The Ghost of the Author

I. Haunted houses

My girlfriend is scared of ghosts. She won’t admit it if you ask her, but leave her alone in a dark room at night and she will quickly make up plausible excuses: “I am actually not that sleepy!” In fact, I’ve read her this sentence out loud and her first reaction was: “I’ve never said that,” only to add, with guilty candor: “they’ll laugh at me!” She knows, I know, and now you know, too. But despite my playful teasing, I understand her fear, for humans are afraid of both darkness and the unknown, and ghosts are the peak manifestation of both.

From medieval chronicles of European castles where pale specters still clank their chains through stone corridors, keeping sleepless vigil over imprisoned princesses, to folklore of rural Japan, where the yūrei—translucent, drifting figures in white burial robes—wander fields and rivers at night, hair hanging loose, unbothered by gravity, moaning softly for unfinished business. And further still, to Caribbean stories of the duppy, a restless spirit that slips between shadow and light, blamed when animals fall ill or someone feels an invisible hand press against their back on an empty road.

Ghosts are everywhere, an unalienable part of cultural terror around the world; perhaps, like dragons, djinns, witches, and werewolves, they existed once. But I’m not here to stir up mythical nightmares, nor to retread familiar tales like A Christmas Carol or Hamlet. I’m here to tell you that, even today, ghosts haunt your home.

People are fond of saying that the English are braver than the French—or so I hear from the Spanish, which I contend to be the bravest of all and thus hold the last word on the topic—but I find this assertion to be at odds with history. William Shakespeare, considered by most critics and historians the greatest man of letters in the English language, and his contemporary, René Descartes, French by birth if not by life and father of modern philosophy, appear to have taken opposite stances to those their nationality presumes. Whereas Shakespeare wrote a tale about a castle haunted by its vengeance-thirsty former ruler in the form of a harrowing ghost, Descartes asserted that we blithely live with one inside our heads and that, if nothing else, it is itself the source of our ability to dream them up in the first place: “I think, therefore I am; ...