Look, I’m well aware I’ve got a problem, and a stupid one: I’m a complete wuss, where anything even faintly resembling a scary movie is concerned. Just a few representative examples should give you an idea of my particular condition:
I was traumatized as an eight-year-old by Ghostbusters’ spectral librarian switching into harpy mode. Nearly forty (!!) years later, and in spite of the film being one of my all-time favorites, I still have to look away before the quiet, conscientious shelver of books turns demonic and chases the bumbling trio out of the building.
I suffered a few nights’ worth of sleeplessness in high school after seeing Bram Stoker’s Dracula—this, notwithstanding the movie’s ample comedic material, including the count’s skittering all over the walls and donning what one friend aptly dubbed “butt hair.”
Well into my thirties, I was petrified for a week of witching hours after watching the dybbuk box episode of Paranormal Witness one sunny afternoon. From what I remember, the special effects amounted to a lot of camera shake, jump cuts, overdone music, and face paint. Oh, and lots of commercial breaks to remind you that evil spirits might mess with you, but you can still get a great deal on Proactiv or a new teeth whitener.
Still from Carnival of Souls (1962). Public domain image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
I’m not sure whether the bigger problem is that I’m so easily scared by adaptations of spooky folklore—especially when I’m fully aware of just how corny and contrived they all are—or the fact that I persist in watching stuff I know will keep me from sleeping. But with all the real threats to my safety of late, whether a crafty virus, an unhinged executive branch, or deluded insurrectionists, I thought now might be a good time to try and get to the bottom of this weird phobia. Terrorized in the middle of the night by the prospect of some shadow coming out and saying boo, I could try to shift my focus to the neighbors’ parties or white supremacists’ tendency to toss out the word “tyranny” as if it really applied to their lives. Even if it wouldn’t help me get back to sleep, the fear might at least morph into anger, and I could stop hiding under the covers.
And so began the attempt to inure myself to ghost stories. In addition to reading a couple of good histories,(1) I moved bit by bit into the two-season reboot of Ghost Hunters. OK, sure, the production team did its fair share of trying to convince you the vague form at the end of the hallway wasn’t just a chair—but in the end, nothing ever happened, and you always walked away with a better understanding of natural phenomena that could play tricks on your brain. Infrasound, a cobweb over a camera lens, pareidolia, particular building structures’ tendency to mess with your head: I was amassing an arsenal of natural explanations I could throw in the face of any number of spooky situations. By the time I finished watching the series, I could turn off the light and head to bed with no problem. Victory, I thought: the power of knowledge in action and all that; you’re only afraid of what you can’t explain! Maybe I’m an adult now!
Yeah, the feeling of triumph only lasted so long—because like any good investigator, I had to see whether my new resolve would hold. Not being a complete idiot, I stayed away from stuff like Paranormal Witness, and thought I’d hit upon the perfect intro test: The Haunting Of…. One more medium from Long Island,(2) talking to cable TV personalities or child actors about events in their past? Focus on the hair and make-up and you’ll be fine. Start, in fact, with The Millionaire Matchmaker Patti Stanger’s run-in with a spirit bully, and the only fear you’ll have will be related to the sorts of beauty and behavior myths being touted as requirements for finding true love. Tack on Anthony Michael Hall’s tale of ghostly interaction—and if you get scared, insert his “Very hot! Very hot!” dance scene from Sixteen Candles into any scenario, and it’ll automatically become hilarious.
Sigh. In spite of taking the extra precaution of following it all up with a few feel-good episodes of Finding Your Roots, I was right back to where I’d started almost a year ago: lights on in the middle of the night, reminding myself it’s supposed to be completely silent at 2 a.m. Mixed in with all the fright, of course, was anger at myself; what was wrong with me? Why couldn’t logic overrule a case of the willies? Why couldn’t I just stay away from all this nonsense? I tried shifting the focus of that ire to our present reality; what was wrong with the world, shirking the science that could help save it from environmental destruction and airborne disease, making up all sorts of conspiracies to compensate for any number of dissatisfactions? What was wrong with the overseers of so many media platforms, letting disinformation and extremism run rampant and cement itself into willing minds, all so that shareholders could rake in a few more bucks? My fear of ghosts gradually gave way to steaming about why humans apparently can’t stop hating each other, about why we so easily fall into ugliness and dishonesty, about how we let thoughts of profit overtake every other consideration—and then I fell right back into dread, even if of a different variety than the sort that had woken me up in the first place.
There I was, with facts long established in my noggin, and trying to act in accordance with them: there were no demons in my closet; hence, there was no reason for me to lose sleep over the possibility. I had the facts, and my reasoning mind accepted them. There I was, armed with a full understanding of how special effects function, of how camera angles and narrative techniques play to our lizard brains—and there I was, still cowering under the covers. If it was this hard for a would-be rational person to be convinced of obvious truths—if I was still spooked by 1984-era CGI used in a comedy—how long would it take to root out conspiracy theorists’ willing beliefs that, say, Bill Gates is trying to inject chips into us all, or that George Soros is the antichrist? Suddenly understanding what responsibility means, social media companies have at least started the process of removing this trash and banning its purveyors. But those particular sorts of informational demons have already established themselves in millions of imaginations, and you have to wonder whether simply removing the horror stories from public view is enough to render them or their creators powerless.
What’s come of my great experiment, then? I’m even more terrified than before. But maybe when the zombies really do come for me, I can take some comfort in the fact that tearing me to pieces is nothing personal. Plodding along according to simple instinct, at least they’ll bring about the end of the world without the need to shout weird falsehoods or manifestoes in my face, or beat me with their own sacred symbols as they do it. All that incoherent moaning of the undead: compared with the lunacy of so much human speech these days, it suddenly doesn’t sound half bad.
(1) Namely, Roger Clarke’s Ghosts: A Natural History (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2012), and Zack Davisson’s Yurei: The Japanese Ghost (Seattle: Chin Music Press, 2020).
(2) Before discovering Kim Russo, I was aware of Theresa Caputo, and before her, John Edward. OK, so this group totals only three, but is there something in the water out in Long Island? Its citizens seem to make up a disproportionate number of celebrity mediums.