Steambunkery

Charles Stross on Steampunk: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/10/the-hard-edge-of-empire.html

Yuki Onna’s retort: http://yuki-onna.livejournal.com/616832.html

Amberite's take: http://amberite.livejournal.com/

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My take: It strikes me that this is precisely where SF has been heading all along. SF, especially Hard SF, the stringent kind afraid to stray too far from the periodic table of science elementalism, craves control out of fear. “No rules?” its adherents thunder, outraged. To them, if it ain’t scientific, it’s just senseless meandering.

Talk about fearful old grannies: It has always been a truism that no one is more conservative than SF writers, especially the hard sf writers. Fred Pohl reminisced how they wrote centuries ahead of contemporary times but dressed, talked, and voted decades behind.

Well, what do such conservatives always want? Safety. They demand deballed kid-lit safeness in their storytelling; plain, by-the-Strunk & White writing; controlled imaginary worlds where their spavined notion of science prevails and where irrationality is a sin.

Many liked this kind of cringe fiction. It masqueraded as forward-thinking. It strutted out its futurists. It bragged about its prophecies and awarded its seers, its prognosticators, and its imagineers. It had all the earmarks of geeks and nerds huddling with hurt feelings in their world-haters clubhouse, agreeing fervently that they were the elite, and the rest mere mundanes.

Trouble was, not all the clubhouse members were engineers and scientists. Could non-elite drones write SF too?

The debate has raged behind the walls of the world for decades now, incorporating such concepts as the Golden Age, the New Wave, and Cyberpunk. Utopia, dystopia, and other topos imprinted themselves on SF’s collective memoryhole event horizon. FTL, ETI, and TNSTAAFL joined GAFIA, FAFIA, and the Moscow Mafia as terms of the trade.

And lo, along came Tor's conception of Steampunk as a genre.

You KNOW a movement's dead when some corporate schmuck company makes a market category out of it.

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Tor publishing is currently working hard to make Steampunk not description but market category. To this end, Tor is pushing second-rate crap as the genuine article. This is true to form for corporate thinking but makes some upset. (Think Pat Boone singing Chuck Berry or other examples of Gresham’s Law where bad latecomers push out good innovators.) Of those upset by Tor’s strong-arm move to force good fiction out with bad, some factions object that romanticizing the Victorian Age is to glorify imperialism, monarchism, and oppression of underclasses.

This is all part of Doyle’s Holmes appeal, too, incidentally. Some of us are nostalgic for a version of the bad old days that never existed. It’s like the movie version of the Old West, fun if you know it's malarkey, dangerous if you're all hat and try to make it real like that goofy cowboy President we had awhile ago.

Any time a new flavor of fiction is made by corporate interests into a market category -- as opposed to genre, which arises naturally and unplanned -- it is likely moribund.

There is usually a prime example, quintessential and pivotal, seminal and famous. It sets the tone and parameters. What follows is response.

That is what we’re seeing now from Tor, response.

The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling was probably the progenitor of Steampunk as a market category, having been a best-seller and a lightning rod for much discussion of literary theory at the time, circa 1990. Yes, there are older examples, dating back in fact to Wells and Verne and running through K. W. Jeter’s Infernal Devices, James P. Blaylock’s Homonculus, and Tim Powers’s The Anubis Gates, but The Difference Engine coalesced all the features of a market category’s prime exemplar.

This does not affect me, by the way. I write what ever it is I write, which I’ve chosen to call Ficta Mystica, having looked back over my life's work and spotting certain themes. I am instructed, though, and entertained, by the debate over Steampunk because the whole process smacks of typical corporate bubble-and-bust promotional capitalism paralleled by deadly serious literary chit-chat aimed ultimately at making writing better. Tant mieux.

In short, Tor’s ploy is a scam for selling more books, sure. Of course it is, why else does a publishing company exist? No shame there.

However, the debate surrounding this is asking a deeper question: Is this good for writing or even for -- gasp -- literature? Once again, it is argued, writing genre fiction is shown to be absurd if one’s goal is anything beyond serving corporate commercialism. Sad but true; art is subsumed by commerce. It may delight and fulfill one to to write genre fiction but all publishing the stuff serves is Big Publishing.

Quietly, a few writers produce solid, quirky, individual work in the unnoticed, and unexploited, shadows. That is where true advances arise.

And sometimes such advancements inadvertently achieve big sales and much attention. When that happens, market categories may be spawned. The last big one stemmed from the del Rey invention of the “trilogy” when an old professor’s outdated book, so big it had to be published in three fat volumes to be easily manageable, hit it big. That was called The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, of course, and spawned what we now call the Epic Fantasy market category.

Will Steampunk be as big a boon to the corporate publishing coffers?

As one of those quiet writers in the shadows, it doesn’t much matter to me. Steampunk’s fun. It cannot be genuinely serious, for reasons covered very well elsewhere, though that needn’t matter to any reader or writer. If Steampunk floats your dirigible, go for it.

The rest is Steambunk.

Or Zombies. Or Sparkly Vampires. Or...

/// /// ///

War Talk on Election Night MMX

Nowhere to go, no place to be.

On the seventh episode of the superb BOARDWALK EMPIRE on HBO, a soldier turned gangster, whose Princeton education was interrupted by WW I service, goes to a VA hospital for his wounded leg. He meets a guy with half his face shot off, who had served as a sharpshooter. Leg is reading so face offers him a book his family sent. It is a Tom Swift novel.

“Don’t you want it?” leg asks.

Face says, “Can’t read fiction anymore.”

“How come?”

“It occurred to me, the basis of fiction is that people have a connection. They don’t.”

It is a strikingly cold existentialist statement. It puts one in mind of Hemingway. Not that Hemingway ever showed such naked cynicism, but it was there, just under his ironic tone.

Turns out face lost his eye and half his face just after shooting and killing a German soldier, whose own bullet got lucky and hit the sharpshooter’s rifle. Further, face can still shoot, as a later “return of favor” scene shows.

BOARDWALK EMPIRE is based on a chapter from a history of Atlantic City, New Jersey. It focuses on the Prohibition days when the Volstead Act allowed gangs to flourish. Hard, cynical, and greedy men made war for as much as each could grab from the others. As usual, the people suffered while being told how blessed, patriotic, and exceptional they are. They swallow it every time.

A generation later, the deep cynicism of returning WW II vets would move post WW I’s hard-boiled fiction into noir cinema, where lost men in a totally corrupt world tried to stick to a personal code of honor for no good reason they could articulate. It was a kind of formula for producing tough prose: Go to war, be shattered, see through the bullshit, and come back to write as bluntly as possible. No more decadent excess to keep minds off reality. Those guys wrote to kill or be killed.

This is why the fiction of the Lost Generation and that of the Forties Film Flatfoots resonate today. We are like them. In both cases the veil of lies was torn and we got a glimpse of how bad things are when scum prevail, as they do so very often, being prone to cheating and theft, thuggery and murder. They operate in a landscape where politics is gangsterism and the rest is up for grabs. See that clearly and the toys get put away so the tools of economic and cultural war can be handled more effectively.

Plain writing for clear communication stems from writers who have seen where pretty distractions and cringing escapism allow the scum to go -- straight into power -- and take us -- straight to hell. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. Sleep with one eye open. We know the watchwords. Why lull ourselves with nonsense when reality is so hostile?

It has always been this way. Go back further and you’ll find Twain and Bierce favoring direct writing over flowery crap. Twain was a deserter from and Bierce a veteran of the Civil War, which created cynics as fast as it created widows and orphans. Go back further still and you’ll find more wars. There is always a war of one kind or another, thanks to the sociopaths always harrying us. We each have a war that shapes us.

My war was cultural and economic, in the 1970s, in the Laurel Highlands of Western Pennsylvania. Back then it was called coal country. Mountain hick gnomes with immigrant names and often accents, too, who dug the deep seams for steel in Pittsburgh, were scraping out a living in the most depressed region of the country. Then big steel moved overseas and the railroads were no longer needed. Everything dried up. Bruce Springsteen’s album THE RIVER summed it up so the nation could move on in good conscience, having shed a crocodile tear for us.

We who were stuck there were left strangely uncomforted.

An economic war against the people, waged by corporations with no national or human allegiance, devastated our lives. It destroyed my father and so many others. We learned then economics was a war, with weapons, killings, and deaths. Consequences of greed, short-term profit frenzy, and zero-sum cutthroat business-as-usual haunted our every moment. Poverty dogged us.

My scars run deep.

My writing tends to be terse.

Now that I and my family have once again voted the connection between war and how one writes makes sense to me. I write this as I watch the latest economic and cultural war again devastate the people for the benefit and amusement of the corporate rich and I only hope to stick to my code of honor, craft, and art. The connection now makes clear for me where my abiding anger comes from, as it builds toward fury at what the scum have done to us, and how I must use that tempered steel. I will write.

Write to kill or be killed.

Nothing less counts.

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War World Discovery - An Alert

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The War World Central web site, warworldcentral.com, was created to provide information about War World and the re-launching of the War World series by John F. Carr and Pequod Press. Learn the origins and history of War World and the CoDominium/Empire of Man.

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Decadence Lost

An article in THE GUARDIAN asked why this second Gilded Age has not spawned a flowering of decadent fiction to satirize its excesses. Certainly TV and film have done so but written fiction has not. People seem to cling to realism and naturalism. Can this be due to literalism infecting so wide a swath of society? Is it sub- or post-literacy giving us too few writers with sufficient verbal chops? High-verbal flourishes are crushed, mocked, and left for dead in genre fiction; this could be insecurity from pulp days prompting a purple prose backlash, and the innate hostility toward mainstream and literary fiction among the genre guardians and gatekeepers to force editors to expunge anything smacking of literary ambition or the fancy. Diversion rules, entertainment is allowed, but venture beyond genre basics into serious intent or layered idiom and wham, the boom will be lowered.

Ah, but where are the one-off literary novels? Why is there not another would-be Wilde stalking London or NYC?

They may exist among the unpublished. Such work stays safely in drawers and trunks, although usually an inkling often glitters in the slurry of short story collections and anthologies toppling off the corporate fiction tipple. So far, precious few hints of a reflourishing decadent movement are sprouting in the gob pile.

Doing high-verbal writing or venturing into the purple is rare in part because Thackery won. Vanity Fair remains the essence of brilliant high-verbal gloss, while Oscar Wilde owned the rest of any claim on decadence. ‘Art for art’s sake’ gave way, as 10CC sang, to ‘money, for god’s sake’ as commerce forced everything individual into corporate molds. And since appealing to masses requires simplicity, complexity is jettisoned to make wallets, and brains, roomier. And since nature abhors vacuum, in rushes a tsunami of cartoonish product.

Extruded plastic plots and vacuum molded characters compete in the grand parade of lifeless packing Peter Gabriel and Genesis warned about. Gray flannel fiction results and the novel is, as usual, dead or thrashing on a low-battery life support system.

Pictionary now comes as a card game needing no drawing. May well be fun, sure, but is drawing a clue such a burden? Merchandising demands it, though; otherwise you’d need only a pad and pencil to play and what would they sell?

Apply the same logic to fiction. If corporate does not control the product, they cannot control its merchandising and sales.

Then there is the stress of being pressured. Feeling rushed and impatient could be another reason no one bothers with decadent, lush prose and layered irony. Decadence requires indirect, lazy, and self-indulgent meandering, digression, and ornamentation. People today want it now, they want it blunt, they want it boiled down to bullet statements and talking points. Get to the point, they demand, already glazing over, their flooded minds churning over a hundred other things insisting on attention, decision, and action.

Conversation has died for the same reason. No one wants to take the time to talk things out anymore, except for endless, pointless meetings that ensure productivity is kept to a snail’s pace so no one gains a march on the well-ensconced CEOs.

But wait, someone cries. Neal Stephenson and China Mieville both write a Baroque, even Rococo style. An analysis reveals not decadence, though, but details layered on basics for the sake of appearing dense, important, and intellectually weighty. Decadence requires a light touch, and this is Germanically heavy, even burdened, a technique used as a ploy. Worked, too. Briefly.

In such ploys there is so much thus crowded out that is never addressed, from basics such as characterization to more subtle aspects, such as allegory, human feeling, or the aforementioned irony. Such higher level curlicues are important if fiction is to go beyond the fifth story toward skyscraping pinnacles.

Most popular fiction is published at a fourth-to-sixth grade reading level, as determined by complexity of vocabulary and sentence structure by such indexes as Flesch and Gunning-Fog. Most is written consciously to that level. Keep It Simple, Stupid, is less advice than description these days. Lowest Common Denominator is the way to gain a wide stance in the Bell Curve of American readership. Hollywood routinely dumbs down its remakes from subtle, sophisticated imports, pandering to a perception that Americans are too stupid to deal with such complications as, say, subtitles or characters with ambiguous identity. Hand-holding is necessary as audiences cross that dangerous street from real lives constrained and controlled by corporations and thuggish governments, into the cartoonish, simplistic, and patronizing world of Hollywood dream factory extrusions.

Make the product bland and sweet and salty and never too spicy except for the macho asshole niche market. Keep things middle of the road, non-threatening, and “family safe”. Make sure you get an R rating, though, because otherwise you get only Disney audiences, and we know how sticky they can be.

Current fiction, perhaps due to short attention spans, tends to deal with each story point as it arises, in sequence, rather than waiting for later resolution. This makes for neatness, perhaps, but is untrue to life. Next time you’re writing, try to remember to leave resolution of at least a few major story points for the end. Yes, a few readers might accuse you of being fancy or tricking them, but most will appreciate the delayed gratification and perhaps even admire your plotting.

Decadence can make a comeback. There is so much to satirize, so much excess to be disgusted by, and so much idiocy passing as normal these days it may in fact be almost inevitable. One novel and story at a time a new insouciance must develop about conforming to the corporate publishing list of acceptable elements and aspects. One novel and story at a time writers must strike out into electronic publishing seeking to do new things for a new audience, one not delivered to them by publishing’s marketing but a readership built up the old way, one set of eyes at a time among people who like what’s being written.

If you write it, they will read. Let your inner demons have full rein. Write from the deepest, most personal, and unruly core of your being. Produce any kind of fiction you really want, the kind you’ve always dreamed of but never dared put in fixed form. Show it around online and start a new rebellion against the new Gilded Age. Decadence lost can be found again; it never went anywhere but inside each of us, in our Wilde-est dreams.

Set them free.

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Demon Dream

My wife and I were at some sort of art class, standing at big tables in a big room, many people bustling about or working at their projects. We had to make a false shirt front, a dicky, out of paper, and cut a few button holes and sew around them. We weren't sure why.

We came up with something, a kind of red sash false shirt front with a small crest of arms or badge of some sort lower down -- I remember thinking it would not be visible if I wore my jacket buttoned over it -- but it had only one button hole. A teacher said it had to have three and took scissors and stabbed our work, piercing it and going down into the table's wood. Noticing the teacher had once been a member of Monty Python, perhaps Michael Palin or Eric Idle but serious now, I remarked, "Yeah, the heck with the table, damned wood, growing all over the place."

There was no reaction to this mockery and we were told to get to work. I was quickly frustrated trying to sew around a button hole by hand, to reinforce it. I remember it kept resembling an eyeball and I was sewing around the lids, not to shut the eye, but to surround it with reinforcement so it wouldn't rip further when it opened. Failing at this, I was shooed away by some older women, who took over the sewing, and instead given a task.

I was to take to take a child of about 8 or 10 to fetch something in his apartment in the building across the street. The child was swarthy to the point of being burnished, and I was wary of him, but agreed to go along because the kid seemed to be okay with me. I got the impression he was somewhat hard to handle, maybe a trouble maker, but it seemed I was able to keep him generally reigned in.

We crossed a cobbled street, on a warm day, bright sun at the top of the buildings but us in shadow. I got the impression we were in Italy, probably Rome but not necessarily.

We entered an older but nice apartment building and climbed stairs. The lobby was old marble flooring and the stairs were mahogany and some creaked, but it was sturdy. The railings and corner pieces were carved nicely, again obviously old but still sturdy and serviceable.

At the third floor we paused and I unlocked the door with the key I'd been given, and in the boy scampered. I followed more slowly, wary of the place. It was big, with many rooms and halls, and the air was warm but not really stuffy. No scents of mildew or other older apartment smells. The boy proved to be demonic, making eerie statements far too creepy and mature for his age. He first alarmed, then scared me, and I remember humoring him to stay on his good side, not wanting to upset or anger him.

As we looked for what ever it was, he kept showing me things, like toys or various items in the apartment. All unsettled or alarmed me. Some gave me the willies, others dizzied me, and some just plain revolted me. The boy himself was matter-of-fact about most of the things. "We have one of these," or "look at this," or even, "how do you like my...?" I remember catching glimpses of a demon inside him; every now and then, for an instant, I spotted a kind of dark blur, or overlaid image, and his eyes and smile were terrifying. It was as if the demon in him was taunting me, knowingly drawing me deeper into some kind of trap.

He kept looking for something, and saying he had to get something, and I pretended to help him look while being nervous about entering the apartment deeper. Finally I'd had enough and tried to leave, only to discover the hallways were like a maze. I paused, calmed myself, and got my bearings, then tried again, and finally found the door.

It was closed and locked. I tried the key, and it did not work. I was locked in, and sensed with low key panic something coming up behind me.

It was the boy.

I cringed, wondering if he would grow claws or fangs and pounce, but he simply walked up and said, "Okay, we can go back now," and the key worked this time when I tried it. As I stepped out of the apartment he slipped past me and scampered down the stairs, while behind me all the lights and appliances and so on switched on and off rapidly, over and over, and things in the apartment moved as if in an ecstasy of dark delight.

Scooting forward, I slammed the door and hurried down the stairs with the feeling I'd narrowly escaped something. I followed the boy, who waited for me down in the lobby, where the light came through opaque white windows to give things a kind of aquarium glow. His eyes watching me come down the staircase looked huge and ancient.

We went out into the sunshine and warmth, crossed the cobbles, and I awoke feeling as if I'd dodged a demon of some kind. Am I haunted? Am I under demonic attack? Am I ridiculous to ask such questions?

Am I ever really awake?

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Dream Poem

I awoke with a poem.

Interestingly, in my dream, I found myself an adult visiting a school, and a teacher I knew, and she actually helped focus the poem as I worked on it with chalk on a playground. "Make these active verbs," she told me about the second and fourth lines. It opened the poem, I realized, and thanked her. She continued prowling the playground, supervising kids.

Later I approached the school, following her. When she disappeared around a corner I thought she'd jumped in through a window and lifted a curtain, surprising another teacher. "Sorry," I said, and went into the school to find the teacher again. Once inside I got lost in a maze of corridors and classrooms.

In one of the classrooms, though, I encountered my cousins, and the smallest one was standing there in a red dress, looking ill. I knelt down to ask her what was wrong and she said, "A thousand bones in my arms and legs hurt."

Standing, I told her mother, my aunt, that a thousand bones in her arms and legs hurt, which we both found cute and also distressing, so we tried to take her to see the school nurse.

Then I was somehow with my Aunt & Uncle not in Germany, as I once had been in real life, but in Africa, walking in a nice residential area. We were coming up a hill when we spotted a huge male lion strutting arrogantly along a sidewalk up ahead. We scrambled and I saw my relatives had gone up stairs and were being allowed into someone's house as refuge from the lion.

I tried to join them but I was separated when the huge lion wandering through residential streets came near. I scrambled and found a house where a woman was waving me inside quickly, where I ducked. There I was given broth and told the best way to avoid lions was to stand still. Then I left to find my relatives.

I ended up on the edge of town and being chased out into the bush, where I dashed through a section of trees and found myself on a veldt with lions and so on.

I got past that and fell afoul of mercenaries, who forced me to shoot, using an old rifle and one bullet, a springbok, which I did, and the I was given another single bullet and told to shoot a guy, which I did not want to do. As I hesitated, and they grew angrier...
odinz9
A small herd of elephants came charging through. I was able to escape notice by pressing myself into a mud mound beside the road. Carrying the rifle, I went to a hut, where I found no help, then made my way across another field to a hill, muddy as hell. I began climbing.

There I encountered my uncle, who handed me a bowl of tar like the one he carried. We walked along atop the mud on plywood, onto which we threw chunks of tar at random, on any bare spot we wanted. "This is how roads get made here," he told me, and I asked where we were going. "We're two hours from Paris, here," he said, and I laughed.

He then said, as we climbed a steep, muddy hill, "look behind you." When I did, I saw a huge jet seemingly suspended at about our height and coming right at us. It passed overhead with only a few feet to spare, and then I reached the top of the hill, and my uncle was gone, but I saw a smaller plane, twin engine, coming in. It barely made it but managed to land.

I spotted my uncle in a crowd trying to get onto the plane, waving for me to hurry.
We both got on and the pilot said, "Hang on, folks, and welcome to the wildest ride in Africa." He then taxied an overloaded plane off the runway and began gathering speed going down the steep hill we'd climbed.

Then he skewed sideways in the thick mud, still gaining speed, and I figured that was it, we're crashing. But somehow he manhandled it into the air at the last moment, and off we flew, for the roughest, most upsetting flight ever. We landed in a skid at a bigger airport and I was saved; my uncle and I flew to Paris.

And through all that I retained my poem.

///

The poem:

"Ginger Girl's World"

Spring and summer
Open windows.
Fall and Winter
Close them.
The moth craves
Fire’s magic
Inside or outside,
Consistently ardent,
Always free.

/// /// ///

Haunted Thoughts

I come from a haunted place. I was born in Altoona, Pennsylvania, where truckers still spot extinct Logan Indians in green prowling the edges of woods as early morning mists rise and fade. I was raised in Munster, Pennsylvania, where there are ghosts roaming the glens, dirt roads, and farmhouses, from the famous White Lady of the Elmhurst Estate to the lesser known that haunt houses less grand, places less storied.

Elmhurst, a Tudor mansion built by coal- and railroad-tycoon William Thaw’s wild son Harry K. Thaw, hosts both ghosts in the 20 room house and legends of a white lady drivers on nearby route 22 occasionally pick up. She asks to be taken home, directs drivers off the highway, over a railroad bump, and along a long dirt road that leads to Elmhurst, but mysteriously vanishes just as the car pulls up.

She’s supposed to be Evelyn Nesbit, Harry K. Thaw’s mistress over whom he murdered architect Stanton White in the rooftop restaurant at Madison Square Gardens, as memorialized in E. L. Doctorow’s book Ragtime, and the subsequent movie. Nesbit, a Gibson Girl, was known as The Girl On the Red Velvet Swing, and why she’d choose to haunt Elmhurst is unknown. Most likely the ghosts have nothing to do with more famous names.

I stopped by at Elmhurst once and talked to the then-owners about ghosts. They said that, aside from shadows and lights in the windows at times the only thing they’d seen was a misty figure standing down by the barn. They’d seen this several times, usually from the porch, and neither footprints in snow or mud or any other sign that anyone had been there ever showed up when they investigated.

We walked down toward the barn along a dirt path made up of two ruts created by truck tires. It was a warm summer day toward evening and as we walked and talked the light began to fail.

I got a distinct feeling I should not continue toward the barn. It wasn’t fear, just a sense of warning.

Deciding to turn around, we headed up toward the house again and as we did I glanced at an upstairs window in time to see someone gazing down at us. I pointed this out and the curtain twitched and the figure was gone.
“That’s what we see,” the owner said, smiling, assuring me there was no one in the house.

If you want a glimpse of the Elmhurst estate and a nice write-up, check:

http://www.post-gazette.com/homes/20011027hauntedhome8p8.asp

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So yes, I’ve seen ghosts. Yes, I can sense presences sometimes. Yes, I can be sensitive to place, so much so that I have broken leases to get away.

What ghosts are, I have no idea, but I know they differ from hallucinations. As Kingsley Amis pointed out in his ghostly novel, The Green Man, you can induce hallucination with drugs, but not the same one in groups, and not the same one over decades or centuries.

Some swear ghosts are spirits. Ghosts certainly often look like people known to be dead; a link seems sensible until we ask why only some people, or why an action is repeated mindlessly.

Ghosts do not seem alive. They seem more an echo of a past life. The video tape comparison makes sense.

Some in fact call ghosts recordings. The theory that places might take impressions from strong emotion only seems persuasive until you ask what place is, or why one place differs from another in any objective way.

Ghosts ignore such questions and don’t often interact with people. They tend to repeat one brief set of actions, such as descending a staircase, walking along a road, or pacing a castle’s ramparts. As we’ve seen, though, some are livelier, such as a White Lady who wants a ride home, only to melt away.

Very few, in fact, make a sound, Marley’s chain-rattling and moaning to one side.

There are more complicated hauntings, though.

When my cousin first married she visited my paternal grandparents in haunted Munster, Pennsylvania. This is a tiny hamlet only a mile or so from the Elmhurst Estate, by the way.

That night, as she slept restfully beside him in a bed in my great-grandmother’s old room, her husband was tormented by pokes, prods, and blanket-snatchings. He heard hateful whispers next to his ear, too. By early morning he’d had enough and insisted they leave just after dawn, refusing even an offer of breakfast.

This house, several years earlier, was the setting of a sighting by my sister and me. We were children, she about 8, I about 10. It was the Fourth of July, afternoon. A family picnic had the lawn filled with relatives but the house was empty. My mother, wanting to buy something from a relative, asked my sister to fetch her purse. Being competitive, I tagged along.

In fact, we raced. We slammed into the house, through the porch, through the kitchen, and stopped shoulder-to-shoulder in the dining room doorway. I’m not sure what stopped us but that is where the oddness began.

When we heard the stairs behind the wall across the room creaking, as they always did, we waited to see who was coming down.

An old women, perhaps in her 70s, heavyset, with grey hair in a bun and wearing the kind of floral dress my great-grandmother -- who was out on the lawn -- wore, came down into the doorway framing the bottom landing. She looked up as she turned toward us to enter the dining room, smiled at us in a calm, reassuring way, with much kindness, and in no more than three seconds faded first to a mist and then away.

My sister and I continued behaving uncharacteristically. We looked at each other, raised our eyebrows, then crossed the dining room. We walked past the bottom landing where she’d vanished and we entered the living room to fetch my mother’s purse, all without a qualm.

Neither of us said a word about what we’d seen until much later, in the evening, as we were driving home to bed. We never really talked it over until days later. We’d both seen it and neither of us had any kind of fear. Our surprise was even muted.

Note that in this sighting there was, or seems to have been, at least minimal interaction; the ghost looked up, saw us, and smiled at us. Or so we interpreted it.

Now, it’s possible we only thought she saw us, but the feeling of warmth and kindness, almost of affection, convinced us otherwise. She saw and liked us.

In either case, we looked into a few things over the years after that glimpse. My great-grandparents had built that house and no one had ever died in it. For many years it served as a restaurant; it stands on what is now Old Route 22 at the top of Munster Hill, beside the old truck garage my great-uncle Art ran.
They’d had a nice dual business back in the days of broken truck drive-chains and overheated engines.

No structure and no known grave ever stood on that property prior to the house and garage. It is, as mentioned, close to Elmhurst Estate, which was built in the robber baron era when the rich wanted places with fresh air where they could escape from city pollution. Back then Pittsburgh, PA was known by Andrew Carnegie’s famous phrase: Hell with a lid on.

So where do the ghosts along that killer old Route 22 come from? Crash victims?

My grandparents’ house on Munster Hill offered another haunting; it chased my grandfather out a year or so after my grandmother died. He fled, selling the house at a loss to a neighbor, who had changed my great-uncle’s garage into M & M furniture, an antique and junk shop supplied by estate sales. Last I heard, the house is used as overflow storage for excess furniture.

My grandfather told me he’d been hounded from the house by my great-grandmother’s ghost, upset, he thought, because he’d failed to protect my grandmother from death. He said she poked, prodded, and pestered him, yanking at blankets and hissing angrily at him night after night. She followed him around the house and wanted him gone, he said.

I suspect he mistook the ghost my sister and I saw for my great-grandmother. They looked very similar, but we’d seen the ghost while my great-grandmother sat outside alive and well.

In the years since, I’ve heard that another cousin, one who lives in Cresson, one town and only five miles or so from the house, has been visiting and talking to the ghost on lonely nights. Yes, my family’s like that. How she gets in, knew about the ghost, or what she says I don’t yet know, having fallen out-of-touch with her branch of the family due to deaths and world travel courtesy of the military. I’ve got inquiries in via other cousins and hope one day to learn more.

Hoping one day to learn more is where parapsychology, or ghost hunting, has stood from the beginning. It’s where we all stand as we think about the shadowy corners of life. Hailing from a haunted place puts me perhaps more at ease standing here, even if no better informed. I can’t wait to find out more.


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