(Obituary) Haunted People Syndrome
After
Ghost stories start like this: A floorboard creaks in the middle of the night and when a character goes to investigate, usually, no one is there. At least in the beginning. At least in fiction. But this is nonfiction, the haunted kind.
2018 | The walls in the bathroom are all black tile, the lighting low. Starbucks designed the whole store to call back to Victorian times. New/vintage. I’m standing at the sink, watching the seemingly endless drain swallow all the water pouring out of the faucet. Soap is on my hands, but I can’t move. A ghost is behind me. In the far corner of the room. I’m afraid to look up, afraid I might see it in the mirror. This is the only bathroom. I’m the store manager. I need to be back on the floor. I know everything I need to do and can’t make it happen.
Haunted People Syndrome is a hypothesis by a group of parapsychologists that if you go searching for a ghost, you’ll find one because confirmation bias causes people to interpret non-paranormal occurrences as such. Spontaneous sightings/interactions are highly coveted by the researchers because they are rare.
2018 | Someone is knocking on the door and I cannot get my throat to say “just a second” because the ghost is moving closer to me. I can feel it or sense or whatever it
is when you know someone is behind you even when you don’t see them. A friend told me once that if a ghost gets in your space that you need to assert that it is unwelcome here, tell it to leave, but I can’t move like I have sleep paralysis even though I’m awake.
Queer theorist Jack Halberstam says, “to tell a ghost story means be willing to be haunted.” This makes me wonder if a haunting can only truly be categorized as such only after you’ve written it down and/or stood at your co-workers cubicle to tell the story and/or published essays about it.
2018 | Knocking turns into pounding, a man, angry, shouts that there’s a line. The ghost has made it to me, its hand hovers over my left shoulder. Menacing. Look up, I think, to see if the ghost appears in the mirror. I’m too scared to look up, to flee. I hear my father grunt directly into my left ear.
Before
Ghost stories start like this: Tapping at the window like someone is doing it with their fingernail. No one is outside when you investigate. No footprints in the snow. Tap tap on the wall next to you when you come back inside. You are alone and not alone.
2018 | The door behind me, the locked one that goes to a room within the Starbucks basement, the one with the scorch marks from when the original building burned down in The Great Chicago Fire on the brick walls, slowly opens, the door seal scraping against the concrete floor. I pause. The tip of my pen is petrified
on the paper, the inventory list, on my clipboard. I listen. Waiting to see what happens next.
Queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz writes about the “ghosts of public sex” in Tony Just’s 1994 photography project about public, abandoned, men’s bathrooms that got shut down in the 1980s because of the AIDS/HIV crisis. The restrooms, the photos are haunted as in here is a time, a place, and experience that doesn’t exist anymore, at least not as it once had. No ghosts appear in the photos, “But if the eye is sensitized in a certain way…it can potentially see the ghostly presence of a certain structure of feeling.” I’m not that smart, so I’m taking “structure of feeling” to mean how ghosts make us feel.
(see also: emotions)
and how we feel about them
(see also: emotion words)
and feel as in tactile
(see also: touch).
Ghosts are there if you know how to look for them. They’re not if you don’t think they exist
(see also: confirmation bias).
2024 | My old therapist, as in previous not in age, said I intellectualize too much about my trauma. He called it a barrier. I call it a way to not end up back in the psych ward.
2018 | I stand at the doorway without passing through it, staying on the official part that we’re allowed to use, be in, the part that looks like a long hallway that feels like a brightly lit white walled tomb if the deceased hoarded five-pound bags of coffee beans, boxes of plastic cups, and bottles of flavored syrups or would they be offerings? This other room is square, small enough that I can see all the walls, the center of the room thanks to the overhead fluorescent lights in the corporate authorized part of the basement. But not what’s in its corners.
Psychologists Jim Houran and Brian Laythe published their Haunted People Syndrome study in the Spirituality in Clinical Practice journal published by the American Psychological Association. The APA is the psychology authority or “authority” because they are a corporation not a non-profit. Anyways, they set the diagnostic criteria that all mental health professionals use to tell us what might be miswired in our brains and/or which level of trauma shredded the wires.
2018 | My phone’s flashlight is not strong enough to reach into the depths. I thought, somehow, that a living person might have found a way into here despite this door being locked at all times, this door that only me and building management had a key to. Houran and Laythe would cause my hesitation “dis-ease,” a combo of distress and unease. Dis-ease. Disease. Great way to stigmatize having a ghostly experience, fellas. According to them this combo of sensations can make us misread the room and believe we’re having a ghostly experience when we’re not. They go on to compare being haunted to having the flu.
I force myself to go in, cross the threshold, and pull the string on the one, the only light bulb hanging from the ceiling. In later weeks, the room will flood and the plumbers will not be able to figure out why because they cannot locate a leak in any of the pipes. They will comment on the strangeness of it. In later weeks, the door will start to open when baristas are in the basement causing them to run back upstairs making others want to go down to see. We will start to call it The Nun’s room because the movie The Nun is recent enough for most of us to picture the scary stone room at the end of the movie that reminds us of our brick room.
The subject of the case study in Haunted People Syndrome study is named Nell, which is also the nickname of Eleanor in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. Jackson’s novel isn’t mentioned in Houran and Laythe’s paper, but it’s too on the nose to be coincidental.
2023 | I visited the spot where the Starbucks I managed had been. It closed during the pandemic lockdown. A CBD store took it over. I go in. Ask if I could see the basement. The employees regard me skeptically until I mention ghosts and the mood lightens up. All three of them have had some kind of spirit encounter. The basement had been turned into their break room. The door to the other room had a handwritten sign that warned people to “keep the door locked.” I chuckled a little. “Does it open on its own?”
“All the time,” they say. I forgot to ask them if they had a ghost follow them home, attach to them. I wonder when the ghosts figured out that just opening a door
could be frightening or if they are simply repeating a pattern without awareness of their impact on people.
2018 | I force myself to go in, cross the threshold into the room. If this is an invitation, I accepted.
None of the theories about residual hauntings mention the possibility that a ghost could be recorded onto your body. Water is said to be a good conduit for recording, playing back a traumatic event. An overwhelming percentage of our bodies are liquid. Residual haunting could be another term for PTSD. Our brains and bodies are playing back scenes of the worst thing(s) that happened to us whenever it wants and we can’t find the stop button to turn it off.
2026 | Ghost stories end like this:
