by Noel Hynd
“Tell me why you feel the need to talk to someone again,” Dr. Rossling asked.
Annette thought about it. “I think I’m seeing ghosts,” she said, raising her eyes to meet the doctor’s as she hit the key word.
For an instant Dr. Rossling looked surprised, almost amused. This changed quickly to a look of puzzlement.
Then, “Ghosts, huh?” he asked softly.
“Ghosts,” Annette Carlson said. “I think… Oh, I don’t know what I think… Maybe it’s tied up with tension. You know, work pressures, combined with—”she hesitated here for a moment and Dr. Rossling caught it—“my mother’s death two years ago. On Academy Awards’ night she had a stroke.” She looked up. “I’m sure it’s all in my records.”
Dr. Rossling nodded without looking at the records he had read carefully before. He recalled. “What do they look like?” the psychiatrist finally asked. “These things you see.”
She told him.
He received her account very pensively. Mostly, he listened in silence, making occasional notes to himself on his yellow pad. Annette’s account took more than half an hour. Toward the end of it, Dr. Rossling flipped the first page of his notepad and began a second sheet of observations. He had written down, Annette realized, more than she had thought. Those large, strong hands obviously wrote quickly.
Finally she concluded. There was a pause in the room for several seconds before Gary Rossling looked up from what he was writing.
“This is not to take issue with you,” he said with understanding. “But I don’t know much about ghosts. I don’t think I’ve ever met one. Never knowingly had the experience. I don’t dismiss anything, though.” He approached it rationally. “I suppose I’d find it very interesting if it happened. Do you find it interesting?”
“I don’t find it interesting or uninteresting,” Annette said, almost with irritation. “I live with it. More than anything, I find it frightening.”
“Upsetting? Unsettling?”
“Wouldn’t you? Very.”
“And you’d like it to stop?”
“Yes.”
“That’s good. That’s a start.” Dr. Rossling folded his arms. His gaze settled into Annette’s. “Why do you think you’re still seeing them if you don’t want to see them?” he asked. Annette thought about it. She shrugged.
“Because I don’t think there’s anything wrong with me,” she said. “I think what I’m seeing is actually there.”
Dr. Rossling smiled. He wrote something down. “Who knows?” he added philosophically and without looking up. “Maybe it is. Or maybe something is. ‘Actually there,’ I mean.”
He then guided her through a final sequence of questions.
Some of them backtracked over territory covered in the transcripts. Others addressed her mental state at the time she had received her Academy Award. Her mental state, and how it wrapped itself around her mother’s sudden passing.
“Were there things that you and your mother had planned to do that you never got to do?” he asked. “How much do you think your grief intermingled with guilt?”
And so on.
Annette answered as best as she could. Fifty minutes of the hour session had soon been filled.
“All right,” Dr. Rossling said when Annette appeared to be talked out. “I think that’s enough for today. At least on your part. Maybe I should gab a little.”
He was still making notes. She smiled hopefully as he looked up and put down his pencil. Yet the doctor appeared disturbed. “Oh, come on,” Annette finally demanded. “At least tell me something.”
Dr. Rossling sighed, gently tapping a finger on his writing tablet. “Well,” he said, “it’s somewhat perplexing. Quite clearly, you’re an intelligent woman. Educated. Well balanced. Stable. In control of your faculties of reason.” He paused. “Yet you entertain these disturbing visions.”
“And I want to be rid of them.”
“And you want to be rid of them,” he affirmed. He scratched his temple for a moment and exhaled thoughtfully. “It would be completely irresponsible and unprofessional for me to attempt any sort of diagnosis or conclusion after one meeting.”
“But you must have something to send me out the door with,” she pressed again.
Dr. Rossling pursed his lips. “I’ll sell you a few thoughts. Check that. I’ll toss them in free for the admission price you’ve already paid.” He smiled. He gave her a wink. He motioned to the adjoining room, the one they had come from.
“Come back into my office,” he said. “That’s the place to talk.”
Annette followed him. Her eyes had accustomed themselves to the diminished light of Dr. Rossling’s examination room. The bright Cambridge daylight outside filtered through a venetian blind. The return was so jarring that Annette realized immediately how different the moods of the two rooms were, just as the psychiatrist had intended.
“Look,” he said, sitting down, “you’re an adult patient. You’re not manic depressive. I doubt that you’re schizoid or a closet psychotic. Very obviously, you lead as normal a life as anyone in your profession—no offence—could hope to. You’re well suited to functioning among sane people in a normal society.” He watched her closely as she settled into a chair.
“Overall, and I stress that these are just preliminary impressions,” he continued, “your mental health would seem fine. Your previous bout with depression seems to have enjoyed a full recovery. And I take you at your word that you’re not abusing any substance.”
He waited for reassurance. “I’m not,” she promised him.
“Good.” He switched gears. “I suppose we could do an electroencephalogram to see if we turn up any brain-wave abnormality,” he said. “But I’d rather reject doing one at this time. I see that one was done three years ago when you underwent depression and the EEG back then didn’t show anything abnormal. I see no reason to do one diagnostically now when your overall mental state would appear to be much better than it was three years ago. Unless you wanted one now,” the psychiatrist said warily. “And even if you did, I’d argue against it.”
“I don’t want one,” Annette said.
“Quite, frankly,” Dr. Rossling continued, speaking slowly, “judging by our conversation, I’m strongly tempted to suggest that there’s some external physical force at work here. Something completely divorced from your mental health or your faculties of psychological perception.”
Annette frowned. “In plain English, what do you mean by ‘an external force?’?”
“Sorry,” he said. “I’m not accusing anyone. But might someone be having a mean joke with you? A complex prank, perhaps? Oh, maybe there might not even be any malice to it, Ms. Carlson. I’ve heard about some really convincing performances. And I’m sure you do know people who’d be adept at ‘special effects’ of a fairly sophisticated sort. I’ve seen stranger things from…”
“No,” she said, cutting him off. “I don’t think that’s a possibility.” She hesitated for a moment. “And even if it were, how would you explain the appearance of Mrs. Ritter several hours after she died?”
“Well,” he said somberly, playing detective for a moment, “there are certainly possibilities of fraud. Don’t you think? Did you ever check the official coroner’s report of exactly when she died?”
“No,” Annette allowed.
“Okay,” Dr. Rossling continued. “Now, I might be putting myself out of business on this tack, but have you reported what you’ve seen to the police?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
She thought of Tim Brooks. “The investigating detective didn’t believe what I was seeing, either,” she said without expression. “Then he witnessed one of these incidents, himself.”
Dr. Rossling was surprised by the response. He weighed it.
“He did, huh?”
“That’s right.”
“And he took what he saw to be a ghost, too?” His eyes narrowed. “I’m understanding this correctly?”
&n
bsp; “You are.”
Dr. Rossling was clearly puzzled. He fingered his notepad. “I see,” he finally said. “That’s right. You told me you had a witness to the most recent incident. That was a policeman?”
She nodded.
For several seconds Dr. Rossling pondered the point. Then he wrote something down. “Okay, then,” Rossling continued. “I’d like to exclude the actual existence of ghosts to start with. Not because I necessarily disbelieve. Rather, because we should look first at the more likely explanation of what’s going on. Barring the existence of some merry pranksters, again, that leads us invariably to stress and trauma, as well as ophthalmic misperception and disorientation. Even, in a very broad sense, hallucination. Are you following me?”
Annette answered that yes, she was.
“Again, these are just initial impressions,” the doctor said. “But I think you’re very much in control of yourself and capable of understanding what I’m going to discuss.”
Annette sat very still and listened. They had already run past their scheduled sixty minutes.
“Hallucination takes many forms,” Dr. Rossling explained. “Normally, when not chemically induced, it stems from hysteria. Hysteria, too, can take a variety of forms. It can be very broad or—possibly in your case—very narrow and focused upon one line of thought. Accepting mortality, for example. Your own. That of your mother. Potentially that of your father. Or maybe of a friend.”
Dr. Rossling smiled reassuringly.
“Somewhere in the dark recesses of the sprawling psychiatric industry,” he said, “they even have a word for this: ‘thanatophobia.’ Great term, isn’t it? Comes from ‘thanatology,’ which is the scientific study of the phenomena surrounding death. It’s a deep fear of people dying, often well obscured within the psyche. It afflicts children more than adults, or at least people who have never survived a close death before.” He paused. “Obviously, that aspect of it doesn’t apply to your case, though in a larger sense I suppose it could if enough remained unsettled in your own unconsciousness.” He thought for a moment. “I should have asked earlier: are there any other deaths in the last few years that deeply affected you? Not just in your personal and private life. But maybe something public? A famous person? Someone in your industry whom you had always respected or hoped to work with?”
Annette searched for a name. Then she shook her head.
“No,” she answered. “No one. Not aside from my private life, which you know about.”
Rossling went on. “It might be significant that the specters you’ve seen are women. But right now, I couldn’t say. I’d only be guessing.”
Annette nodded.
The doctor continued. “So obviously, we’re looking for something more elusive. Something deeper, perhaps. And obviously again, I’d like to discuss these problems with you further, as long as you continue to feel the need to talk.”
He tapped gently on his desk. Thinking. Searching. Maybe pondering.
“Ghosts,” he said again. “This really isn’t exactly my line. But I will tell you a story that I believe to be germane to what we’re discussing.” For a moment he focused on some inner thought. “And I have to tell you: This is what’s really troubling me today,” he said. He glanced at his watch. A Rolex. “Do you have a few extra minutes? We’re running over our time, but I won’t charge you.”
Annette had the extra minutes and didn’t care about the charges.
“My theories would tend toward believing that such apparitions originate in the mind,” he said. “Even if the experiences are shared with another individual, as you say one was. I recall a paper I read a few years ago in the psychiatric journals. It was very striking. It concerned a local group, I think it was the Boston Society for Psychic Research. Something like that. I’m sure I could find the material if I looked for it.”
Somewhere outside there was the sound of a car horn, followed by skidding tires, metal crunching metal and then angry voices. Yes, this is metropolitan Boston, Annette thought.
The doctor read her mind and smiled. “Mass drivers,” he said. “If you’ll excuse my terminology, we call them ‘Massholes’ around here.”
“That’s good. I’ll remember that,” Annette said with a smile.
“Anyway, the Society attempted an experiment one summer,” Dr. Rossling continued. “They wanted to determine whether ghosts were actually the spirits of the dead, some sort of disembodied entity, or figments of the unconscious mind. So they set about to manufacture a ‘ghost.’”
Dr. Rossling leaned back in his chair.
“There were three male doctors who were involved. Two psychologists and a psychiatrist. They invented a case history of a man named Caleb,” he continued, “a contemporary and friend of Abraham Lincoln. Caleb had an affair with a black woman named Althea. When Caleb’ wife found out about it, she had Althea accused of murder. Althea was convicted and hanged. Ultimately, Caleb committed suicide on the same day Lincoln was shot.”
Annette listened.
“The researchers created a suitable background for their ghost—an old plantation house in South Carolina—and spent summer weekends there trying to conjure up the spirit that they had invented.”
“Conjure up how?”
“So-called séances. No medium. Just the three of them and an ordinary table in this old mansion.”
A table. Annette felt something morbid come over her, a sense of foreboding that lay coiled within her like a length of rope, ready to unravel and tighten at any time.
“A table,” she repeated aloud.
“Something small. Card table size,” he said.
“Please continue,” Annette said.
“They worked on it for six or seven months,” Dr. Rossling said, recalling. “Finally, they were just about to give up when they felt a sharp rap on their table one night. They used a code to communicate with their ‘spirit.’ One rap for yes. Two raps for no. The spirit, or whatever was rapping, claimed to be Caleb. It repeated the story they had created. At later sentences, before a television camera, the spirit—or something—actually was seen to levitate the table. It could also move small objects around the room through what the Society termed ‘psycho kinesis.’ That’s moving objects through mental force rather than physical. ‘Caleb’ even threw the table once.”
Dr. Rossling drew a breath. Annette was very still, conscious of her heartbeat.
The psychiatrist continued. “The three men involved considered the experiment a triumph,” Rossling said. “They contended that the ‘Caleb’ persona was a product of their creativity. And the appearance of his spirit was a product of their unconscious minds.”
“So?” Annette asked.
“The truth is,” the psychiatrist said, “that what the three researchers did was very unscientific. They held a number of séances until their original prophesy was fulfilled. They kept their ‘research’ going, in other words, until they arrived at the results they wanted. The most likely explanation for what happened is that the three researchers induced a mutual self-hypnosis on each other. Thus they shared the same hallucination because they had decided in advance what the hallucination would be.”
Annette smiled slightly, following the doctor’s logic. Temporarily, something about the story mildly relieved her.
“Even people who ardently believe in such things as poltergeists and feral spirits totally discredit the Boston Society’s conclusions. They maintain that the spirit that descended upon them—if indeed one did, as you know I’m a skeptic—could have been any bored spirit, wandering through eternity, looking for something to do.”
The doctor shrugged playfully. He rolled his eyes. Then he turned serious again.
“But that’s not the point of my telling you this story,” he said.
He stood as their time together came to an end.
“No? What is?” She stood, too.
“For some reason, the whole episode evolved under an ill star,” Dr. Rossling said. “I don’t know any of th
e circumstances surrounding the private lives of any of the three men. But about a year after the final séance, one of the researchers murdered one of the other two. Came into the laboratory one day with a kitchen carving knife from home. Day after Easter, if I recall. He slashed his psychiatrist friend along the jugular vein. Ear to ear. A week or so later, the third member of the team suffered a psychotic break with reality. Mental breakdown. Never came out of it. So that’s my point. Within two years after seeing their ‘ghost’—or their hallucination—one man was dead, one was serving a twenty-five-year prison sentence for homicide and the other was in an insane asylum.”
He let this sink in.
“So what I’m saying, Miss Carlson,” he said softly, “is that I take your story and your problem very seriously. These things—the alleged manifestation of spirits—can translate very easily into a very bad case of stress-related hysteria. I want you to come back. And I want to help you dispose of what you’re seeing while we can still keep things under control.”
The doctor paused.
“Is anyone staying with you at the present time?”
“No.”
“Is there anyone on Nantucket you could call if you needed to be with someone urgently?”
Timothy Brooks, she thought. So, “Yes,” Annette answered.
“I think that’s constructive,” Dr. Rossling said. “A rational voice nearby is a healthy counterpoint. Can you come back sometime next week?”
Annette nodded. On her way out, she made a follow-up appointment.
Chapter Thirty
On the evening of the same day, just past six, Tim Brooks was waiting with the car at the airport in Nantucket. As soon as Annette saw him, she knew something was wrong. Moments after that, she had an inkling as to what it might be.
“You saw something, didn’t you?” she asked. “You were in the house alone and something happened.”
He exhaled long and hard as he pulled his car out of the airport parking lot. “Maybe worse than saw,” he admitted. “I heard. I felt.”
“Uh oh,” she said. “Let’s hear about it.”
He explained as they drove back to Cort Street. The knocks and the thumps. The rattling of something hard rolling across the attic floorboards. The icy blast at the top of the stairs. The sense that something was chasing him away from the door. Then they rode part of the way in silence, each alone with individual thoughts. He asked a few questions about Dr. Rossling, but the questions were intended only to break the tension. There was no question about what was on either of their minds. And perhaps they shared the same visions telepathically, for the discussion quickly drifted from Dr. Rossling back to the house and what had transpired there.
