A Ghost Story

a ghost story is a trauma story

I must confess: I do not like Halloween. It’s one of my least favorite holidays—when people ask why, I say something about the drunk, skimpily-dressed people cavorting around the city, taking the opportunity of Halloween to smash pumpkins and sloppily vomit onto the sidewalk. It’s like St. Patrick’s Day: something that once meant one thing, and has since turned into an excuse to give oneself alcohol poisoning.

But that’s not the actual reason I don’t like Halloween. It’s true that I feel the other side more profoundly than most people I know. My BFF has heard my stories, and she believes in my second sight as much as she believes in my Taiwanese American-ness: which is to say that she believes it as a component of my identity.

The membrane between our world and the other one is supposed to be—because of Samhain—at its thinnest on Halloween. I’ve never experienced anything particularly strange on Halloween. If I’m going to have something strange happen to me, it’s going to be when I’m in an old French residence, watching ghosts enter and leave the bathroom in the middle of the night; sitting upright in bed on Toronto Island, hearing tiny fists pound on the doors all the way down the hall, only to open the door and see no one and nothing; hearing the creaky screams in my cottage. It’s true that I live with the schizophrenias, but differentiating between the otherworldly and hallucinations is a simple process. I’ve seen a rotting corpse in the passenger seat of a car; I know this to be a hallucination. One is one thing and the other is another thing.