As a kid, I got easily spooked. We lived on the edge of a creaking, bubbling, swampy-dark woods; at night, my mom sang “The Unquiet Grave,” a haunting folksong where a young woman begs her dead lover to speak to her. (He does speak, to creepy effect!) But I grew up to become a skeptic, fully aware that the keenest dangers we face come from living human beings rather than undead ghouls. Naturally, I became a fiction writer, devoted to telling plausible stories about plausible characters in plausible situations.
So it was as a dedicated realist writer that I began writing The Spirits (W.W. Norton, 2026), about the twenty-one-year-old farmgirl Sister Whitby, who feels responsible for her father’s violent death. (Spirits, initially, is simply what she’s been drinking!) The story takes place on Christmas Eve, on the ninth anniversary of that traumatic stormy night, which everyone in the Whitby family remembers differently and nobody talks about. But I hit a snag: Though I created this auspicious event, even I didn’t know what happened. Sister Whitby’s memories are muddled, and Daddy is dead.
Yes, redemption was on the menu. Yes, the graveyard was right outside. Yes, I called it a Michigan Christmas Carol, but still I resisted indulging any wraiths! For so long I had written the supernatural off as implausible, and I thought, surely, we could manage this scene without such fanciful notions. But the longer I sat at the table with my characters, the more haunted they turned out to be—and there was no denying that Daddy’s ghost was in the room. What was a realist writer to do? To figure out how to proceed, I took an inventory of some literary phantoms.
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Hamlet’s father’s ghost, a big bully of a patriarch, arrives at the beginning of the story and gets the action going. He is actually quite transparent (har har) in what he demands of Hamlet Jr.: to “Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder,” presumably by offing Uncle Claudius, his father’s killer and his new stepfather. We may ask whether the ghost is “real” or a figment of Hamlet’s imagination. Turns out, Shakespeare didn’t have to decide, because the story works equally well whether the reader believes the figure is ectoplasm in the castle courtyard or is a psychological manifestation of Hamlet’s nagging conscience.
In addition to scaring the bejesus out of Hamlet and demanding blood, the ghost informs the audience exactly how the murder occurred. But not every story benefits from such truth-telling. I decided to let the uncertainty about events become a story element: the work the family must do this evening is to puzzle out what actually happened on that murky passion-filled night. Everyone must work together to create the story that allows them to move into the future. The reader learns the truth along with the family members—and despite them.
Banquo’s ghost: In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, only the guilty-as-hell party himself can see the ghost of the man he has just had assassinated. The royal banquet is supposed to be a celebration of Macbeth’s power, but the presence of the morally upright ghost spoils everything! Banquo doesn’t have to do or say a thing to trigger Macbeth’s disintegration. Macbeth has ordered the murder out of fear, and now fear comes back in spades. Unlike the bossy Hamlet Senior, Banquo achieves his haunting this without lifting a finger—such is the power of well-placed ghost!
Marley’s ghost: It struck me with the subtlety of a shotgun blast that if my story took place on Christmas Eve, A Christmas Carol was already befogging the room. Dickens’s first ghost, the gloomy remnant of Jacob I-wear-the-chains-I-forged-in-life Marley is gloomy but much improved in moral character by death—he is forthcoming and tells only the truth. The three ensuing ghosts are similarly trustworthy, and the message is made clear: Scrooge must choose between eternal suffering and sweet redemption. And presto, he buys the goose, opens his heart to Tiny Tim, and amends his business practices wholesale, just as Dickens’s wanted his wealthy Victorian readers to do in this cautionary tale advocating social change.
In my own cautionary tale, Sister needs redemption as much as Scrooge does; events of the past have made her bitter, ungenerous, and generally no fun to be around. In The Spirits, I had to tread more lightly. Imagine if Sister woke up from her grumpy stupor and exclaimed: “I am as light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a (school‑girl). I am as giddy as a drunken (woman). A merry Christmas to everybody! A happy New Year to all the world!” While I knew I needed a happy ending for my Christmas story, such an epiphany would inspire my readers to pitch The Spirits into the hearth fire and say humbug.
Beloved: I’ve always found Toni Morrison’s daughter the scariest ghost of all, this creature who has been wronged by her mother and by the whole slave-holding society. Beloved returns as an unquenchable force demanding more and more nourishment and attention from Sethe. This ghost is an unsophisticated agent of revenge who has not been made wiser by death, only more powerful. She has come back to take revenge on the one who loved her most, even luring Sethe’s lover into sexual betrayal! Sethe has an unsolvable problem, and she has to find a way to metabolize her guilt and live with it if she is to survive this haunting.
The thumping in the “Tell Tale Heart”: We never see a ghost in Poe’s story but clearly the knocking on the floorboards that inspires our unnamed murderer to confess his crime comes from the other side. Sounds like a good job for a ghost, driving guilty parties to confess. And Poe, like all the great spooky writers, never explains the thumping but allows the mystery to linger!
Lincoln in the Bardo: So often, writers present an afterlife that is an orderly, a moral place where all that happened in life becomes clear. But not George Saunders. His Bardo is filled with confused people who wander aimlessly and bemoan their fates, as muddled and miserable as they were in life; some of these poor creatures don’t even know they are dead, especially those who died without time or inclination to reflect—they wonder why they have to live in wooden boxes now. We would not trust mixed-up creepers like these to guide us the way we trust Marley!
The Unquiet Grave: Finally, I decided to look back at the folksong my mother used to sing—to be honest, this ponderous, haunting tune still gives me goosebumps. Therein, a young woman sits on her dead lover’s grave for a year, begging to see him again. The song’s epiphany occurs when the ghost finally arises; he tells the forsaken lover to get lost, go make a new life, stop haunting him. Ha! I love the twist, that it is sometimes the living who are haunting the dead. I take the message to heart. After otherworldly trouble shakes up folks in The Spirits, this skeptical literary writer, yours truly, returns to the living to (plausibly) resolve the holiday story!
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The Spirits by Bonnie Jo Campbell is available from W. W. Norton and Company.