Of Ghosts and Burdens

“In one aspect, yes, I believe in ghosts, but we create them. We haunt ourselves.”

- Laurie Halse Anderson, Wintergirls

“Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what.”

                                                - Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

 “Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage.”

- Ray Bradbury

My place is a place of burdens. It has its proverbial skeletons in the closets and ghosts in the ground. Most small towns do. The histories and pasts of small towns are built, after all, on human foibles.

A former mental asylum sits atop a wooded hill overlooking the town. Most of it is disused now, abandoned, its stone exterior crumbling to sand and its lime-washed interior falling to heaps of rotting timber and insect-infested detritus. Where the walls still stand, the institutional colours of green or pale  yellow glow in patches of the decaying elements mixed with the lime for strength  – water glass, glue, egg white, milk, soil, pig’s blood.

Below the asylum is 1,000 acres of wooded land, now the domain of turtles, herons, and community gardens. But at one time this was a farm worked by the inmates of that mental asylum on the hill. The farm produced enormous quantities of hay, vegetables, honey, meat, and milk from one of the largest herds of diary cows in the area.  It was considered a great agricultural and mental health treatment success. But I wonder, was this indentured labour, the inmates used much like prison gangs used to be? Or was it some enlightened medical procedure consisting of bright sunshine, fresh air, and hard exercise?

I recall the story of John Harvey Kellogg, the inventor of that famous corn flake. His sanatorium was run on the basis of his philosophies of nutrition, enemas, and exercise.  He had ideas about holistic health, vegetarianism, intestinal health, and how patients benefited from these, at that time, unusual practices. But he had strange ideas about sexuality and was also a devout believer in eugenics.

Perhaps institutionalized people are always at the whim and mercy of those that feel they understand them and what it is that they need – whether that is true or not.

At one time, another farm adjoined this wonderfully productive one. But it became a place of many ghosts and appalling abominations. A serial killer is another skeleton in the closet of this small town. Now that farm is gone and there is instead a housing complex made up of homes, and schools, and playgrounds. Here the ghosts in the ground don’t have voices anymore – the intensity and magnitude of life in its everyday ordinary-ness suffocates them. 

Perhaps ghosts are always at the whim and mercy of life lived large, and loud, and vital – whether that is true or not.