Ghosts are real. Maybe not in
the ways you’ve heard, but I assure
you, they’re very real. I’ve seen
ghosts nearly everywhere in my
hometown all my life — in every
corner of my house, in every school
I’ve attended, in every nook and
cranny of my neighborhood. Every
so often, I take it upon myself to
collect these ghosts from their
spots — not with a positron pack
or vacuums or exorcist tools, per
se, but to simply visit them and
ask them to come along with me.
It’s not so hard when you’ve been
doing it for as long as I have. You
just have to know the exact right
thing to say.
Throughout my time in Ann
Arbor, I’ve spotted three such
ghosts. In my hometown, I have my
car, which makes it easier to get to
every haunted spot, but it isn’t here.
I do have a bike. It’s no ECTO-1, but
it’d have to do. I slipped on my New
Balances and jogged down the
apartment stairs while plotting my
round trip on Google Maps. This
method of ghost hunting might
seem mundane, but trust me when
I say these are the best tools for the
job. Like I said, I’ve been doing this
for a while. As the sun sets, I set out
too.
The ride didn’t take much exer-
tion. I rolled down Plymouth Road,
conserving my momentum for
the changes in slope and switch-
ing to the bike lane when I could.
The bridge over the Huron River
was another small challenge in
elevation, but nothing would stand
between me and my ghosts that
night. Navigating through Ker-
rytown until I reached the border
of downtown Ann Arbor, I saw
my first spot. The mostly white,
slightly color-sprinkled tiles of the
Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum
shone in the distance. I kept biking.
I was looking past, checking the
windows on the brick backing of
the building. It was after hours, so
there shouldn’t be anyone in there
except my target. A wispy motion
caught my eye as I braked hard,
gazing at what I found.
This one was just a kid, bare-
ly older than a toddler. Neatly
combed, straight hair fell across
his forehead as he stood still, star-
ing at me in his tiny overalls. He
looked like he was on the edge of
crying as his eyes darted, taking
in his surroundings and me. I also
looked around, debating whether
I cared enough to be seen in pub-
lic talking to air. Placing my hand
on the glass, I prepared myself to
speak, practicing the words in my
head very carefully as to get this
right.
“Hey, everything’s going to be
alright — I think you’re ready to go
home. Could you come with me?”
Slowly but surely, the kid’s
quivering lip steadied. His eyes
focused on me and then wrinkled
as he broke out into a wide, toothy
smile. He phased through the
closed window and into me. I felt
the small weight of the spirit settle
onto mine and figured it was light
enough to keep biking. Moving
towards State Street and taking
a right to continue towards cam-
pus, I felt the inevitability of what
this ghost would have progressed
toward if he had continued. That
smile would lessen over the years
as he found fewer things to grin
about, his teeth disappearing into a
flat curved line. My next stop was
the Law Quad.
In the very center was what
looked to be a teenager. Dressed
in a simple T-shirt and shorts, his
short hair stood in shock, with
the very ends curling off. His
mouth was closed firm, but his
eyes revealed that he was keeping
his jaw from dropping. Rotating
and taking in the sights of the sur-
rounding buildings, he didn’t see
me until I was right in front of him.
No longer caring what the students
relaxing in the grassy fields saw, I
said my piece, point-blank.
“When you work for it, you’ll
belong here — but you’ll learn to
value the time you’re not working,
as well. I can prove it if you come
with me.”
Lowering his eyes to meet mine,
he gave me a nervous half-smile
and joined me as well. Feeling the
two souls meet each other on my
own, I figured I had just enough
stamina to return home. My apart-
ment was where the third ghost
was, but I figured I should gather
these two first. I caught the TheR-
ide bus back to my apartment,
locked my bike, took the elevator
and walked back into my home.
Sitting on the couch was the
last ghost. Their hair fell in shaggy
curls that I could tell still weren’t
long enough to tie up. I couldn’t
make out their face as they leaned
over on the couch with their head
in their hands. Oddly enough,
they were completely still. No
sobs shaking their shoulders, just
still hands gripping their face. I
could only tell that this was some-
one that had lived by the memory
of breaths ever-so-slightly shift-
ing their body. Taking a second to
swallow, I gently sat down next to
them. I picked my words carefully
— knowing what I had to say would
be much more intricate than the
other two ghosts —- to be the exact
right thing.
“I know it’s quiet. It’s completely
silent in what’s supposed to be
your home, and it will stay that
way if you want, for the first time
in your life. And I know a part of
you loves this quiet, and a part of
you hates that you love it. You hate
that you’re so glad to be away for
a bit, and you love that you finally
get to be. I’m here to tell you that
you’ll come to miss the noise. Then,
you’ll go home and miss the quiet.
You’re allowed to miss both. You’re
allowed to love and hate this.”
They slowly removed their head
from their hands and sat up to meet
my eyes. I smiled, looking at my
ghostly reflection from over a year
ago. Slowly, they broke out into a
smile, one they’ve been practic-
ing to be as big as they feel, tooth-
ily affirming their journey. I took
their hand, and we went to my bed-
room, where I released the other
two ghosts. They all stared at each
other in recognition and looked
all over my bedroom, filled with
every trinket, poster and picture to
affirm my identity. The kid looked
around in awe, gasping in delight
at the children’s novels I keep on
my bookshelf and my Spider-Man
posters. The teenager looked out
the window, out towards the cam-
pus and the city, his smile slowly
becoming whole. The oldest took
in every part of the room they had
first seen bare. The three began
to wind down, and then they all
faced me before rejoining my soul,
restoring it.
Ghosts are real. Before in-per-
son classes started, I’d been in
Ann Arbor at three points in my
life: moving in during the sum-
mer before, my campus tour and
a visit to the Hands-On Museum
I’d forgotten about. They’re all
places where I made the deci-
sion to become a different person
three different times: the young
adult who had to leave behind their
past immaturity to live alone and
establish his identity, the teenager
who knew where he needed to go
to college and had to leave behind
his past childishness and the kid
who went to a children’s museum
with his family but was never
remembered by his older selves,
only recognized. My soul split as I
forced these different versions out
of me. I see ghosts nearly every-
where in my hometown, in every
place I’ve become a different per-
son. Every so often, I take it upon
myself to collect these ghosts from
these spots, driving around to the
places I used to haunt to restore my
soul, to move forward with every
version of myself. It used to be so
difficult to return to them, but I’ve
been doing it for a long time. You
just have to know the exact right
thing to say — what I wish someone
would have told me at those times.
Michigan in Color
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Ghost stories
Content warning: This article con-
tains mention of sexual assault.
October clambers in without
warning, its ostentatious display
sweetened by crisp autumn air, bois-
terous jack-o-lanterns flashing toothy
grins and ghost stories.
I’ve never experienced the super-
natural: I have no sinister encounters
to furtively whisper around a bonfire,
no tales of messages from beyond or
Ouija boards gone awry. I’ve never
touched the other side, but I think I
believe in ghosts. Not the kind you’re
thinking of, I’m sure, but ghosts all
the same.
The ghosts I’m acquainted with
don’t look like the ones written in
folklore. They are not disembodied
figures with lifeless skin, pinned
up curls and shadowy nightdresses
clinging to their skeletal, evanescent
frames. They lack the eeriness of
empty eye sockets and mouths fro-
zen in a permanent scream of agony,
moaning in torment as they float
down ornate spiral staircases. Mine
take the form of moments frozen in
time, so vivid I think they’re still here,
but long-since dead.
They are people, places, memories,
relentless in their haunting and antag-
onizing in their absence. They lurk
patiently in every corner, begging to
be remembered: in old photo albums
and my childhood bedroom, in text
messages and vacant corner stores, in
the pages of my high school diary and
the dusty frames on my nightstand.
Ghosts may connote death, but it’s the
living who create them. We conjure
them in empty corridors and horror
films. We lure them to speak to us in
the sanctity of flickering candlesticks,
with our hushed whispers and elec-
tronic spirit boxes. We want them to
make themselves known to us, enam-
ored by the untouchable specters we
force back into existence.
I am no stranger to necromancy,
to the cruel and fruitless pursuit of
trying to bring things back from the
dead. I long for lemures: I crack the
door open for them, I leave the lights
on. I am encompassed by eulogies,
akin to apparitions.
I am a mosaic of ghost stories. To
tell them is to keep them alive.
———
The Graveyard
I drive back to the town I’m from
and think I’ve never seen a graveyard
look so much like home.
The roads are familiar but uncan-
ny, reeking with the putridness of a
past life. I was born and raised here:
I’ve kissed every corner, caressed
every crack in the concrete, so why do
I feel like a tourist? I don’t recognize
the new shop by my high school. The
city has cut down the towering oak
tree in front of my house and nobody
cared to invite me to the wake. I am
sick with unrest, like an anguished
Victorian spirit discovering that the
sanctuary wherein he lived and loved
had been bulldozed and replaced,
that nobody remembered him at all.
I drive the same car but it feels like a
casket now, a cold metal vessel trans-
porting me through a world that’s
since moved on without me. I’m pale
with the bone-chilling premonition
that things have died here.
I realize I’ve died here too, a hun-
dred times over. So many little ver-
sions of me have faded away, leaving
sepia-toned remnants in their wake.
Old flames, friends, feelings and
fleeting memories, all faceless ghosts
now marking this place as a land of no
return. I wonder if my presence sends
a chill down the locals’ spines, if they
know someone that no longer belongs
here has tried to communicate from
the other side.
I try to rouse these things back to
life. I perform seances in the park-
ing structure I used to frequent with
people who dare not speak of my
existence. I watch in solitude as the
sunset, red as inferno, sets the town
ablaze. I think about how so much
has changed here, that I’ve changed
too. But I find solace in knowing that
one November evening, we drove up
to the top of the parking structure and
used our car keys to carve our names
into the wall. I’m grateful for the
etchings that outlived us, the irrevo-
cable proof that once, I was here.
Kyra tells me to hold my breath
when we drive past a cemetery. Super-
stition warns that the restless spirits
will enter your soul and nestle into
your bones. With no home to return
to, they anxiously await a gust of air
from unassuming lungs that they can
get swept up in, longing to take the life
that courses through your veins and
make it their own. I don’t blame them,
but we selfishly puff up our cheeks
and sit in silence anyways. Kyra steps
on the gas so we don’t suffocate. We
turn the corner and breathe out a sigh
of relief in unison.
I pull out of the driveway of my
home and make the trip back to
school. I hold my breath. I’m blue in
the face the entire way there.
___
Pretty Dead Things
My body feels like a graveyard, too.
Because my body, it’s a mess of
limbs and appendages, of flesh and
regret. Sometimes it feels like a thing
I haunt, a land that is no longer mine.
To be so disjointed in the skin that
was painstakingly designed for you
feels blasphemous, but each move-
ment is exorcised out of me, like I’m
rattling my putrefying bones from
the inside trying to coax out some evil
sickness.
I remember the graverobbers that
visited my body, their greedy hands
digging and clutching and taking,
always taking. They were insatiable
in their taking, and their hunger
raised a mind-splitting ring in their
ears that stopped them from hearing
me protest and plead and persist that
this body is mine, not theirs. Not that
it matters: dead girls can’t say no.
It feels like watching from the
other side, suspended in the leaden
grey of compulsory silence. Like a
spirit that doesn’t know it’s passed
on, screaming until her throat is raw,
wondering why nobody can hear her.
But I watched as they made a grave
of me, something so alive, with teeth
and hair and blood and fight left in
me, still.
I mourn the girl that I was before
you touched me. I bring her flowers
on Sundays. I make her headstone
beautiful, wondering if dead things
can be pretty, too.
I scrub and shine until my knuck-
les bleed.
Can dead things be pretty, too?
__
Are you a ghost, too?
Last year, I asked a boy if he’d ever
felt like a ghost.
He wanted me to elaborate and I
was rendered speechless, that inex-
plicable shame boiling inside of me
and clawing its way up my throat
like bile. How do I say that I feel like
a stranger in my own body, watching
my life unfold from some hazy neth-
erworld? Like a tortured soul con-
demned from their house of bones
and forced to observe in paralyzed
purgatory? I tried to articulate the
placelessness, the drifting, the amor-
phousness of it all, but the words are
all clatter and chaos and confusion.
My abstruse existential question ulti-
mately falls flat, and he says he hasn’t.
The boy relayed my question to
his roommate later that night. His
roommate responded with expected
indifference, rolling his eyes and ask-
ing what the hell that even means. He
called me pretentious, said it’s ‘not
that serious’ and I nodded my head
so hard that my papier-mâché bones
clattered against each other in fren-
zied discordance.
“It’s not that serious,” I echoed. I
want nothing more than to believe it.
When I was eight, I read about
the girl with the green ribbon. Jenny
kept the enigmatic bow laced around
her neck, unrelenting as a promise.
In her final moments, she allows her
lover to untie it, and her head discon-
nects from her neck, rolling onto the
floor in a discarded heap of skull and
hair, long and black like my own. I
think she looks like me. I am a mess
of knots, more green ribbon than girl.
I’ve spent years begging people not to
touch the tangles.
I think I’ve always felt that way —
like if someone tugs at me just right,
I’ll fall apart entirely.
__
Birds & Banshees
I visit home again despite my
apprehension.
Because when the unspeakable
becomes reality, when you’re ghost-
like and translucent and begging to be
grounded by some sort of familiarity,
you go home.
I drive to my favorite park and
settle down at the top of the hill alone,
brushing shoulders with my grief,
thinking about the house with one
less heart beating between its walls.
I want nothing more than to be left
alone, to remain ensnared by the
frothing, sharp fangs of hurt.
But a man named Nick walks up
to me, oblivious to my staccato of
sniffles and sobs, and tells me he’s
an ornithologist: he studies birds,
memorizes their flight patterns and
mating calls and physical character-
istics. He possesses an unplaceable
warmth, and I’m almost annoyed by
the way my sluggishness subsides as
he lets me sift through his leather-
bound notebook. It’s overflowing
with hand-drawn Midwestern fowl,
and I sit in silence while he clumsily
explains how to distinguish between
their feather tracts and beak curva-
tures.
He shares his favorite type of bird,
rattling off some complicated name I
don’t quite remember. They’re diffi-
cult to find in the Midwest these days,
already on their migration away from
the bitter winter. He’s never seen one,
but he found one of their vacant nests
during his hike through the park, still
miraculously intact and perched in
the crook of a tree branch overhead.
He flashes me a lottery-winning grin,
telling me how lucky he is to have
found it, how beautiful it is that they
were ever here at all.
I find a video in my camera roll,
and it takes me weeks to watch. When
I finally succumb, music blares from
my speakers so loud it launches my
heartbeat out of sync. You’re swaying
your hips and bellowing a triumphant
zalghout in our family’s living room.
I remember that day, how you tied a
scarf around my waist and forced me to
dance. My body is rigid and obstinate
and not built for dancing. But you make
it look as easy as breathing, and we
share the same blood, so I do. I zalghout
the way you taught me to when I was
younger, when you and I roared fero-
ciously in the kitchen until I got it just
right, two unknowing banshees. You’re
weightless, smiling and iridescent and
so alive, waving your arms like wings
outstretched in flight.
How beautiful is it that you were
ever here at all?
__
It’s an undeniably human feat to
believe in ghosts. Our illusory stories
are fostered by the faith we have in
things now vanished, in our inexo-
rable trust that they are still with us.
That our loved ones will visit with
outstretched hands, that they’re sit-
ting on the L-shaped couch that still
bears the indents their bodies forged
after years of use. That things like
love and friendship and memory
persist beyond the grave, beyond the
metaphysical constraints of life and
death, past and present. We welcome
the visitations, leaving a seat open at
the Thanksgiving table, letting the
photos stay encased in the frames. We
love the things that haunt us, and that
love keeps them alive.
I love the things that haunt me,
even when their visits spur night ter-
rors and fever chills and body aches. I
love them enough to retire the ghost
hunting. I decide to stop driving aim-
lessly through my hometown search-
ing for some semblance of what it
used to be, of who I was when it was
mine. To stop yearning for the ver-
sions of me that were once untouched
and untarnished, to stop believing
that I deserve to be here any less than
they did. The things we’ve lost are not
always ghosts or graveyards. Some-
times, they’re glorious reminders that
we loved something enough to miss
it, to keep it alive forever, to continue
basking in growth and newness even
in its absence.
I visit the unmarked grave of the
things I’ve loved that are no longer
here, and I leave yellow sunflowers. I
mourn and I grieve, but I do not claw
at the dirt, do not interrupt the bloom-
ing that is emerging in the wake of the
loss. Instead, I thank them for their
time and let them rest. Just as we
must remember to hold onto these
things, we must know when to let
them go.
YASMINE SLIMANI
MiC Senior Editor
Design by Janice Lin
Read more at MichiganDaily.com
Ghost hunting in Ann Arbor
SAARTHAK JOHRI
MiC Columnist
Wednesday, October 26, 2022 — 7