My mother saw or felt ghosts regularly when I was a child. Once, at a bed and breakfast out in the country, miles away from anything, she told me she’d seen a young girl in the glassed-in sunporch off our room. It was very late at night, and there were no other living guests besides us. “She didn’t seem mad,” my mother said, then stepped into the bathroom to wash her face. I was twelve years old and plenty reassured. My child's logic worked like this: if my mother could see ghosts, then she could also be trusted to accurately read their intentions, and if she said the girl's ghost was harmless, then she was. I fully believed that my mom saw spirits, but I never had any expectation of seeing a ghost myself. This was something only she could, or wanted, to do.
Last month, I read North Woods by Daniel Mason, which is a novel about what happens at one homestead over centuries—deaths and births and murders and natural disasters and many, many ghosts. I hardly ever think about the fact that I live in a house that was inhabited by my ancestors, but this book left me no choice. Normally, I think of my house as just my home, the house my children will grow up in, a place so crammed with our own lives and memories that there’s no room for anything else. I only remember when the light catches my great-grandmother’s portrait as I pass by.
Over the years, people have asked if I “feel” any of my deceased family members in the house. The answer is an unequivocal no. There are moments when I feel a sudden recognition that I am standing in the same spot my great-grandmother must’ve stood, looking at a hardly changed view (more trees, fewer cows). Or that I’m doing the same thing she would’ve been doing more than a hundred years ago (changing diapers, or weeding the garden, or lugging something very heavy).
When my own grandmother was dying in a hospital from a stroke during the pandemic, I sent her a voice memo about this very thing. I told her I was standing at the sink in the kitchen where the sun was coming in the window onto my face, and I was watching my children play in the side yard in the way she must’ve once watched her children play, and her mother-in-law before her. I cried when I hit send and my mother and grandmother cried together behind their masks while listening to it, the three of us crying together across a great distance in a way that felt transcendent. That’s as close as I’ve gotten to anything spiritual.
But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that ghosts exist. If that’s true, I feel certain that all of mine have left. The last time I saw my grandmother, she pleaded to have her and my grandfather’s ashes scattered on “the farm” as she called my house. I, of course, agreed. But after she passed my grandfather made it very clear that he was vehemently against this plan.
He told us that he was miserable as a child and young man in this house, on this farm. Always cold, always working. He wanted his ashes scattered on the golf course he’d made in the next town over, where he had sculpted smooth rolling greens out of rocky cow pasture, or better yet in the marshes of Lowcountry South Carolina where he caught crabs and shrimp in a cage off the dock and watched the Yankees play in his plush recliner, the air-conditioning on full blast.
I’ll admit, it made me a little sad to hear this. If you’ve read this Substack for more than one minute you’ll know I’m the sentimental sort. For my whole life, the farm had been talked about as a kind of Eden—when my husband and I bought it back into the family, we were celebrated like heroes. How was I to make sense of the fact that the person who was born in the house, who lived here the longest, hated it and wished never to return?
In North Woods, Daniel Mason writes, “The only way to understand the world as something other than a tale of loss is to see it as a tale of change.” Our farm is an Eden to me, regardless of what came before. I can’t see it any other way. And so we plant trees that we’ll never see mature and perennials that will continue to bloom long after we’re gone. And when it’s all said and done, I’ll plan to come back and haunt the shit out of this beautiful, beloved place.
This is beautiful. I grew up in rural England where ghost stories and sightings of ghosts were common place. But i was always scared. I wish I could’ve had that brave confidence you had when your mother talked about seeing them, how lovely. I love the idea of “haunted houses” being a gift & a way to connect with the past- I’ll lean into this next time I’m home, sleeping in the flat my parents bought that turns out to be an old haunted psychiatric hospital 👻
My grandmother grew up on a farm in Ontario, the oldest of 9 children. She left at 18 and never looked back. When she heard that my husband and I brought a farm in upstate NY, the first word out of her mouth was , “why?”. Haha.