed Bob the Yellow Pages. “Call,” she ordered him. Bob opened his mouth to protest. “It’s almost five,” Amy continued. “Do you want to have this smell here all night? ‘Cause you ain’t staying at my place, Mr. Great White Hunter.” Bob’s shoulders dropped. He hung his head. “Here’s the phone,” she said, and thrust the already ringing receiver into his hand.

“I’m not white,” was Bob’s parting shot.

Ten minutes later, the exterminators arrived. One of the two men reached into the gap around the ‘possum, gave the body a little twist, and pulled the corpse out in one piece. “It took them all of five minutes,” Bob exclaimed. “Five minutes! They charged me 250 bucks for five minutes of work!”

“And worth every penny,” said Amy.

“What a scam,” insisted Bob. “I should go into business doing that.”

“You would be so successful, too,” said Amy.

“At least people would feel that they got their money’s worth from me.”

Thus began the short-lived tradition of the Christmas ‘Possum. The next year, we incorporated the opossum into our Christmas decorations. Inspired by a Seinfeld episode in which George’s father describes the celebration of “Festivus (for the rest of us),” we installed an aluminum pole in our living room, which Amy topped with her blue bandanna. Beneath the pole sat a stuffed toy opossum that I had found at a market in South Carolina. When Bob first saw it, he shrieked and grabbed his chest. “The Ghost of Christmas Past,” said Amy.

Eventually, Bob and Jane divorced, and Amy and Bob began dating. That relationship did not bring out the best in either of them. When they borke up, Amy moved to Colorado, and Bob began to date a sucession of the wrong women. After twenty years of plotting to leave Houston, I finally began a life in New England. They have opossums in New England. I saw one at Christmas, down near the river. When I tell this story about the Christmas ‘Possum, people up here think it is typical of Texas. It fits their image of hunting mad people who bungle after helpless furry game. I think of that when I pass the traps in front of the library.

The Christmas 'Possum, part 1

Outside of the library, the groundskeepers have set up four cages to capture some critter or another that is lurking around outside of the building. The library staff speculates that the game is either mink, skunk, or opossum. The unsuspecting prey is supposed to crawl into the cage and grab the bait, thereby hitting a trigger that will close the door of the cage, trapping him inside. When the exterminator arrives the next morning, he will cover the cage with a plastic box, which he will turn into a little gas chamber by pumping in carbon dioxide. He will then haul away the carcass to some distant dumping ground. This process, of course, does nothing to rid the property of furry pests. The grounds lie next to a river and across the street from large wooded lots, and animals have no conception of property lines. The efficiency and futility of the traps outside of the library, however, reminded me of a less efficient but equally futile encounter with urban wildlife. This encounter came to be known among its participants as the tale of the Christmas ‘Possum.

The story started one early September evening in the Heights neighborhood of Houston. A group of us were gathered on the porch at Bob’s house. By “us,” I mean myself, Amy, Babu, and Amy’s husband, Bill. Amy, Babu, and I were graduate students in history. Bob was our large, hairy history professor of Sicilian descent and a communist bent. We were all gathered for the occasion of cheering me up after another nasty break-up with another questionable boyfriend. Beer and wine flowed liberally, and Bob passed around cigars to whomever would smoke them.

Just as I was learning that cigars taste just as nasty as they smell, and Amy was learning that she liked a little buzz, and Bill was trying not to mind that Amy had a buzz, and Babu was launching into another tale of “m’cat Mosh,” and Bob was leaning back in his lawn chair like an impresario, his wife Jane walked out of the front door and gave a little yelp. “Oh look,” she exclaimed, “a baby opossum.” Sure enough, just where she pointed, a football-sized opossum climbed up the trunk of a sapling growing at the corner of the porch. The creature settled itself onto a branch and peered into the light at us.

As we all cooed at the creature, and expressed astonishment that it was not as ugly as the full-grown opossum that populated the neighborhood, Bob launched into a full-scale indictment of the entire opossum species. These were the creatures crawling in the walls of his house. They kept him awake all night. They clawed at the walls. They ate the garbage. Evil they were, he proclaimed. Evil. “Look at those beady little eyes,” he said, “those sharp little teeth. They want blood.”

“’Possum aren’t carnivorous,” Amy laughed.

“Oh yes they are,” insisted Bob, focusing his “Manson glare” on the opossum in the tree. “He’s just waiting me to drop my guard, then he’ll jump me. They move like lighting, you know.”

“’Possum don’t attack, you nutwad,” said Amy. “Why the hell do you think they call it ‘playin’ ‘possum’? Because they want you to think they are dead and go away.”

“Oh, no,” said Bob, “they’re trying to lure you closer. Then, they attack.”

Thus, the conversation proceeded, much to the mirth of everyone in attendance, particularly Bob’s ten-year-old son, Kelsey. Kelsey and Bill, in fact, conspired to tease Bob at every opportunity, shaking bushes and tossing tortilla chips from hiding places. Even after the party broke up, and for the next three months, Bob became known as the fierce ‘possum hunter, a giant gorilla of a man afraid that the opossum were digging their way through the walls of his bedroom to slaughter him in his bed then snack on his Bruno Maglis.

During those next three months, several things would happen that would alter all of our futures, most especially the opossum’s. First, Amy and Bill split up. Both being students with tiny paychecks, neither could afford to move out of their one bedroom apartment in the “Gulfton Ghetto.” Bob saw how stricken Amy was on the day after she and Bill had agreed to part. He empathized perhaps a little more than he cared to admit with the predicament of living with someone whom you no longer love, so invited Amy to stay at his house. Fortunately, both his wife and son liked the idea as well. Amy then saved a little money, and she and I got an apartment together in a complex known as the graduate student ghetto in Montrose.

Second, Bob located the nest of the opossum in the wall behind his sofa in his living room. His landlord had removed an old-fashioned heater from the wall, leaving an uncovered and unfinished nook in the wall. A musky smell emanated from the boards in this nook, making the sofa a rather unpleasant place to sit, particularly on warm days. Bob pulled and tugged at the sheet rock and exposed boards to get a glimpse of his quarry’s lair. Then, he went to the last remaining independently owned hardware store in America and found the most potent rat killer that the place sold. He took a huge chunk of the poison and wadded it up with some bread, making a deadly ball of dough that he crammed between the boards of the nook near the creature’s nest. “I just thought that the ‘possum would eat the dough, then crawl outside and die,” he would later plead.