All Stories are Ghost Stories

What is a story? We talk about characters and plots, settings and dialogues, but that is like trying to define a diamond by discussing its facets. To be blunt, a diamond is a rock. To be equally blunt, a story is information given if-then structure. In both cases, the sparkly miracles we crave are a result of skillful shaping based on the potential in the material we start with. The way we shape stones, stories, and our lives depends on what we are searching for. Pleasure? Power? Transcendence? 

In other words, we are seeking immaterial meanings within defined spaces. That’s the fancy way of saying we are hunting our houses for ghosts. 

That hunt is the reason I write ghost stories. I am far more interested in your experience within the walls of my creations than I am invested in telling you what you want to experience. You come in already haunted. To paraphrase the Robert M. Pirsig quote about gods and mountaintops, if there are ghosts in your houses, you brought them in with you.

My haunted house with its maze of corridors, its oddity-packed attic, and its irresistibly forbidding basement depends wholly on the imagination of you, its visitor. I can only design the maze, choose the artifacts, remove the basement light bulbs. I can only suggest the possibility of ghosts. It is you, the reader, who provides the echoing footsteps and disembodied voices. I provide the clock. You provide the time.

This is why I try never to describe the ghosts outside a character’s encounter with them. The phantoms in your mind are far more real than anything I can put into words. My defining the haunt on my terms deflates its power, reducing restless souls to bedsheets with holes cut for eyes. If even that image gives you a creeping sensation on the back of your neck, you just proved my point.

Without you, the reader, the houses of my stories sit empty and waiting. There is a reason we are fond of tales of haunted libraries. Whether the story concerns a haunting or a hostage taking, a lady-in-white or lovers reunited, the stuff of it, the raw rock of its carefully arranged words requires the shaping force of your spirit to manifest it into reality.

And so I invite the sparkly miracle of your imagination into my sprawling old house. May you find in these halls and rooms the evidence you need to believe in the reality of the story you came here to encounter.