Ghosts From Our Past: Both Literally and Figuratively: The Study of the Paranormal

by Erin Gilbert

  After all, science is nothing if not a series of questions: How do birds fly? What causes lightning? Are pirate ghosts the ghosts of pirates, or are they ghosts that became pirates in the afterlife?

  Since you already know I’m a world-class scientist, it should come as no surprise that I was an exceptionally curious child.

  Going Bananas

  I’ve always loved asking questions—about anything and everything. My first word wasn’t “Mama,” “Dada,” or “Higgs boson.” My first word was “Why”—followed quickly by “What this?” And then I said “Higgs boson.”

  They are the eternal questions of childhood. Yet they have driven parents nuts for centuries, mostly because adults often don’t know the answers themselves. Even the simplest question may have a complex answer. A child picks up a rock and asks her mother, “What this?” It’s virtually the same question the first Neanderthal scientist asked when picking up a rock. Neanderthals never learned the answer to that question, but tens of thousands of years later modern humans learned rocks are made of minerals. Centuries after that, scientists discovered those minerals are made of atoms. And decades after that discovery, physicists discovered even smaller particles called quarks and leptons. That’s a pretty deep dive, so most parents will just cut their kids off and say it’s a damn rock.

  If I picked up a rock, I had to know what it was made of, where it came from, and why it tasted funny when I licked it. Because of my intense curiosity, my parents called me “Curious Georgina.” A cute nickname when you’re a toddler, but embarrassing when the other kids overhear your mother calling you their “little monkey” at the third grade science fair.

  The day after the fair, a group of half a dozen girls cornered me on the playground. They looked like trouble. Kacey Lambertson pulled an enormous bunch of bananas out of a paper bag and held them out to me. “Hungry?” she said with a smirk.

  When faced with danger, our fight-or-flight response is supposed to kick in. Mine must have been broken. Instead of throwing a fist or running off, I snatched the bananas out of her hand and proceeded to eat them. Down the hatch they went, one after the other, until all that was left were thirteen empty peels and a gurgling stomach.

  “Thanks,” I said. “That really hit the spot.”

  The girls were speechless.

  An hour later during a math lesson, I blacked out.

  I woke up in an intensive care unit. An IV drip was hooked up to my arm. Apparently, potassium poisoning is a thing! It’s called “hyperkalemia,” and can lead to renal failure and cardiac arrest if not immediately treated. Science!

  Hunting the Elusive Leipreachán

  Despite my brush with mortality, I couldn’t help my natural curiosity. And so, a few weeks later, I set off on an ill-fated quest to reach the end of a rainbow.

  I’d heard about leprechauns and their pots of gold at the ends of rainbows, of course. Most of my education on the legendary Irish fairies had come to me by way of Lucky Charms. To say the least, I was extremely skeptical of the claims made by General Mills. The frosted marshmallows were certainly delicious, but were they magically delicious? There was only one way to find out: Follow the rainbow to the very end and see if leprechauns were real.

  (Yeah, I know what you’re thinking: Leprechauns? Isn’t this book supposed to be about ghosts? Well, not all of us could be as lucky as Erin and see a ghost when we were kids. Even if it did terrify the living neutrons out of her. So hang with me here.)

  One day, following a big thunderstorm, I was playing in the backyard with my imaginary dachshund, Zorp (Figure 2.1). (Yes, he was named after the Class VII metaspecter.) Before you go off thinking I had lost my mind, let me state that my mother was allergic to dogs. An imaginary one was the only kind I was allowed to have.

  I looked up and saw a massive rainbow, shimmering in the late afternoon sky like half a McDonald’s arch. It couldn’t have been more than a hundred yards away. I’d gone further into the woods and found my way out before—I harbored dreams of being an explorer of unknown worlds like Sally Ride, the first American female astronaut. While my parents didn’t have the money to send me to space camp, they let me have free range in the woods. We lived in Rochester, a small town on the outskirts of Detroit. Bad stuff was always happening in the big city. Nothing bad ever happened out in Rochester. Except for wolverine attacks.

  I tore off through the woods in the direction of the rainbow. No matter how fast my legs carried me, however, it didn’t get any closer. Deeper and deeper I went, farther than I’d ever gone.

  Figure 2.1.

  Zorp, Abby’s Imaginary Dog

  After ten minutes or so, the rainbow faded. My shoulders slumped in defeat. I turned around and started trudging back the way I’d come.

  Except that I found myself in uncharted territory—there were no landmarks to help me chart my course back home. After an hour of wandering aimlessly, I gave up. I was lost. With horror, I realized I wasn’t going to be the next Sally Ride; I was going to be the next Amelia Earhart. Zorp was no help. His allergies were acting up, and he couldn’t sniff his way back. I’d have to take him to an imaginary vet and get him some imaginary antihistamines. But we had to get home first.

  My father once told me that if I ever got lost, to sit still and let someone find me. “If you go wandering around while someone else is searching for you,” he said, “you’ll just lead everyone in circles. And then you’re not missing—you’re leading a parade through the woods. That’s pretty neat if all the deer and squirrels join up, but less cool if the wolverines do and they start attacking everyone.”

  For three days and two nights, Zorp and I huddled beneath a large maple tree, which protected us from the elements. We survived by drinking fresh rainwater off leaves and eating imaginary dog food. It was no Lucky Charms, but it was better than Cheerios.

  If you don’t remember my dimples all over the news, that’s probably because my face wasn’t shown on TV when I went missing. There was no search party, no benefit concert to find Abby L. Yates. My father simply showed up on the third day around supper time and asked me if I was ever coming home.

  My parents had known where I was the whole time. My father had found me sleeping under the tree and left dinner out for me, which the wolverines must have eaten. He’d also brought dry dog food for Zorp. So I wasn’t eating imaginary dog food after all! Ha ha. Ugh. Let’s just keep that detail between you and me.

  I wasn’t angry with my parents, even though being left alone that long in the woods did sting a little. (The stinging turned out to be the poison oak I’d been using for toilet paper. I recovered, though, and now you can barely see the scars!) Still, I’m thankful my parents indulged my every whim. Even if sometimes they couldn’t tell the difference between me playing around and me fearing for my life in the woods.

  While I never did find out if leprechauns were real—the jury is still out (Figure 2.2)—I did eventually find out what made Lucky Charms so magically delicious: sugar. Three teaspoons per serving. Just one of the many exciting facts I learned at the Dry Breakfast Foods Museum in Battle Creek, Michigan, which my family visited on vacation the next year. Little did any of us know that just a few short years later we would be living in Cereal City, USA—and that I would meet a kindred scientific spirit by the name of Erin Gilbert.

  Figure 2.2.

  Leprechauns: Real or Fake?

  First Contact

  I called my mother Mom, but to most people she was Dr. Cynthia Yates, the first woman to earn a doctorate in chemical physics from Iowa State University.

  The 1950s weren’t a good time for women in science. My mother kept her head down and forged a career nonetheless, first as a researcher at Tulane University and later in the private sector, as head of chemical engineering at Schorning Chemical. If you don’t recognize the company’s name, you surely know the jingle from Schorning’s commercials, which aired endlessly during Saturday morning c
artoons (We make the chemicals / That make up your plastic toys / Found in four of five cereals / Safe for both girls and boys). As it turns out, one of those chemicals—hydrazine polycarbonate—wasn’t safe for girls or boys. It was an endocrine-disrupting compound, which caused the early onset of puberty in millions of children in the seventies and early eighties.

  My mother was the first to discover the dangers of hydrazine polycarbonate. When her bosses told her to keep quiet about it, she took it to the FDA. Unfortunately, there were no whistle-blower protections at the time. She was fired—a major blow, since she was the breadwinner in our family. Thankfully, she found a new job in Battle Creek, where she could put her skills as a biochemist to work fortifying cereals with essential vitamins and minerals.

  I was already a month into the first semester of my junior year. I begged and pleaded with my parents to leave me behind with my aunt and uncle to finish out high school. There weren’t even any woods in Battle Creek. They’d cut down all the trees to make room for cereal factories! Plus, I dreaded having to make new friends.

  They reminded me that I didn’t have any friends at my old school.

  So I lost that fight and packed my boxes. My uncle gave me some tips on adjusting to a new environment. Specifically, to avoid being bullied by other girls, I should walk up to the baddest-looking girl on the first day and casually slip a shank into her side. Perhaps it’s a good thing I didn’t stay behind with them.

  What I did do on my first day of school was keep to myself. So, not a big change from my old routine. Nobody approached me, even to bully me, which I found a little insulting. I’d been expecting some minor hazing, like what happens to the new kid in teenage movies. Maybe some girl would slap a Post-it Note on my back reading KICK ME. Or maybe some insecure guy would knock my lunch tray out of my hands. But apparently nobody pranked the new kid anymore, at least not at Hoover High. They were too busy picking on existing students to worry about me.

  I quickly identified their chief target: a beanpole dressed like a librarian. The other kids called her “Ghost Girl,” which was about the awesomest nickname I’d ever heard. (Better than Curious Georgina, at least.) We were the only two kids in Chemistry who ever bothered to raise our hands. At lunch, we both sat by ourselves, which was particularly insulting, since there weren’t enough tables for anyone to be eating by themselves; a couple of girls chose to eat standing up against the brick wall rather than sit with either of us. After a week of this ridiculousness I went straight from the lunch line to Ghost Girl’s table.

  “Is this seat taken?” I asked, nodding toward an empty seat across from her.

  She looked up at me, startled as if she were a deer caught in headlights. It wouldn’t have surprised me if she had scampered off on all fours like a deer.

  “Real funny,” she said. “Like I haven’t heard that one before. There’s not a ghost in the chair, if that’s what you’re asking. You can move along now.”

  I contemplated moving along, but Mama didn’t raise no quitter. I sat down. “Anyone who asks if there’s a ghost in this chair doesn’t know a damn thing about ghosts,” I said. “Ghosts might have supernatural origins, but they’re composed of ectoplasm, which appears on the visible light spectrum. If there were a ghost here, we’d both be able to see it.”

  “That’s comforting,” she said.

  We sat in silence for a minute, and then I spoke up. “You . . . didn’t see a ghost sitting here, did you?”

  “God, no. You see one stupid ghost, and suddenly everyone thinks you’re some sort of ghost whisperer.”

  “Okay, because if you did, you can tell me,” I said. “I’m Abby, by the way.”

  “Erin,” she muttered.

  “So it’s true? You’ve seen a ghost?”

  Erin glanced around the cafeteria nervously. “You’re not going to make fun of me, are you? Because if you are—”

  “I wouldn’t do that,” I said, crossing myself. “Girl Scout’s honor.” I’d never been in the Scouts, but I respected what they did.

  She inhaled and exhaled loudly, as if she were about to go into labor. She leaned across the table. “When I was eight . . . I saw the ghost of an old woman who lived next door.”

  “Was she dead?”

  “Of course she was dead! How could I see her ghost if she wasn’t dead?”

  I shrugged. “Could be an astral projection.”

  “An astral what?”

  “Astral projection. It’s when your astral body leaves your physical body, sort of like how the soul departs your body upon death. I don’t necessarily believe in it, but it’s one possibility.”

  Erin contemplated this. “What other possibilities are there?”

  “That you hallucinated the whole thing. Did anyone else see the ghost?”

  She shook her head.

  “Then that’s another possibility,” I said. “But I believe you believe you saw a ghost. I mean, you wouldn’t call yourself Ghost Girl for nothing.”

  “Someone else started calling me that.”

  “Kids can be cruel,” I said, nodding.

  “My second-grade teacher came up with the name.”

  “Ouch.”

  “You’re telling me.” Erin paused and smiled for the first time. “You know, you’re the first person who I’ve talked to about ghosts in years who hasn’t called me crazy.”

  “Oh, you could still be crazy,” I said, “but that doesn’t preclude you from seeing ghosts. Crazy people see ghosts just the same as everybody else. For what it’s worth, you don’t seem crazy. You seem kind of . . . cool.”

  Suddenly her smile fell. “How much are my parents paying you?”

  When I expressed ignorance, she explained how her parents had paid a couple of neighbor kids a buck an hour to be her friend when she was younger. It was the saddest thing I’d ever heard. Right then and there I offered to be her friend . . . at the bargain rate of seventy-five cents an hour.

  Erin accepted, and we’ve been the best of friends ever since. By now she probably owes me about $13,679.50, if my calculations are correct (and they’re always correct, except when they’re not). But I’d never ask her to pay up. For one thing, we’re both so far in debt with student loans there’s no way she’s ever going to have that kind of money just sitting around. Also, I should be the one paying her for her friendship. Nobody else would have had the figurative balls to join me in founding the Metaphysical Examination Society, Hoover High’s first-ever paranormal investigations club.

  Chapter 3

  The Metaphysical Examination Society

  Our Story

  It is human nature to fear the unknown. There is no greater unknown than what awaits us after we take our final breath. It is life’s great unanswered question.

  If the fear of the unknown comes to us naturally, however, so too does the fear of those who take interest in it. Those who have sought out explanations for the afterlife outside the hallowed walls of religion have long been branded as heretics.

  Nobody explicitly called us “heretics,” of course, because nobody at Hoover High had any idea what that word meant. They just knew we were into spooky things. Our unnatural obsession with the paranormal was a bit like somebody who leaves their Halloween decorations up year round: Acceptable for the month of October, but mildly disturbing the rest of the year.

  Perhaps we shouldn’t have written and performed a musical based on The Shining for the school talent show. We’ll also allow that our interpretation of “School Spirit Week” was wildly off-base—nobody wants to see spectral effigies torched during the homecoming parade. We get that now. Whatever the reasons, though, we weren’t just unpopular. We were shunned.

  Not that we cared. While all of the other kids in high school were busy going to parties and playing lawn darts or whatever, we were all like, “That’s stupid.” That’s what Erin would literally say every time we overheard some girl in
class talking about a rad party. And we heard about some great ones at Hoover High—ragers with DJs, kegs, and bouncy houses. Okay, not that last part, but that would have been the only thing that made a party cool in our eyes. Nobody was interested in hearing our opinion, though. Perhaps picking up on the vibe that we weren’t accepting invitations, nobody ever invited us.

  Besides being social outcasts, we were extracurricular outcasts too. We weren’t interested in any after-school activities, like sports (too many bruises), chess club (too many rigid rules), or marching band (too fascist). Fed up, we decided to form a club of our own.

  Ghost Clubbin’

  As long as there have been ghosts, there have been ghost hunters. Whatever you call them—paranormal investigators, conductors of metaphysical examinations, psychical researchers, or supernatural scientists—they have been out there in the field, doing the work that few others have judged worthy of their time and attention. Over the years, they have banded together to form organizations such as the Ghost Club and the Society for Psychical Research (which we’ll talk about more in Chapter 5).

  Unfortunately, there were no local branches of these illustrious groups in Battle Creek, Michigan, when we were in high school. We had no choice but to forge our own path. We called our club . . . THE METAPHYSICAL EXAMINATION SOCIETY (Figure 3.1).

  We turned our table for two in the school cafeteria into our meeting space every lunch hour. Abby pushed Erin to explore the strange world of the supernatural—to confront, rather than run from, her fear of the ghost in her past. With Abby’s help, Erin learned to embrace her nickname. For good measure, Abby adopted it herself. Two Ghost Girls are better than one!

  Figure 3.1.

  Metaphysical Examination Society Meeting Notes

  We shared notes and discussed the latest paranormal research. We read everything about ghosts we could get our hands on from the public library, with the eventual goal being an on-site inspection of a real haunted house—a metaphysical examination, in paraterminology.