you got . . .”
“You’re talking about myth!” She protested shrilly.
No, I thought, I’m talking about the hazy line between history and myth.
“Don’t talk to me about ghosts on High Street! I have to work there!” She screeched and hung up.
Buried not too deeply under our seemingly solid sidewalks and parking lots is the blood-soaked, story-drenched soil of our not-too-distant history. We block out the secret life of the past. We forget that not too far behind every myth is a real life adventure. We forget that our own lives are ghost stories.
I was looking underneath the Cambridge sidewalks for something more, something missing, just out of my reach. I couldn’t wait to interview Olivia and see the graveyard.
Getting no help from Thomasine, I read more history, digging for the gem of a ghost story. Regardless of its unreliability and its inherent fiction, our stories are our roots; they’re our culture’s childhood.
In the 1870s, the oyster market exploded, and Cambridge and other Chesapeake towns like St. Michaels and Crisfield became oyster boomtowns, no different than the rough and brawling Western mining towns of the same period, rippled by arson, theft, murder and rape. Virginia watermen poached Maryland oyster beds, so the oystermen took to sea with Winchester rifles. Maryland created an oyster navy comprised of several steamers and fifty men to suppress the anarchy, but the Baltimore Sun reported that the bloated bodies of dead oystermen were clogging the Choptank. Full-scale battles raged on Maryland waters over oyster beds. When Virginia dredgers threatened to fire on Cambridge and burn it to the ground, the citizens organized the Dorchester County Oyster Militia in order to protect their oyster beds.24
Amazingly enough, despite all this violent nautical history and all the folklore about sunken vessels and hidden gold, I found no Cambridge oyster war ghosts lurking in High Street houses. Maybe like Nanking, Cambridge doesn’t want to glamorize that part of its rough history with story.
I was reading at my desk and an elongated black shape whipped by along the baseboard, heading out into the hall. The phone rang. I blinked, and my heart pounded. Did I see that?
I answered the phone; it sounded real. “How was Thomasine?” Judy asked.
“She doesn’t dig for coins in the swamps.”
“Oh, I heard she and her husband did . . .”
“Nope. Or if they do, she denies it. Vehemently.” I took a deep breath. “And she doesn’t believe that pirates ever existed.”
“Oh, dear. Well, they did. Blackbeard sailed the Chesapeake and murdered and stole and hid in the backwater of the Eastern Shore to clean his ships.”
“I know. There were pirates in Vienna.”
“The Oyster Wars on the Choptank happened right at the end of this street.”
“I know. I read the book,” I said.
“Maybe you could make something up. I’ve read your work, certainly you can make up a little something.”
“I don’t like the idea of fabricating,” I said. “It seems like cheating somehow. Like all those fascist regimes that made up history.”
“I don’t think it’s the same as all that. Well, if you can’t find the stories, then you have to make them up,” she argued.
I didn’t want to see the logic in that, but considering that all of history is made up, I shouldn’t have any qualms about embellishing some ghost folklore.
After a month and a half and no direct High Street ghost legend, I fabricated a short story for the tour on #115 High Street, the once home of Joseph H. Johnson, the man who is credited with writing the Maryland oyster laws. Inspired by the Dorchester Arts Center’s gravity-defying porch puddles, I wrote that even in dry spells puddles appear in the downstairs hall and sometimes the puddles have a pristine oyster shell in the middle.
I wondered if one person could start folklore, like literature, or if folklore took a community. I felt guilty that I even considered writing a story of shanghaied oysterman rising out of the river grass by the wharf, bloated by watery death, dripping, hulking, thick with revenge. I wrote a puddle story for the tour, but I swear that all the stories in this compilation are as true as I found them.
This is all truth, as I know it. “It’s the gospel truth,” as they say in the county.
May 25th
Black Shapes
The hard man in Fells Point was not the first ghost story in my life. I repressed many poltergeist experiences until they cropped up again during this project, surfacing like mysterious skin rashes, skirting around baseboards like the black shapes. American society does not encourage its members to tell ghost stories. Some spectral tales begin with a reckless group of teenagers telling ghost folklore and a phantom descends, as if the narration of the story summoned up the real thing. The fabricated stories of The Woman in Black, The Ring, The Turn of the Screw, and The Mummy all have curses associated with the telling of the tale.
I wondered if those curses turn the ghost stories dissociative. Joseph Campbell theorized that when a myth separates from the society that created it, the story becomes disconnected. Commercial television jingles and reality TV are decidedly dissociative; they replace the informing archetypes in our brains with a useless jumble of confusion. But ghost stories don’t disconnect people from their society. They reflect our need as a society to know the Other Side of the Veil, to know what happens after death, to communicate with those who have crossed, to trick death one last time before he finally finds us, to cheat the Devil, and to transcend our own demise. Most ghost stories project a further reality than this one and disqualify the end of our consciousness. We need ghost stories. I find them more reassuring than the doctrine of most religions. Phantom legends have been part of our lore for centuries. The survival of these associative myths is a very positive cultural sign and a fictional Darwinism – ghost stories have common ancestors and the ones that best adapted to their surroundings endured. It’s the natural selection of folklore.
By learning her stories, I was connecting to Maryland and to her checkered past.
I told my friend Joe the Big Liz story. I was evolving the tour’s narrative voice by re-telling the stories and adjusting my writing style. Ghost stories, parables and myth are told in basic language since they’ve been repeated by generations. Folklore archetypes work like metaphors work: with something tangible they help us understand a disembodied concept.
“The wind will howl and soon you’ll hear Big Liz’s shuffling step,” I drawled, telling Joe the swamp story.
Joe was born in Frederick, Maryland, and he owns an antique store called Fat Elvis. He re-circulates dead people’s stuff back into the community. “No more. Stop,” he said. He paused and his brown eyes twinkled. “Okay, more. Tell me more. Is she carrying her head?”
That’s precisely how I feel about ghost stories.
Stop. No. More.
We love ghost stories and repress them all at once.
“New ghost stories are scarier than older ones,” Joe said. “Somehow the fresher ones are more powerful.” His goatee flexed as he thought. “Like it can still happen now.”
“Like the older ones are further away?” I asked. This thinking seemed so linear.
“Maybe,” he said.
“But Big Liz is still off Route 50,” I said dubiously. “Ysabel knew her story and she’s fifteen.”
The older ones hold power from all those years of the ghost being dead, from all those years of the story being told. Each re-telling by each generation makes the story more powerful; certainly each chronicling increases impact and increases the story’s base. The reporting conjures it, perpetuates it, like prayer.
I took a chance and told him one of mine, just to keep the story alive a little