Edward, novelist Kathleen Donohoe’s deceased grandfather, appeared to her while she was working on a writing project on one of the last days of 1997. At that time, he’d been dead for 10 years. “Opaque, but not quite see-through, he faded in earnest only at the knees,” she writes now, remembering the event and attempting to make sense of it at the age of 52.
Everything 52 knows, 25 will find out. At 52, it’s my grandfather who intrigues me. Though the mechanics of haunting held no interest then, now I wonder if it requires nerve, like bungee jumping, or if it’s a talent, like singing. In Irish folklore, thresholds are known as ‘thin’ places, where the boundaries between worlds are easily crossed. Entering another dimension could be like stepping from one room into another. Or maybe to haunt is to visit a city where you once lived, finding it both familiar and different, humming along just fine without you. It could be like visiting a museum where the ghost treads carefully around the exhibits. A sighting could be the dead tapping on the glass behind which the living live.
More picks about ghosts
We Salted Nannie: A Real-Life Southern Ghost Story
“Nannie, and the land around her, was thoroughly haunted. In less than a year we would break the lease, perform a binding ritual, and leave.”
It’s Dead Around Here
“A ghost town enthusiast searches for the essence of these scarcely populated locales.”
Our Haunted Apartment in Montreal
“Twenty years on, the author reflects on being trapped in a vortex of dark energy.”
