Our theme for the month of October is “haunt.”
The first time my aunts called the ghost buster, it was because their employees had asked them to. Too many odd occurrences, too much angst in the ambiance, an IT closet that wouldn’t behave no matter what technician tinkered with it. When she came to their office, she brought dowsing rods and looked very much like a substitute music teacher. They hadn’t told her about their technology problems, but even so she stopped next to the server room and said, “Oh. This is it, isn’t it?” After she left, their office tech worked just like normal.
The next time my aunts called the ghost buster, she spent an hour padding through the historic building they were working to renovate. She paused before a wall where she said she could feel powerful energy swirling into a vortex. After concentrating, she exhaled and declared it closed. Immediately, a crash sounded through the building, followed by high calls of alarm. On the other side of the wall, a floor-length mirror had just shattered.
The third time my aunts called the ghost buster was one too many. She stood in the middle of the room and bent, cranking her fists as if turning the spigot on a massive cartoon sewer pipe, vocalizing with each twist. Squ-weak. Squ-weak.
“It was the sound effects that lost us,” my aunt told me with a laugh.
My aunts are the kind of people that interesting things happen to, so I am not surprised that they have been involved with three properties in need of ghost busting. It’s more than that, actually; it’s haunted hotel stays and suspect gurus and the flip of the Tarot card—the knowledge that the inexplicable often lives just down the road.
Or at least it does when you live in New Mexico, like they do. Maybe it’s because New Mexico is ground zero for so much weirdness, like aliens and atomic bombs. Maybe it’s because New Mexico is so old, home to the United States’ longest surviving church and thousands of years of humans living on its land and naming its ghosts before that church’s Church even existed.
I, meanwhile, have no ghost stories. This too may be a symptom of geography—West Michigan is so Calvinist and sterile we can barely conjure up a haunted lighthouse or the occasional melon head. The bigger problem is, as usual, myself.
A natural-born skeptic, I don’t believe in ghosts. But I want to. I want to believe with all my heart. The “why” here is simple: I love history and Scooby Doo, I was a morbid child who grew into a cemetery-exploring adolescent, spirits and their stories are just so much fun. And lurking beneath the superficiality is a longing for confirmation; if ghosts exist, might there not be more out there? Other things, meaning-making things, than are dreamt of in my philosophy?
And so when I visited New Mexico earlier this month and listened to my aunts’ ghost stories, I couldn’t help but hope, just a little, that this might be the time.
It wasn’t—I got sick two days in (a curse for my unbelief?) and spent the back half of the trip curled up with a mug of chicken noodle soup and The Great British Bake Off.
Before I came down with my cold, my aunts and I did head to downtown Santa Fe and visited that fifteenth-century church. We also went to the library, a must-see destination for an out-of-town librarian like me. Santa Fe’s public library has all the essentials, plus a gorgeous reading room and a short-haired reference librarian who was happy to answer all of my oblique questions about their display furniture.
Upstairs, we stopped by their bulletin board, where I spotted a yellow flier for an upcoming program, advertising “Spirits, Ghosts, and ET’s, Oh My!” Struck by the coincidence, I pointed it out to my aunt, who cackled, “It’s her. It’s our ghost buster.”
I’ll take being haunted by my aunts’ ghost buster, if that’s all I’ve got. But I want more. I want to be one of those people whose spirituality survives the death of their religion. Failing that, I want to be the kind of person who looks at the malfunctioning IT cabinet, shrugs, and says, “Could be.”
Photo by Flickr user Rennett Stowe (CC BY 2.0)

I, also, want to believe, and want to be “one of those people whose spirituality survives the death of their religion.” This is great. Cool story, I didn’t know that about Santa Fe.