Ghosts Don't Need a Brochure

The haunted-city rankings are out, and Harrow Corners isn't on them. Good.

Somebody published a study. Ranked American cities by spookiness, near as I can tell, like they were handing out ribbons at a livestock show. New Orleans took first. Savannah was in there. A few other places that have built their whole economy around the fact that somebody died dramatically inside their city limits a hundred and fifty years ago.

I read it on Loretta Fitch's tablet because she brought it over with the raspberry preserves and seemed to think I'd find it exciting. I found it instructive, and not in the way she meant.

Here is what those cities have in common: they went and told everybody. They strung up the lanterns and hired the tour guides and started charging nine dollars for a walking map of places where, they promise you, something unpleasant occurred. They courted it. Made it a line item. And now they are stuck with it seven nights a week, rain or shine, plus a podcast.

Harrow Corners has never done anything so foolish.

We've had the Hendersons' boy come back from the lake. We had the year the county fair ran nine days longer than scheduled and nobody could leave, though most folks eventually stopped trying and just made the best of it. The third porch step on this house isn't there on Sundays. It's there Monday through Saturday, solid as a campaign promise on election morning, and then Sunday it simply isn't. I put my foot through the absence of it once and that was enough. Now I step over that spot without thinking, the same way I step around Myrtle Obbard's opinion on casseroles.

You manage what's yours. You do not put it on a banner.

The trouble with those ranked cities isn't that they have ghosts. Every place has something it can't entirely explain. The trouble is they started treating the unexplainable as an attraction. You invite the crowd in, you negotiate terms, you sell them the experience. And the thing you invited in starts expecting to be consulted. It gets an opinion. It starts showing up to meetings.

That is not a ghost problem. That is a management problem.

I have never once argued with the step. I have never set up a chair beside it to document the phenomenon or invited anyone from a university to come look. I have not written to the county. I cover the mirror in the back hallway when it needs covering, I put salt where salt is sensible, and I get on with my day. This approach has served me across several husbands and a number of winters that behaved nothing like winters are supposed to, and I see no reason to change it now.

The folks in those ranked cities looked at what they had and saw revenue. I understand the logic. I am not calling them fools for wanting to keep the lights on. But there is a cost to making your strangeness into a spectacle, and the bill does not arrive all at once. It comes in small installments. A chill that stays a little longer each October. A presence that used to keep to one room and now wanders. Something that used to knock three times, which is polite, and has started skipping the knocking altogether.

You opened the door. Can't act surprised at what walked through it.

Harrow Corners is not on the list, and I mean to keep it that way. We tend our own ground here. We don't go poking at the dark places for the entertainment of strangers who will be back on the interstate by Sunday morning and won't have to live with what they stirred up.

The fruitcake I baked in 1954 has come back to this porch every Christmas since. I did not advertise that fact. I did not submit it to a study. It just keeps coming back, and I am of the opinion that some things are entitled to their habits, same as the rest of us.

Mind your strangeness and don't give it a business card. , Aunt Dot
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