Window at Old State Capitol, Springfield, Illinois. Photo by Steve Givens
“Marilla says that a large family was raised in that old house long ago, and that it was a real pretty place, with a lovely garden and roses climbing all over it. It was full of little children and laughter and songs; and now it is empty, and nothing ever wanders through it but the wind. How lonely and sorrowful it must feel! Perhaps they all come back on moonlit nights…the ghosts of the little children of long ago and the roses and the songs…and for a little while the old house can dream it is young and joyous again.” – Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne Of Avonlea
I do, in fact, believe in ghosts. But not in fleeting gauzy images and rattling chains and, God help us, ectoplasm. I believe in the worn and tattered memories of those who have come and gone before us. For if we do something with our lives that makes a mark and leaves an impression, isn’t there something to be said for the idea that the maker of that mark might linger, too?
If a person raised their family in an old wooden house in an early French and German settlement just to the west of the Mississippi River, if they gave birth there and toiled there and celebrated there and ultimately suffered and died there, shouldn’t there be something left of them besides a portrait or a name in a Bible? Shouldn’t the echo of their footsteps somehow reverberate down through the stairwell of the ages and find the ear of a willing listener?
If a person from another time wrote a book or composed a song or painted a painting that touched and continues to touch the lives of those who come in contact with their work of art, shouldn’t the very life force and soul that brought forth that work of art be, even in some small way, touchable and discernable to those who live today?
Have you experienced moments where that sense of a “ghost” has haunted your mind, your experiences, your feelings of “I am not alone here?” Have you ever tied those moments to real or imagined ancestors? Or to those who lived in your house, worshipped in your church, walked down your street?
I’d love to hear your stories. I’d like to maybe do something with them, like turn them into songs…or put together a web journal or a performance. I don’t know. What do you think?
“Truly the universe is full of ghosts, not sheeted churchyard spectres, but the inextinguishable elements of individual life, which having once been, can never die, though they blend and change, and change again for ever.”
- H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mine
Detail of historic house at St. Louis County’s Faust Park. Photo by Steve Givens
Beautiful, Interesting.
THOUGHTS: 1pe 1:24 For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away:
Steve, I think you are on to something, and the Native Americans felt strongly the spirits of their departed relatives in the places where they had lived. In a different sort of experience, I get that “not alone” feeling when I read the stories my husband’s grandmother wrote of her pioneer childhood. She personified some objects in the stories: a glass ball (big marble), a basket-shaped vase, a green chair, a small clock, etc. These have been passed down through the family but some of them inadvertently came up for auction when my husband’s great aunt died. When I discovered the blue glass basket and some other items in a cardboard box lot for the auction, I knew I had to bid on it…and I won. In the story, Norm’s grandmother muses on whether she will be remembered…and because of the story she IS remembered, and the blue glass basket, with its cracks all mended, seems to carry some of her spirit, or “ghost” to this day.