It’s not a strange occurrence for me to be surrounded by ghosts. Exposures of people long past, impressions of things that used to be, objects imbued with meaning of people who are no longer around to remember or be remembered. And I think that's part of what scares us the most about ghosts: the fact that they still carry intention and meaning within them even after their body has decayed, and that we have forgotten that ambition, and it has made them angry.
I had an uncle, my father’s uncle to be specific. His name was Charlie– may he rest in peace–and he was a tailor for beautiful and ornate wedding gowns while he was alive. When his belongings were divided up, some pieces of furniture were given to me and now sit in my room, holding my clothes, my jewelry, my bedside lamp; cradling snapshots of my life in their warm mahogany. Despite my familiarity with these objects, I’m afraid I wasn’t all too familiar with Uncle Chuck himself. In fact, I’m not sure I ever met the man in person. Still today I am unsure if he was shut out from the family or if he was just antisocial. Knowing my family, it was probably both.
The meaning Chuck invested in the gorgeous nightstand and dresser set I now own has died with him, and for the most part so has his story. I’ll never be able to hear him speak of his passions, of his decor, of his lamps. Never be able to ask if the rumors were true, never be able to find kinship in that, together. Yet some small bit of him still remains in the way I sometimes ask him questions I know will never be answered, in the fond way my family still speaks of him in the rare moments that they do. I don’t think he haunts my dresser or my nightstand, no, but I like to think he checks in every once and a while to see how I’m doing.
Just like people may leave their souls behind, I believe objects can do much of the same, and none so much as houses. Two come immediately to mind: my school and my home. People used to live in the building I called my school from Pre-K through 6th grade. They’d hold balls in the assembly room, and sleep in the 4th grade classroom. The servants would travel up the backstairs like I would in a rush to get to class and the kitchen in the basement, well... it's probably always been a kitchen. But after hours, when all the staff has headed home, and the lights are shut leaving the frigid marble lit only by the bloody, red, safety lights, there is an unquenchable emptiness that can be felt throughout the bones of the school. An aching maw of abandonment that once you notice it, isn't even filled during the sunlight hours. Even if the corridors are filled to bursting with growing minds, and creativity, and luke-warm kindergarten millet, you can taste the loneliness in the air of a home without its family. A sanctuary left and forgotten by those it was meant to protect.
The house I live in used to be a nunnery for a nearby church. In the attic where I sleep now there used to be wall-to-wall cots, humbly laid for them to sleep in. They could stare out at yet untilled farmland from the window in the front room on the second floor which has been relegated to a storeroom for so long I swear the old clothes there must have their own ghosts. The basement is just as cluttered as every space my grandmother sets her eyes on, and the mountains of old tools and workout equipment and fishing rods lean together to make even more corners for the sorority of pious deceased that watch me as I load up the dryer.
Within my soul, at least for this brief bubble of time, there is peace. I have looked at the essence of myself in the mirror and I am satisfied. I can say this without a shadow of a doubt. I have not always been like this. I’ve had to go through countless iterations of myself to get to who I am today, and a little part of me looks at the ghosts of all the people within me that I had to forget in order to become “me,” and I fear for their resurgence. Not that I fear their anger, or what they might say or do to harm me, but rather that their anger might drown me out when I say I still love them. I will never be them again, just as they have never been me, and yet we are all one and the same.
A parting message to those I have left behind: I thank you all and hope to bid you hang your hats and sit by the fire a while. And just like them, I hope that one day I will be able to pass my role onto the next me, for though I love myself there is always more to come. To all those who have come before and all those that will come to be, I hope you know that you will never truly be forgotten; the world in its essence will remember you. I hope that whatever may await us be serene enough to rest in, for though this world is but what we make of it, there’s only so much life we can handle.
Heavily influenced by Jacob Geller’s video essay Control, Anatomy, and the Legacy of the Haunted House
Scillian Raaf Panepinto is a junior Illustration major at the School of Visual Arts. They have long enjoyed writing in all its forms, and have attempted to mimic nearly all of them with varying degrees of success.