Several years ago, when COVID was still a bruising force in our lives, scaring us spitless, I took a COVID test, got the requisite negative result, and trekked to upstate New York for a writer’s retreat. I had no more than a seedling of an idea for my novel—a young widow overcome with grief. Barely a seedling. A small cohort of peers gathered for the event—an engineer, a professor, a teacher, a published author/mentor, a poet, and me, the stay-at-home mom. I arrived late afternoon on Monday, turning off the main road to a large stone house. It had a dark aspect. This is not a dramatization.

If I were to show you a picture, I promise you’d agree. A house of the Victorian era with carved wood, stonework, and stained-glass windows—the variety found in cathedrals that often depict red-faced devils and the flames of hell. I wish I could say that upon entering the house its first impression improved, but it didn’t. I felt as if we were submerged in the murky depths of the ocean—all shadow, with the occasional shift of colored light overhead. Several of the writers commented on the creepy nature of the house, but we soon found a couple rooms that had a degree of hominess—the kitchen and the dining area—where we spent most of our time discussing and reading from our work.

It was on Wednesday night when things went sideways.

I should explain—two of the women were participating from the West Coast on Zoom, unable to attend because of prior commitments, but four of us were seated around the dining table. On this night, we were all enjoying the gift of camaraderie and laughter, denied us for months. We may have been boisterous, but who was to mind? It was in one of these peals of laughter that a woman seated across from me suddenly shushed us. Listen , she said, and pointed above. We all went silent. Each of us heard it—the heavy tread of feet overhead, but then it was gone. And like those predictable horror movies where the heroine is naively glib about all indications she should run, run for her life, we forgot about the noise. In no time, we were back to talking and laughing. This time, it stopped all of us mid-laugh—the sound of furniture, heavy furniture, being dragged across the floor directly above us. Someone yelled out, asking if there was anyone upstairs. No one answered, but the sound became more emphatic.

The spectral are getting louder, more insistent, more prevalent, and our literature, our cinema, reflect this

Do you know what you’d do in the case of a haunting? Neither did I, but I do now. It was as if I couldn’t commit to an emotion, zigzagging between unhinged laughter and hysterical crying. Dear reader, I was the untethered woman who is slapped in the horror movie, the first one sacrificed to whatever evil presence needs feeding. Not a proud moment. Somewhere in all this, we learned that our two companions on Zoom were both trained by shamans and, for a moment, our interest in this bit of trivia superseded our fear. A shaman? No, two shamans? One of them mentioned that maybe, just possibly, all the laughter had upset a spirit in the house. They both hypothesized that an elderly ghost was disturbed by our raucous behavior and suggested we find something “rose” to placate her. Rose, as in the flower. I remembered my rose-scented perfume upstairs in my bedroom, on my bureau.

Imagine: three grown women—three because the fourth, our mentor, had gone to her house a few miles away to get her dogs and return with eager canine force to sniff out our poltergeist. Three women walking in a tight cluster up the long stairs, down the hallway, to my bedroom and retrieving the perfume, then walking in this same tight circle, spritzing as they go, choking on clouds of rose perfume—and that one dimwit still crying/laughing hysterically. Meanwhile, the two Zooming shamans were texting each other privately so as not to alarm the rest of us: Do you see the ghost? Yeah, I see it, too. It was around this time that our mentor and her three dogs arrived. Let off leash, they ran through the house, roaming and sniffing, jumping on our beds, looking for snacks. Our noises came to a screeching halt. Later, we learned that the house was known to the locals for hauntings and that it had once been used for an elder care home.

And with that haunting, my novel took on a new shape, one in which a husband lingers as a ghost grieving all that remained unresolved, unfinished in his marriage, while watching his wife struggle to re-start her life. A wave of recent books and movies reveals that I am far from alone in my preoccupations. These days we are surrounded by ghosts and gossamer visions vying for our attention, trying to tell us something vital—or as mundane as to shut up already, like in my case.