For many years, I worked in a dingy 1930s house on the edge of campus. It was home to professors, students, and a sorority until the University’s ever encroaching boundary bled across the sidewalk and crept up the stairs of each house on the block. Brick by brick, house by house, the residential neighborhood was gobbled up and spit out as subpar office space. When my department moved in, I stood in the living-turned-conference-room and told my coworkers, “I bet someone died in here.”

I found it delightfully shabby.1 Thick layers of paint softened every sharp angle like frosting on a cake. There were hissy feral cats huddled under the porch and rusted beer cans shoved between attic rafters. This was not your typical sterile office environment. It was grubby, but underneath that surface grime, there was a hum of previous occupants. My kind of place. I happily settled into a cozy downstairs office with French doors and drafty windows.

One early Spring morning, my friend and colleague Kara stopped by my desk to engage in that age-old office tradition: talking shit about everyone else while they’re in a meeting across campus. As I whined about whatever nonsense had aggrieved me that particular week, we were startled by footsteps above our heads. The wooden floors creaked and groaned with each distinctive thud.

I felt like a fool. I had let RSVPs on an Outlook calendar embolden me to gossip a little too freely. The footsteps continued. The thud of a foot, the creak of the floor. Kara and I did a quick accounting of the cars we’d seen in the parking lot. It was just us. We looked at each other and then at the ceiling. We heard the footsteps pause on the squeaky top stair.

For the doubters, I knew I was hearing footsteps and not the random clamor of a 1930s house. Trust me, I knew. As the only person who worked downstairs, I had become so acquainted with the acoustic language of the house that I not only knew when someone was upstairs, I could quickly discern which coworker it was. I was especially familiar with the distinctive top stair creak. I had developed a Pavlovian response to that sound. It was always my cue to minimize the NYT Crossword.

Of course, the rest of the story is a tale as old as time - your basic ghost story stuff. We crept upstairs, cautiously peering into every room only to find each one empty. I never heard the footsteps again.

I sent this story to Kara to corroborate my memory. I worried that all these years of retelling my one-and-only ghostly experience had warped it, embellished it. She remembered it just as I did. We both heard those steps. We both saw the empty rooms. And yet, I’m still not wholly convinced by ghosts. I’m still unsure those sounds were truly the echoes of previous occupants. I desperately want to be convinced, but something holds me back. I suppose I want evidence more substantial than footsteps.

I’ve had plenty of unfulfilled opportunities for ghostly encounters. I’ve sat in archives, reading intimate diaries and love letters never meant for my eyes. I’ve scrolled through endless reels of microfilm watching story after story of untimely deaths and heinous crimes flit across the screen. I’ve worked at nearly every kind of historic site and most of them came with their own batch of ghost stories recounted in hushed voices among docents. I even worked on a Revolutionary War battlefield as a National Park ranger. Sometimes I’d be assigned to a house on the outskirts of the property where the final agreements of the American Revolution were settled in the commandeered parlor of a local farmer. I’d sit for hours with my book just outside the room where George Washington had once sat. Visitors were awestruck by this proximity to history as if the mere glimpse of a chair that had once made contact with George Washington’s ass was the most magical thing they’d ever seen. They would gasp with delight and I would smile and nod. Yes, yes. Very historic. Very profound.

But I am just as susceptible. I don’t get all that excited by the founding fathers, but I do have a tendency to conjure up ghosts in my everyday life. I’ve curated an entire life from the debris of dead people. I rummage racks at thrift stores and I get down on my knees to dig through dusty boxes in estate sale basements. I buy things people have left behind.

I wear a lot of dead people’s clothes. I put on their jewelry. I eat off their plates and drink coffee out of their mugs. I know that an object is simply an object, but I I can’t help but to look at each one in my house and remember that someone owned it first. Someone touched it. Treasured it. Everything becomes imbued with ghosts and I imagine ghostly residue clinging to the fabric and glass and wood. I feel a tender sense of obligation to objects as if someone’s spirit is trapped inside. I’m more caretaker than collector.

Which brings us to this week’s playlist. Instead of haunted objects, what would a haunted song sound like? I tried to avoid songs explicitly about ghosts and instead I curated songs that to me, sound like a ghost lingering between melodies and chords, haunting you from your headphones.

link to Spotify / link to Apple Music

There are cracks, hisses, and eerie field recordings running throughout this entire playlist. Broadcast’s “We’ve Got Time” from Work and Non Work sets the tone. It’s the audio equivalent of turning a rusty key on the front door of a Victorian house and stepping into a black and white horror film.

“B and O Blues” by Eola is the track on this list that by far makes me the most unsettled. It has a reverberating sense of doom. Imagine purchasing a beautiful antique radio from a flea market. You bring it home, lovingly dust it off and before you even plug it in, the dial glows, the radio screeches to life, and this distorted and eerie version of a 1930s blues song starts playing. Congratulations - you bought a haunted radio. That’s what I imagine when I hear this track.

Lastly, I’ll encourage you to listen to the entire MEMORIALS album. I can’t recommend it enough. They were a fantastic opening act for Stereolab when I saw them in Asheville last month. “Book Stall” is just barely contained chaos. It’s buzzing with frantic energy like a tangible shift in the atmosphere before a ghost hurls a potted plant across your living room.

Curating a playlist for ghosts has been one of the most enjoyable experiences I’ve had while writing this Substack. But then again, I’m always happy to dedicate some time to ghosts. While planning this week’s post, I asked my friend Jon about his favorite ghost story. Jon has a much longer career in historic houses than me (and he also used to give Lexington ghost tours). He sent me an old interview he did. In it, he tells the local story of Bouviette James. Here’s the whole interview - you can read one of Lexington’s most famous ghost stories in full, but, it was Jon’s comments about our common fascination with ghost stories that really resonated with me:

“Ghost stories are actually historical artifacts in and of themselves,” he told the interviewer. “Ghosts require us to remember – they are inherently a product of the past, not of the present. How societies grapple with their past, how societies grapple with their history, things that they may be inherently uncomfortable with, things they would want to change or explain away – and of course it also deals with death and dying and the other scary stuff that we as human beings have to deal with.”

Jon’s quote speaks to my own romanticizing of objects. Maybe I’m also trying to tether myself to the past in some way that helps me grapple with my own fears and worries. But while that’s something I should unpack with a therapist and not on the internet, I do think there’s something incredibly comforting and even a little magical about imbuing things with meaning. It certainly makes life more interesting.

Take the collages I’ve used in this week’s post. Each was carefully cut from vintage magazines I lovingly scooped up from all manner of dusty places. Some of the images are from 1950s women’s magazines. Whenever I flip through them, I picture a housewife in her day dress reading them on her floral couch with a cigarette. There’s something so humbling about that imaginary thread between myself and the past. On a less savory note, some images are from a vintage nude art model booklet that I got at a yard sale. I found it in a musty box that had belonged to someone’s brother who had long since passed. Judging by the clippings stuck inside, I’m pretty sure he wasn’t using it for an art study, if you know what I mean. I guess if you’re the caretaker of ghosts, you can’t always choose the haunting you inherit. RIP, buddy! Sorry I chopped up your…special magazine.

Which is where I’ll leave you this week. I have a small glimmer of hope that one of my readers sends me a message with their own ghostly experience that will finally tip me towards believing. My internal Mulder and Scully have been fighting it out for decades and I secretly want Mulder to win this one.