Wallen - When we were ghouls: a memoir of ghost stories

Drab Habitation of Whom?

Tabernacle or Tomb

Or Dome of Worm

Or Porch of Gnome

Or some Elfs Catacomb?

Emily Dickinson

A coffin is just too lonely. An urn, with all that porcelain, is too cold. Graves like giant steamer trunks, thats what Buddhists, Egyptians, and Incas have. This is my preference. A big hole in the ground filled with all my belongings, packaged food, remembrances, and even a companionlike a family to-go.

This Family Plot, Im unearthing it rather than burying it. Im going six feet down, maybe farther, to collect all the pieces, my inheritance for the afterlife.

I will start in a Peruvian ghost town.

I remember miles and miles of sand dunes. Everything on the surface is broken to pieces. To find anything whole, I have to dig. Deep.

I dont believe in the afterlife. But I do believe in ghosts. Which I know makes no sense. I believe in ghosts because, while I may never know when they will show up, or whether they will ever show up again, I know they can and, on occasion, they do.

But why ghosts when no one is dead yet?

Let me start with a memory that takes place at this gravesite.

This is that memory:

I squatted just on the other side of the sand dune, knees sticking up pointy like chicken wing bones. This way I could sift through the melty sand around me, scavenge for pieces to take home. The dunes were scattered with bones and clay shards, and I thought this was the best ghost town my family had ever explored. A real ghost town.

A pre-Inca graveyard.

I heard my brother Martys deep voice on the other side of the dune. He was talking to Sarah Riley, the daughter of the family friends who had come with us to explore this ghost town. To me, Sarah was too flirty, had too big a crush on my brother. He was mine, not hers. He was seventeen, I was eight.

At first I heard their voices like a radio tuning in a distant stationin and out, in and out. Then they were gone. I climbed over the ridge, hoping to spy on my brother and Sarah. The sand dunes splayed out all around me were reminiscent of Saint-Exuprys The Little Prince when the pilots plane crashes in the Sahara. Only I was not in the Sahara; I was in a graveyard near the beach north of Lima. The sand warmed my feet up to my ankles, but the air blew cool and constant. I looked out over the swell of the dunes and tried to see the invisible wind, see how it swept the sand into waves. I spotted the picnic set up where we all just finished lunch. Everyone mulled around, picking up the remnants, the scraps, leaving the heavier bottles and baskets to weigh down the blanket, to keep it from getting carried off in the fierce wind.

With my short and pudgy eight-year-old legs, I trudged back over to the far side of the deep sand dunes to hide. Hiding was what I did. Hiding was a place I could be by myself. Where I chose to be alone. I also hid hoping my mom would come looking for me. She never did, but I still tried. I also wanted to see a ghost. I figured if I were alone a ghost was more likely to appear than in the noisy crowd on the other side of the dune. I didnt know whether I would be afraid if a ghost showed itself, but I wanted to find out. A ghost would be so much better than the pottery shards and bones lying around. I imagined a specter would be there for only a moment, then disappear, leaving only my memory. I would have to convince everyone or save the vision for my own. Maybe it would be better not to share the experience, because the adults would only convince me it wasnt true. That I hadnt seen what Id seen. My family was always doing that. Telling me it couldnt have happened that way.

Check this out! I heard Marty call, then he quicksanded his way over the soft crest of the tall dune, Sarah Riley right behind.

In his hands he held up a skull.

A skull, I said. Human skulls were scattered everywhere, so I didnt really see the point in getting excited.

The dunes were so littered with bones you could barely walk a few feet without finding a clavicle or rib or ulna. Its not just a skull, Marty said. Look. He held the skull skyward with his left hand, and then with his right he attached the jawbone, making it whole. Now that was a find! Even I knew the jaw always got lost; rarely could you find a human skull with its mandible intact. Nothing held the two jawbones together except skin, cartilage, and muscle, which easily disintegrated under most circumstances. Marty had a real find. Id never seen a skull intact, in all my eight years of ghost town scavenging. Something about this place had kept the skull whole. Something about this place kept the bodies embalmed. Something prevented decomposition.