[For this year’s
installment in my annual
Halloween series, I’ll be AmericanStudying ghosts in American society and
popular culture. Boo (in the best sense)!]
On a more
psychological and a more historical side to the enduring appeal of ghost
stories.
There isn’t a
lot of overlap between this AmericanStudier’s favorite
books when he was a ‘tween and those of my two ‘tween (although soon to be
teenage!) sons, but one series that does feature on both of our lists is Alvin
Schwartz and Stephen Gammell’s Scary Stories to Tell in
the Dark. Featuring three total books, from 1981’s original through 1984’s
More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark
and 1991’s
Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your
Bones, and soon to be a major
motion picture (if one that from the description I’m quite sure will be
loosely adapted at best from the books), the Scary Stories series has been an enduringly popular spooky presence
for young audiences for nearly four decades now. And while the books feature
scary stories in a number of different genres and forms, I would argue that the
ghost story is consistently at their heart, from the original’s “The Ghost with
the Bloody Fingers” to the sequel’s “The Guests” to the final book’s “The Dead
Hand” and many more. As most of this week’s texts and topics likewise
illustrate, there’s clearly just something about ghost stories that we keep coming
back to, that keeps them firmly and squirmingly in our collective psyche.
On one level, I
think ghost stories and the discomfort and fears they invoke appeal to
different elements in our psyches than do other horror tales. Much of horror is
about external threats, bogeymen or creatures clearly distinct from us; certainly
some of them can turn ordinary humans into threats as well (such as vampires
and zombies), but nonetheless the fundamental threat in those kinds of stories
comes from something overtly not-us (and thus easy not to believe in). Whereas
ghosts are entirely us, our fellow humans with whom we know for a fact we share
this world—and given the belief across religions and cultures in some form of
an afterlife, it’s not difficult to imagine that we likewise share the world
with humans we can no longer see but who remain in some form. Even for someone
who does not believe in either an afterlife or ghosts (as I will admit I do
not), I guess it would be more accurate to say that I’m pretty sure those
things don’t exist—but there’s a level of uncertainty compared to, for example,
my certainty that vampires and zombies do not exist. To put it simply, it’s
difficult if not impossible to separate the concept of ghosts from other forms
of spirituality that define much of human society and existence—and the individual
and collective needs for those spiritual beliefs thus help explain the scarier
flipside represented by ghost stories.
At the same
time, to live in the world in 2018 in particular means that we’re surrounded
constantly by layer upon layer of history. Even a relatively young nation like
the United States has centuries of such histories layered beneath us, to say
nothing of the Native American histories that extend back much further still
(and help explain ghost stories like those about the
wendigo, of course). Yet much of the time, at least in the U.S. as I argued
in comparing it to Rome in
this post, we act as if history is something that can be localized to particular
sites or spaces, something we can visit and learn about but not necessarily a
constant presence in our communities. Deep down I think we know better though,
and perhaps the continued popularity of ghost stories also reflects a recognition
that the
past isn’t dead, it’s not even past—and thus that at any moment it can rise
up from the ground or out of the air and grab hold of us. That’s a pretty scary
thought to be sure, but as the more complicated and even friendly ghosts in
many of this week’s stories illustrate, it doesn’t have to be, not if we first
admit the ghostly but real presence of the past and then see where those
stories and ghosts might lead us.
October Recap
this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other ghost stories or histories you’d share?
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