Truly Haunted

In this age of ghost movies that rely on “boo” tactics and images of people being thrown around rooms, a very important fact has been mostly forgotten: a good ghost story is not about the ghost. It's about the people being haunted by the ghost. If it's done well, the audience will eventually realize that the ghost is not the only thing haunting those people – possibly not even the most frightening thing.

The Haunting is the best example of that kind of ghost story. The book (The Haunting Of Hill House), by Shirley Jackson, is one of my favorite novels – and the original movie, filmed in 1963 and directed by Robert Wise, is one of the few adaptations that actually does justice to the source material. In fifty years, very few movies have been made that can rival it in spookiness. And the wonderful thing about it is that no high-tech special effects were used – it was all great location, good acting, lighting, choice of film stock, camera angels, sound effects and music, and on one occasion a broom handle applied to an old-fashioned, moulded door. You never see a ghost.

So how can a movie that never shows a ghost be spooky? It starts with a good story and some troubled characters. The premise in the beginning is that some places are just bad. Maybe they started out that way, maybe someone made them that way, or maybe it was a combination of the two. Somehow a sediment of despair, sorrow, and fear has accumulated there, and it affects everyone who visits. The focal point of this wrongness is Hill House, a place built by an extremely authoritarian man whose version of Christianity makes the Puritans look like a bunch of free-love hippies. He wasn't content just to build an imposing pile of a house – he has to make sure that the place is a maze, both mentally and physically, where people are lost and eventually trapped. The angles are deliberately off by a few degrees; doors will silently swing shut if you've left them open.

The real setting of Hill House was a hotel in England, a beautiful place that is made sinister by lighting, special film stock, camera angles, etc. You get a glimpse of how nice the place really is when you look at the scenes done in the breakfast room and the music room. Turn the lights down and focus on some of the details of that house that would seem charming and quaint in the daylight, and suddenly you see faces among the leaf patterns on the wall and doorknobs that look like they're watching you.

Add the right characters to this setting, and things just have to happen. Professor Markway (Richard Johnson) is the perfect guy to get the ball rolling. He's a scientist to the core, looking for observable phenomena that can be recorded and analyzed. He believes that what seems to be supernatural is really natural-but-misunderstood. His wife (played by Lois Maxwell) does not agree – she is not only skeptical, but aggressively so, and very annoyed with him for embarrassing her in the upper-class circles in which she runs. Luke (Russ Tamblyn) is a spoiled rich kid who is simply hoping that he can make a profit on the old pile once he inherits it. Theo (Claire Bloom) is able to sense the thoughts and feelings of others, an ability that has often made her unhappy. And then there's Eleanor.

Unfortunately for Eleanor (Julie Harris), she has something in common with one of the ghosts of Hill House. This similarity makes her especially vulnerable to the house. On top of that, she's a sheltered woman who was never able to spread her wings until this odd trip in which she gets to belong to the team of investigators. She falls in love, and the love can't be fulfilled.

I've always thought that this team of characters could have carried a TV series for at least a couple of seasons, if it were well-written. TV executives would probably balk at the cost of special effects for such a show, but that's the irony – CGI ruins ghost stories. The old-fashioned, clever, and inexpensive effects of this movie are the best sort of effects to use for story lines that rely on the psychology of the characters – and the psychology of the audience. When you watch The Haunting you believe you've seen things that were actually never shown.

That's true movie-making genius. And that's why The Haunting makes my top ten list.   

My Poltergeist

Let's face it – latchkey kids are the perfect target for a haunting. We're all alone. We're hungry (and sick of cheese sandwiches). And we've seen all the monster movies - we know that evil forces are out there, just waiting to gobble us up.

But what are you going to do? Mom and Dad are working to keep a roof over our heads, and we're too old for babysitters. So we walk home from school, let ourselves into our scary, empty houses, check in the closets and under the bed (baseball bat in hand) and settle down in front of the TV and/or game thingee with a crummy cheese sandwich. We find some diversion to keep us from freaking out until more people come home and turn the empty house back into a haven.

If you were a ghost, wouldn't YOU pick on that kid? Plus, you would have the advantage of surprise. In an ordinary neighborhood, who's expecting a ghost? We don't have a lot of abandoned mansions nearby. We're kind of expecting to get attacked by monsters of another kind.

I think my neighborhood was typical in a lot of ways. It was suburban, and we had a resident monster. She was called Mano Loco, and I suspect she was a spin-off of La Llorona, the vengeful spirit of a woman who killed children. Being a kid myself, I took that very personally. But sightings of Mano Loco were rare – the monsters we were most likely to encounter were human. And as a kid gets older, our expectations change. When you're 5, you think Frankenstein is going to get you. When you're 10 or 11, you're more likely to expect the crazy guy with the knife.

I think I almost encountered that guy once, or his close cousin. I got home from school one day with a really big problem – I had to go to the bathroom so bad, I almost didn't get the front door unlocked in time. I rushed into the house without even closing the door – the only smart thing I did was to lock the bathroom door.

As I sat there taking care of my business, my mind started nagging at me. You didn't close the front door, it warned. Bad idea.

Still concerned with more pressing matters, I brushed that off. No one's going to break in, I said with 99% confidence. It's not like crazy guys are waiting behind the bushes outside the house 24/7 . . .

Maybe they aren't. But I heard a sound in the hall, and then I saw shadow feet in the gap under the door. I ran to the door (I can't remember if I tripped over my shorts or not) and grabbed the doorknob just as it began to turn.

You may remember, I said I had locked the door. So why was the bad guy on the other side able to turn it? Because this oddball doorknob was designed with a hole in the center – if you inserted something into the hole, you could press on the mechanism and turn the knob, opening the door. This is an important point for two reasons: 1., if you couldn't turn the knob, you couldn't unlock the door, and 2. You actually had to have a knob like that to know how to get it open. Which means that the person on the other side of the door, attempting to ambush me in the bathroom, was probably one of my neighbors. I was only 10 or 11 at that time, but I grasped that little detail immediately, and to say that it freaked me out is a serious understatement.

I held onto that knob for dear life. The person on the other end kept trying to turn it. Fortunately, this was not comparable to arm wrestling – my desperate strength was just enough to keep the knob from turning. I'm not sure how long this contest of wills went on, because I think I was suffering from time dilation by that point. I just hung on until the galaxy stopped spinning and time itself came to an end.

Then I peeked under the door. No one stood there anymore. It took me a while to work up the courage to come out. When I did, I fled and stayed at a neighbor's house until my mom came home.

I never did figure out which neighbor tried to ambush me. And from that point on, I felt more than a little paranoid about being home alone. I think that may have been what attracted the poltergeist.

Poltergeists are “mischievous ghosts.” They like to move stuff around, to occasionally throw things, and to make loud noises. I had a friend who was trying to clean up her mother-in-law's house – the woman had been a pathological pack rat whose home was stuffed to the rafters. My friend had a lot of trouble making progress. She would sort books into separate piles, leave the room for a moment, then come back to find the books had been re-shuffled into one giant, precarious stack in the middle of the room. That's pretty typical behavior for a poltergeist.

My ghost only had one trick up its ectoplasmic sleeve. It demonstrated that trick to me one day after I came home from school. I was standing in the family room, setting my books on the table, when I was overcome by the certainty that someone was in the house with me. I turned, listening as hard as I could. Then something began to come down the hall toward me, stomping its foot and snapping its fingers as it came.

Let me clarify something. The noise I heard was not the sound a human foot and human fingers would make. It was grotesquely amplified, as if freakin' Godzilla were stomping his way down that hall, headed straight for me. And the snap was like the sound high voltage wires would make as the giant, mutated Komodo dragon walked straight through them. It went like this: THUMP! SNAP! THUMP! SNAP!

That line of THUMP-SNAPS would be a lot longer if I had actually hung out to listen to them. Instead, I ran out the front door as if my tail were on fire. I ran to my friend's house. And if this were a movie, this would be the part where I told my friend what happened, and she didn't believe me. That's what happened in real life too. So of course, I had to take her back to my house and show her.

No, really. We were that dumb. You would have been shouting, “Don't go back into that house, don't go up those stairs, don't go into that basement!” I didn't actually have a basement or any stairs, but if I had, I'm sure we would have climbed and/or descended to our doom. We went back into the house. We stood in the family room. We waited for a long time. Nothing happened.

She smirked at me and said, “See?”

And then something in the hall went, “THUMP! SNAP! THUMP! SNAP!” moving right toward us.

I think she may actually have gone airborne at that point. She zoomed out my front door with me right on her tail. But I admit, even in the midst of all that terror, some little part of me was saying, I told you so, with a ridiculous amount of satisfaction.

So for months afterward, I tried to avoid being home alone. But the THUMPSNAPPER still managed to ambush me a few more times. Each time it happened, I zoomed out the front door before I could get a good look at the supernatural prankster. And each time it happened, I had no trouble getting away. But then something unavoidable happened. I got sick.

I had to stay home in bed. And I was so sick, for a few days I didn't even think about the THUMPSNAPPER. I just sort of faded in and out of consciousnesses, halfway listening to the TV set on in the background.

Finally I got to the point where I was feeling better. I was wide awake in the back bedroom, watching some game show. And suddenly I heard the THUMPSNAPPER coming.

But this time, it started at the other end of the hall, between me and the front door. I couldn't get out. I looked at the window, and for one moment I contemplated trying to climb out.

Instead of doing that, I hid behind the door. And I didn't cower there. I waited, because I wanted to finally confront this thing that kept terrorizing me, that kept chasing me out of my own house. I had had enough. I was ready for a showdown.

Well – almost ready. I hid there as the noise came closer, my heart pounding. It reached the end of the hall and stopped there. It was on the other side of the door. I could actually feel a presence. And finally, I screwed up my courage enough to look.

Nothing was there. The THUMPSNAPPER had simply evaporated. That's when I knew that my poltergeist was nothing more than a loud noise. It could startle me, it could annoy me, but it couldn't hurt me. Its reign of terror was over. I never heard it again.

Years later, I was reading a book about ghosts and saw the word poltergeist. I had never heard it before, and I didn't know the word back when I was actually being haunted by one. I read something interesting about those noisy ghosts. The noises they make often sound unnaturally amplified. That's when I realized what had actually haunted me, years earlier. The THUMPSNAPPER was a textbook case, though it never threw anything at me. It was more playful than mean.

So if your kid tells you about something that scared them, something they never saw but that made REALLY loud noises, believe them. Tell them what a poltergeist is. Maybe they can confront it and make it go away. Or it may get bored and go away by itself.

Or it may just hang around indefinitely, waiting for the right moment to go . . .

. . . “THUMP! SNAP! THUMP!”

The Ghost

“Wolfy fetches things,” said Ebony, who seemed much more outgoing than Ivory. “What does Brat do?”

Hawkeye scratched the cat between his ears. “Brat is the eyes in the back of my head. And the sensitive nose I don’t have, and the ears that hear ten times as well.” She stared into Brat’s intelligent eyes and thought of something else. “And the point of view I need to put my feet on solid ground.”

Brat gave her a slow blink, as if to say, Of course!

How did I ever get along without you and Wolfy? she wondered. How could I stand to lose you?

But that was not something she could bear to think about as they sped South on I-1. Once they crossed The Break, it seemed far too likely she could find out how.

They drove for five hours, pulling into rest stops along the highway at regular intervals. It was at one of these stops that Hawkeye learned something new about Neighbors.

Adult humans tended to maintain a polite distance from the Neighbors once they got a good look at them, but small children couldn’t resist coming over to pet Wolfy and Brat. The Neighbors let them, even spoke to them gently, answered their questions about the doggy and the kitty. The Neighbors seemed almost equally interested in the children, though Hawkeye wasn’t sure why she thought that. They weren’t acting overtly affectionate or curious, at least not in the human sense. Maybe it was just that they answered questions so patiently, never assuming the children wouldn’t understand them. Maybe it was their tone of voice, which differed noticeably from the one they used with adults.

Finally, just outside of Middle, the biggest town on the North side of The Break, a little girl asked Ebony, “Why does the doggy have to wear those straps around his body?”

“That’s a harness,” replied Ebony. “It keeps the doggy secure. If he got scared, he could wiggle out of a collar, and he might run onto the highway and get hit by a vehicle. But with this harness, he stays right here where I can protect him.”

“Why would the doggy get scared?” asked the girl, who looked seven or eight years old.

“He might be startled by a loud noise, or by another doggy who barked or tried to bite.”

It wasn’t until they all climbed back in the van and they had re-entered the sparse traffic that Hawkeye remembered the little girl’s questions: Why...? Why...?

She asked it twice! Why! And Ebony answered her both times without hesitation, with none of the outrage that Neighbors usually demonstrated when adult humans asked Why? And now Hawkeye couldn’t ask him, Why not?

She felt sure she had never read anything to indicate Neighbors would answer a child’s Why. Maybe she was the only one who had ever noticed. Or maybe anyone else who had noticed just assumed the Neighbors were more inclined to be patient with children, because their questions were innocent.

Maybe the ambassadors humans had been sending to Neighbors were too old for the job. Or perhaps they should be taking their children along to the meetings. Children and assistance animals. Hawkeye ought to mention that in her report . . .

She became so involved in this imaginary report, she didn’t notice the miles slipping by, the signs of human habitation becoming sparser, until she woke from her revery with a start to notice that the sun had descended halfway to the horizon and now the Interstate stretched through a wasteland.

Hawkeye stared out the van window, her perfect vision recording details that would have been missed by most others. She saw sparse scrub and cracked earth, seared by the hot season. She saw small rodents nibbling on seed bundles at the tips of dry twigs. She saw an otherwise empty landscape that seemed to stretch forever. Looking intently into the distance, Hawkeye couldn’t focus on the lone figure standing on the side of the road until her window framed it, and the world froze around her.

Caught in that motionless frame, Hawkeye focused her gaze from far-seeing to close, and the blurry figure became solid. Yet somehow it remained shadowy, featureless, except for eyes that trapped her in its dead regard.

Ghost . . .

“In Evernight,” whispered the ghost, with a woman’s voice, “closing doors and the waiting. Have the pills running up stairs? Things are here and taking for the Wolves, hear the lark ascending. The Loops and loops the loops, so through-and-through, speaking Spirits of Glory with Dagger. Quiet, Hawkeye! Be quiet . . .”

The world jolted forward again with an explosion of movement and sound, and Hawkeye drew a breath to tell the Neighbors about the ghost.

Then held it. Quiet, Hawkeye, be quiet!

In all its baffling ramble, that had been the ghost’s clearest piece of advice. Or was it clear at all? Did it really mean that she shouldn’t tell what it had said, or would silence serve her better further down the path?

But inside that tangle of words: speaking Spirits of Glory with Dagger. What dagger? The sort that stabs? Hawkeye drew another breath and said, “Boss –”

But stopped when Brat bit her thumb.

-from Spirits Of Glory, by Emily Devenport

The People In The South Were Gone

One morning, the people in the North woke up, and the people in the South were gone.

This is the first thing every child on Jigsaw learned about the Disappearance. Since that day, no one had learned much more.

No Northerner saw it happen. No one saw flashing lights, or heard thunderous booms. A few people who had been on the phone with Southerners got cut off mid-conversation, but at that time of night, there hadn’t been many of them. The Northerners didn’t catch wind of what had happened until a freight driver almost crashed off the end of the fractured Interstate highway at 4:30 a.m. Hawkeye could imagine what that had been like for him, slamming on his brakes, skidding to a halt just inches from destruction, then getting out and looking, first at the smooth stretch of highway the way he had just come, and then at the broken chunks of road up ahead, and finally down at the perfectly straight, even line of division six inches from his toes.

History books called that line The Break. Hawkeye had seen pictures of it. It looked like a slice, as if someone had taken a sharp knife to a hunk of cheese.

By then, people had already noticed the South wasn’t answering phone calls. Networks were down, diagnostics were being run. But prior to that morning, most technical difficulties that occurred on Jigsaw could safely be attributed to odd fluxes in its magnetic fields or to its equally odd gravitational anomalies. Fractured Time had become a familiar occurrence, so no one thought anything was seriously wrong until they saw what had happened to the Interstate. Once that had been established, authorities converged on the area.

Everybody looked. Everybody scratched their heads. Everybody looked again. The sun came up and cast an ominous light over the scene.

In the South, that light cast shadows on empty streets. Nothing moved, living or mechanical. That’s what Northern investigators reported when they came back with more questions than answers, that even automated systems had shut down and could not be made to start up again. Errant winds teased loose shutters or pushed hanging doors shut, and the footfalls of hazard-suited Northerners echoed here and there. Their respirators vented carbon dioxide as they took pictures, consulted monitors inside their helmets, and searched for evidence. No blood stained floors, or walls, or any other surface. Yet it could not quite be said that there were no signs of struggle. Some things were broken, or spilled, or out of order. Some things were missing. And in their place, artifacts had been discovered.

Hawkeye had combed through hundreds of books and electronic databases, but none of them described these artifacts. She wondered if this was because the artifacts were simply indescribable, too baffling to categorize? Or was there another reason? Something less honest, a desire to keep discoveries a secret until they could be properly exploited by those in power? Or worse, were they so terrible, news of them would have spread panic?

Were they beautiful things, practical things? Or had the Southern cities become shores upon which the flotsam and jetsam of Fractured Time washed?

If anyone knew, they weren’t saying. Possibly the investigators were too busy scanning for toxins, for high levels of radiation, for anything that might have caused a mass death and/or disappearance. They found nothing beyond normal parameters. They kept looking anyway, because despite the lack of evidence, something nagged at them, something that never quite seemed to be there when they looked over their shoulders, yet also something that seemed to be right out in plain sight, if only they knew how to see it. They looked, and measured, and documented.

And then their equipment stopped working. One second before it stopped, every one of them received a transmission over their helmet communicators. Later no one could agree whether the voice they had heard had been male or female, whether it shouted or whispered, sounded angry or alarmed. But everyone agreed about what it said:

“Get out of here.”

No one argued whether they should leave. Everyone boarded their aircraft and returned North. They flew over a countryside empty of any life that had come from Earth. Native fauna still lived there, but no wild creatures ventured into the abandoned cities again. Everyone knew that. The Neighbors said it was so.

And so did the ghosts.

-from Spirits Of Glory, by Emily Devenport

About Spirits Of Glory

One morning, the people of the North woke up and the people of the South were gone. That’s the first thing every child learns on the colony world of Jigsaw. But for one girl, knowing about The Disappearance is not enough. Hawkeye wants to know why. That's why she spent half her life researching The Disappearance. And that's also why eight Neighbors show up on her doorstep, demanding that she accompany them into the Forbidden Cities ruled by the Southern gods – to speak with the Spirits of Glory. Everyone thinks Hawkeye is an expert on Neighbors, these almost-humans who move, talk, and think as if they were born inside one of the Time Fractures. But she can't imagine what they want to ask the ghosts of their ancestors, or why they need her to go along. The Southern gods caused every human inhabitant of the Southern cities to disappear overnight – what else might they do?

But the Northern gods say Hawkeye should go – and her curiosity won't let her refuse, even though she's going into more danger than she can imagine. Pain and puzzlement wait along the broken interstate, along with scavengers who want to kill them all. Hawkeye's questions only generate more questions as they move farther and farther into the South, right into the heart of the Disappearance, until Hawkeye's questions have all been answered.

Even the ones she was afraid to ask.