Norman and Muriel Miller (yes, these are pseudomyms) are a couple I know near retirement in the hill country of Connecticut, who believe that they are the guardians of a family from the eighteenth century. That is, they believe an eighteenth-century family live with them, now, in their house, the house that that family built, more than two centuries ago. Why do they think this? Because they’ve met them many times. Thirty years ago, Norman and Muriel rescued this 1780’s farmhouse from highway demolition. They physically moved the building to a safe spot on the edge of their village, and then restored it — in such detail, they say, that the 1780’s farmer who hewed its logs would feel right at home. Not that the rest of the hamlet has changed much either. There are only a handful of houses in the area, scattered along a coarse road. The place is still hard to reach in winter, new highway or not. But at least the house is safe, and this was the Millers’ goal: he, a painter and professor of art history at a local college, she a harpsichordist with a special affection for chamber music. They are old-school patricians, with sophisticated tastes, a handsome couple who think deeply about things. They like beautiful houses, they respect the people who build them, and they see no particular reason not to accept them when they linger after death.
On the day of the house-move, tractors outside and cables over the roof, that farmer whose house it first was came for a visit. He didn’t stay long. No floorboards creaked, no door opened — nothing. There just stood, suddenly, the bulky shape of a man by the fireplace, a big man, looming under the rafters. His hands were jammed into his pockets, his feet apart, his tricornered hat pushed back on his head. His greatcoat and boots seemed straight from the movies. His face was ruddy and smiling, his nose red like a drinker’s. His teeth were not very nice — an antique touch — but at least he was smiling. His eyes moved slowly about the room, pausing lightly on Norman. He nodded — ‘hello?’ ‘I like what I see?’ What did he mean? — and then he was gone. This heavy presence, solid as a living human, this figure who took up a full man’s space in the room, was gone. There was then only fireplace and floor, and scraps of sunlight playing through the window. He felt gone too — not invisible, but truly gone away somewhere.
It’s hard to know how to understand a ghost’s visit in your living room. What did this particular meeting mean? Where was the ghost now? Had he really been there? What did he want? Norman’s mind raced, he recalls. Was this person connected to the house? To the grounds? To Norman? Had he ever come before? To anyone else? Was he ever present in the house but unseen? Did he shadow the living people here? (If so, was he discreet about bathrooms?) And what if the ghost believed that the house still belonged to him? And did it? And was that going to be trouble?
Subsequent study convinced Norman that this was one Peter Fike (I’ll rename him), the area’s Episcopal minister, scion of a prominent family in the colony. He had indeed built the house.
To Norman he left a strong impression of being pleased with the restoration project, and he even seemed to want to help. That may have been why he came. Well then, Norman reckoned, how fitting it is, and how flattering, that he appeared on the very day of the house move. Parson Fike, who built the place and passed his life here ought to be on hand to oversee its rescue.
And according to Norman and Muriel the Parson stayed, and appears even to have seen fit to bring his family along with him. Their house wades safely in thistles now, by an overgrown post road, and things are calm and foresty as they probably once were. It took about a year, he says, for the other ghosts to come, but one day the children arrived. They were timid at first, but gradually bolder. They began to show their silvery bodies at night, running through the front yard. They came into the house. Their footsteps pattered up and down an upstairs hall. Doors slammed behind them. Clothes were pulled and scattered from closets and trunks. Were these all siblings? Cousins? (Bent on pranks? No real trouble ever ensued.) Muriel saw a tousled brown mop bounce by her window one afternoon as she sat sewing. She waited for a small boy to appear at the next window, but he never did. Was he trying to tantalize, she wondered, or was he just messing around? Was he aware that he was visible? Did he know she was watching? What goes on in the mind of a two hundred-year-old child? In winter she hears echoey shrieks of laughter over the brow of a nearby hill. It is the cousins, she thinks, sliding down a granite slab that overlooks a creek.
Sometimes the kids cross the yard in daylight, their bodies transparent. Oddly enough, they are sometimes up to their knees in the soil. Are they walking at the old ground level? If so, do they see the old countryside? And if so, are they aware of us, the living onlookers? Who knows — perhaps they aren’t even ghosts the way we imagine them, but merely images, impressions, running on some cosmic videotape. For that matter, why could they not be images of the eighteenth century — distinct from ghosts in the sense of the lingering dead — that we just happen to be seeing as they play in parallel time? Who’s to say that two hundred years ago a knot of frightened children didn’t fly to their mothers one day to report seeing transparent images of people in funny clothes, standing before a house they didn’t recognize?
Antique children in the yard present a complicated problem, especially forward little ones like these. A delicate nine-year-old with dark eyes and a yellow dress came along the road at lunchtime one July, driving a hoop with her stick. She stopped and coolly watched the Millers eating lunch in the yard with a pair of friends before she moved on and disappeared around a bend. Had she made a sound? Had she left footprints? No one remembers, and no one checked. These spiritual visitors had become old hat. How did the Millers know she was spiritual? Besides her antique dress and toy, they just knew. It was a feeling they always got. And some of these kids’ faces they even recognized by now. But who was she? And why did she come?
One hardly knows where to begin to look for answers. This post road was once busy by local standards. There were lots of dwellings along it. So, did the little girl live nearby? What did she come to see? Was she curious? Upset? Maybe she was just poking around, the way a kid does on a hot day. On the other hand, maybe she didn’t think like a kid any more. How juvenile could her mind have been, after all, if she had been doing this for a couple of centuries? Do ghosts grow and mature the way living people do? If so, why the toy? Why hadn’t she spoken? If she hadn’t stopped and made eye contact, one would wonder if she wasn’t some sort of automatically running image instead of the sentient being that she clearly was. She registered no emotion. Maybe she was stuck in a child’s mental state. If so, what was on her mind? Had she gotten someone’s permission to visit? Was this a ‘visit’? Did she know she was visible? Did she even know whether she was dead or alive? And did that matter to her? There is just no telling how cosmic or how pediatric her perspective was. Could she sense the mood of the people in the yard? Could she read their thoughts?
On and on these questions go, even to the bizarrely metaphysical, if we care to push things. Why could they see her clothes, for example? Or her hoop and stick? Perhaps the image of the girl was only a virtual reality in the minds of the viewers. Suppose a real spirit had been at the gate, invisible to optical instruments but able to project an image of its whole identity, as it were — with dress, hoop and stick — right into humans’ inner senses. Ambrose Bierce, I think it was, ridiculed the idea of ghostly clothes, and by extension the idea of ghosts. The idea is actually not ridiculous, thought of this way. Or does it require a mind at all, to see clothes or toys that come with ghosts? Sometimes film, or even video equipment, picks up people — clothes and all — that viewers’ naked eyes do not see. That’s actually quite common.
What humans feel, when they see ghosts, is the most important question of all. In the Millers’ case it’s delight. Anyone else might be afraid of life in a haunted house. Not they. They speak of their houseload of ghosts as a perpetual homecoming. New spectres arrive all the time, too. ‘We aren’t restoring a building,’ they said to me the day we met, me adjusting my eyes to the smoky dark inside their house. ‘We’re restoring a home — family and all.’ They feel that they have a very special relationship with the phantom group that bustles around them. Isn’t this relationship by itself just as remarkable as the ghosts? It’s one thing to see spirits; it’s quite another to know them personally, to desire their presence, to want their approval … to love them, which I believe they do.
The fact is, the Millers do think they and their ghosts are family. It is kinship. It’s not biological, but still exists, in other ways, that are actually deeper than biology. I’ll explain in degrees, the way they explained it to me. It took some getting used to.
First understand that Norman and Muriel are dedicated agents for the happiness and also the reputation of their spirit householders. That’s their job. The Fikes, it happens, were once important people in the Connecticut colony. That’s a key part of the story too. Their achievements, in business, politics, medicine, letters, and religion, and also their moral success as individuals, makes the Millers proud to champion their latter-day cause. It shows in the way they describe spirit visitations. Each account of a ghostly visit, eventually, takes the shape of a little moral lesson. All the Millers’ reflections on these sightings become expositions on the privilege of earthbound ministry for some very important dead. They describe all their visitations as part of a story of their own service on behalf of the Parson and his kinsmen.
Why?
When I met them, the most obvious feature of their lives in the old house was their apparent removal from emotional life in the world outside their house. The acquaintance who introduced us, a bookish anthropologist who has retired to write murder mysteries, prepared me by saying, ‘the Millers actually live in the eighteenth century–you have to understand that.’ And in certain ways they really do. They have landscaped an authentic workyard outside, they have taken care to conceal the house from curious eyes on the road nearby, and they have surrounded themselves inside with carefully chosen furniture and household tools that make life appear exactly as it was in the 1780’s. Period clothes in their trunks and all the books on the bedside tables belong strictly to that generation and no later. They are fond of saying how hard it would be for a genuine colonial to find anything amiss, should he awaken in a bedroom upstairs. There is no electricity in the house. Nor is there any heating besides the main fireplace. (That matters in New England winters.) The kitchen sink empties its pump water to the outside by a little spout through a windowsill. Surrounded by tallow and pewter, night winds and cold, the Millers devote all their energies to the perfection of what is, to them, a near-sacred space. For all the difficulties that unheated, preindustrial life must involve, they have in it an alternative life to ours that they pretty clearly feel is better.
Frankly the house felt lonely to me. But how safe it might seem, once a person was used to it. The sheer effort of the restoration kept this couple away from contact with the everyday for long periods when they were young. (The project began when they were newlyweds.) They adjusted early to isolation. In this space, particularly if they possess the imagination and sensitivity to the aesthetics of lifestyle that artists and musicians generally possess, what a short step it must be to identify with the living-dead here, and with those people’s emotional stakes in the place. The intimacy with which the Millers came to know each timber and doorjamb must have been like knowing the other newlyweds, the ones whose gritty labor this house first was. What an easy place to feel phantoms. The house came to belong to Norman and Muriel in exactly the way it had belonged to the Parson and his young wife, whoever she was. These two couples are natural friends.
The thing is, the house is not just an inducement to leave the world. It is a vocabulary about what is actually wrong with the world. Norman has had long, career-damaging battles in his university department. He senses that a new generation of uncouth ‘professional women’ is to blame for his problems there. His wars with administrators over this issue have weakened his base for negotiating new teaching contracts, and this has brought down financial difficulties on him, which in turn endangers the ongoing house restoration. Recently, things were made worse by the ‘robbery’ of an important restoration bequest by New York attorneys. Professional women and big-city sharpies are a kind of construct for talking about modernism, against which these two people are lonely defenders. As they see it, the house is a citadel of fragile beauty against a civilization become unlettered and barbarous. In the olden days, they imagine, women were softer and there was less need for lawyers. Back them, people respected beauty in each other and in the things around them. And back then, people built houses like this. A person who doesn’t appreciate their restoration project, or who threatens it, is a boor and maybe a latent criminal. Whereas, to appreciate an eighteenth-century aesthetic sensibility is to have moral sensitivity.
They talk like evangelists about the connection between people’s environments and their ethical formation. Life, they say, is all out of scale for human living. Industrial values and technological habits have rendered most of us brutish. Pope and Goethe, to cite famous figures of the Enlightenment, both heard love’s heralds not in civilization but in the terrible sublime of the wilderness. So it is with the Millers, who feel that healthy personalities take shape in sunny side yards and hearthside intimacy like their own. Good people live in the eighteenth century, bad people in the twenty-first.
I struck a chord with Norman when I observed how healthy the quiet in their town must have been for the Parson’s family. ‘You can come back!’ he told me, smiling. He then said the silence is exactly why the Parson’s family has returned. With silence comes introspection, with introspection comes reverence for things that are good for life. Why did Rousseau read quietly to himself instead of aloud, as was the more usual manner of reading? Because it sustained him in a dialogue with himself that he judged necessary to his mental health. Eighteenth-century novelists, from Henry Fielding on, wrote self-consciously for just this kind of reader, an audience with a private center. Wordsworth said the industrializing noise across the countryside was changing the national character. Silent is how life was before savagery.
Nobody in the noisy modern world is beyond the Millers’ reproach. They are gravely disappointed in the curatorial skills of the two local museum scholars to whom they had wanted to entrust the house after their deaths. They are outright dismissive of their town’s historical society, an ignorant and irresponsible rabble. Even their beloved adoptive clan isn’t what it used to be. The Fikes are a lowly clan now, where once they were people of quality. Language like this betrays feelings of being threatened by life among the living.
And so, the dead Fikes have closed ranks around this nervous couple, making physical contact with them nearly every day, especially when they are alone and things are quiet. At times the figures of people appear, which sometimes speak out loud. They can look as substantial as flesh and blood or they can half-form, and be black and white. You hear their footfalls sometimes, though other times they are silent. A cold spot usually forms in the house for several days before and after the really big manifestations. It occupies a vertical sweep through the three floors, forming in effect three cold places. Muriel feels people breezing past her on one of the staircases when she is by herself. In one bedroom upstairs a woman’s scent comes some afternoons. Sometimes instead of human forms, shapes of familiar objects appear, looking vaguely allegorical. Or else rooms fill with ‘undulating color’ and nothing more. Visiting psychics capture voices, usually late in the evening by the light of the fire. People are tired then, they say, and more easily approached by spirits. The house, of course, is also quietest then, just like ten or twenty decades ago.
The Millers receive their spirit visits tenderly. To them, a manifestation is a precious trace of someone’s life, deserving of careful attention. They puzzle through the images and sounds with scholarly care and sort them into a mosaic picture of the family. They match the details of what they learn from the ghosts with what they glean from long safaries through records in the town library. It was in a late-night gathering by the fire once that they heard channeled voices through the mouth of a dinner guest, lamenting the loss of a young man named Dan, for example. These voices are common enough at the Millers’ hearthside. It’s like radio, says Norman. You hear these signals. Generally, it’s someone passing through, and you never hear them again. Other times it’s voices you know, ones you’ve heard before, using names that you finally attach to the voices, or names that you know about through earthly means. Family records do speak of a son, Dan, who died young in an accident around 1800. He is known to have worked in a sawmill close by the house. Why was he being introduced to the living now? Was he important in family history? When did he live, and what else did he do? Was he killed by a runaway blade, and is that a critical part of the story? The ghosts must have wanted the story known.
Several days after this, Vanessa, a friend and former art student, and an unusually sensitive psychic, stopped by for lunch and fell into a trance right at the table. She dissolved into tears and said she saw a parade of women back and forth through the kitchen. They were all carrying pans of something, she said. Who were they? What were they carrying? What did they look like? Could Vanessa say they were actually in the kitchen now, mere feet from the table? Or was this a vision of the past? Was it a remnant in the atmosphere, of events once lived out, that a psychic could detect and play? Was this all happening by command of some cosmic authority, for humans’ edification, or for some sort of resolution for the dead? She could not say. There was no answer to any of these things.
She said only that it was pans of blood that the women were carrying, away from a tiny sickroom, through the kitchen, and out the door to the yard. She wept into her hair and said only, ‘It’s so sad, it’s so sad.’ In a quieter moment later she said at last that it was Dan being tended by the women. They were there day and night. She heard them using his name. Had he been cut? No. He had not been injured by a saw blade. Then what?
That answer came many days later, when Norman opened the sickroom door on an errand. He was terrified to see a vision of his own: an avalanche of milled logs, rolling down at him. It was so convincing that he slammed the door and shouted before realizing it was all illusory. Here was the rest of Dan’s story! He had indeed been hurt at the mill, his wounds not from an angry blade but from this other logger’s hazard.
And then, weeks later, they found a revealing line in a family journal. A nineteenth-century descendant who had undertaken medical studies at Yale happened to observe in his notes that the woman who was Dan’s mother brought hemophilia into the family. If Dan carried this gene and had been badly enough mangled in the collapse of a stack of timber, he might have bled to death over the next few days. The story was complete now.
Dan’s tale, pieced together from supernatural agency and simple investigation, was a very important fact about the history of the family. How flattering it must be to be told such an undoubtedly heartfelt story by people who remembered it for two centuries. How gratifying to be included in this way. The story encapsulates a profound life event for a group of rustic colonials. It also demonstrates the depth of the Millers’ relationship with them. I would have a hard time making a sandwich at that kitchen counter myself, thinking that some ghosts and I were walking through each others’ bodies all the time. On the other hand, these were nice people. Norman and Muriel like them. They did take good care of Dan, after all. In this kitchen daily they did feed their family for years too. Well, maybe this deep an inclusion in the family is a nice idea at that.
The fact is, Norman and Muriel’s attachment to the ghost family runs even deeper than caretakers and confidants. This is the point behind their more abstract visitations, the ones consisting of shapes and colors. What are visions like these good for? For being the mysterious loci of allegory. Norman and Muriel have well developed ideas about the significance of each undulating color, for example, and exactly what they say about the mood of the household. It matters that a room fills with billowing gold one day and with blue glitter the next. It matters when a vision takes the shape of one familiar object rather than another. Muriel once observed a spectral curtain with what appeared to be a broom behind it. Her impulse was to consider this strange sort of visitation for what it must represent in an abstract sense, or for what an art historian would call its iconographic value. Exactly what the curtain and broom signified she couldn’t tell me, but she understood that the job of interpreting these symbols was hers.
She had this right of interpretation because it was to her that the spirits chose to appear, after all. It is one thing to hear a ghost explain itself, but another thing to be expected to understand the ghostly image of a broom or a flatiron or something as it floats in the air. This requires plenty of knowledge about the spectral family. Only the true illuminati can make sense of any of it, for having received plenty of other supernatural information already. Beyond being simple friends of the family, in other words, the living couple in the house have an important privilege in this right of interpretation. No one alive can say as reliably as they can what the spirit entities are probably thinking on the basis of this peculiar sort of vision, or what the dead here must want from the living. This is to be a chosen intermediary between the living and the dead, at least in the confines of their house. This is a level of initiation that belongs really only to intimates.
Oddly, the Millers do not claim a natural supersensitivity to the presence of the spirit world. They have only the gift of having been chosen by the spirits. In gratitude for this gift they try to attend to the earthly desires of their ghosts, and they subject themselves to a kind of self-inquiry with what approaches monastic rigor. It was odd to hear them talk about whether they deserved to live in their own house, which they regarded as the property of someone dead two centuries. It was spooky when they explained the ghostly inactivity the day I was there as the spirits’ pleasure in my visit. ‘I think they like that you’re here,’ Norman said to me. Actually, I felt very unwelcome, close to the Millers but alien to the ghosts. (You’ll know, if you know me, what I think ghosts actually are; I had stopped the car and asked Jesus for insulation from these spirits before I arrived.) To know the things the Millers know, especially since they received it from unwarranted revelation, implies a great authority over the rest of us. Dare I call the Millers’ station a kind of priesthood? Like priests, they were careful to warn me away from dishonorable intentions — if I had come to scoff, they would summarily dismiss me, as they had dismissed others who came with the wrong attitude.
Norman has a more straightforward, and possibly more priestly, role in the spirit household than Muriel does. After the sawmill revelation he had an early-morning half dream/half vision of Dan, lying asleep or dead, against a background of faint blue. He asked out loud if he could see his face more clearly, and Dan opened his eyes. They were strikingly deep blue. The background color then rose to a rich green, and the vision ended. Green, Vanessa advised when she heard this, is a color representative of any process of healing. Somehow, Norman told me, he himself had at that moment done something, in a mystical way, to restore Dan, the lad killed by logs, back to life — if not biological life, then life in some sense.
Usually the Millers’ ghosts act like regular ghosts, and not very mysterious ones. Their visits require less energy to understand than mystical visions or rooms full of undulating colors. One of the very first hauntings, around the time that Parson Fike walked into his living room to critique construction plans, was when a vivacious woman in period costume swept up to Norman, in the living room again, carrying a sock purse, and saying out loud, ‘Here, I want you to have this.’ A pretty girl she was, and full of confidence and goodwill. Was she Mrs. Fike? She acted like it — there was authority about her. He reached for the purse, and she vanished with it. The purse, he and I decided, might represent all the various material and spiritual treasures of the family. Her offer to him was the formal, almost ceremonial, granting of his right to husband their affairs. It was just as when the patriarch himself showed up, smiling broadly: it was appropriate to understand him to be commenting favorably on the stewardship of his house.
If priesthood is how Norman and Muriel conceive of their role in the house — they do not actually use the word — then it is of an earthly sort, a secular mission, not in service of God. Their focus is on their own interactions with the dead, and not on anything loftier than that. I judge this to be the case because they never say how the visitations occur, metaphysically speaking, and they do not talk of cosmic issues very much in general. There is certainly no appeal to scriptural tradition, and there is no attempt at a formal theology. Norman was not able to explain what he meant by his having restored life to Dan, except to say that he understood from the vision that there is no such thing as death, or anyway that death never means the obliteration of a human identity, and that death is a natural cycle with a predictable course. His sense of life and death is that of a closed system, with no creation at the beginning and no judgement or purification at the end — no traditional telos. In our conversations he never said ‘God’, and in fact told me that he disliked even the conventional language of spiritualism, never using the word ‘haunting’, and pointedly refusing to substitute my ‘ghost’ for his preferred ‘life entity.’ There is, he said, a law of conservation of life force: a certain amount exists, and it is distributed and redistributed among everyone living and dead. This is the extent of his priestly explication.
His sources for a featureless geography of the afterlife like this are unclear to me, except that what he believes seems to come directly from what he sees in the visitations. That’s reasonable enough, on one level. The corroborating advice of psychics like Vanessa supplements it, with an impressionistic kind of intelligence. (Exactly what Norman and Muriel mean by ‘psychic’ was never clear to me in any of our conversations, though.) This is a system which explains little more than this couple’s immediate interactions with the dead. Norman makes no appeal to written sources of religious information or to tradition. Nor does he involve himself in a prayer life, or a regimen of consciousness-altering meditation or anything, which might seem useful in understanding the context in which these ghostly comings and goings happen. The metaphysical mechanisms behind the ghosts remain unexplained because, strictly speaking, they don’t function in the story of the family’s continued life in the little farmhouse. Norman told me over tea that he was ‘an agnostic about these things.’ He is not an agnostic. He means that his cosmology is ad hoc, because it is not of primary importance to him. The important thing is that the ghosts come.
Here’s just how deep the Millers’ relationship with the Fikes really runs. A psychic at a university reception one evening — this was a stranger — introduced himself to Norman and his wife. He crossed the room spontaneously, and started talking. He told them, with a sort of urgency, that they were reincarnations. Of whom? Of the Reverend and Mrs. Fike. He got their names right. And he knew details of the house, which he had never seen. (How could reincarnations encounter ghosts of themselves, as it were? That logic problem didn’t come up in their conversation.) Norman glowed when he told me this. He and Muriel belong to the Fike family, it turns out. They’re the very leaders of the clan, in fact. They are the Parson and his wife.
‘You can understand now why I’m concerned about what happened to Dan,’ he said to me at length. ‘I regard this young man as my son.
It occurred to me when he said this that neither Norman nor Muriel had spoken to me of fleshly kin. I gingerly asked whether the rest of the family – those physically related – shared their interest in the house project. They spoke only of parents, and did not mention siblings or children. As nearly as I could tell, their family was with them here. I thought of Muriel showing me a small boy’s suit from a trunk upstairs. She drew attention to the worn-out seat and knees, and chortled, ‘Isn’t that just like a boy!’ Here is where her heart was. Here was her family. It was the stories about the small children who played in the yard that she repeated the most.
A different ghost shows even better the depth of this astonishing notion of family. Norman’s biological father had died insisting that no afterlife existed. The two men never agreed about this. His shade appeared in the yard one afternoon soon after his death, smiling sheepishly, as if to say, ‘Well, Son, you were right.’ Here, in the middle of raking leaves, Norman had won something over his father. The older man had to concede a central point of disagreement. Furthermore, this senior figure now found himself situated in a pantheon of household spirits in which his son, the reincarnated patriarch of the important Connecticut clan, was the boss. Norman outranked his father now. Because of his anachronistic construction of ‘family’ his triumph was cosmic.
To be sure, it is a remarkable brood over which the two preside, as they tell it. As the stewards of family history and as reincarnated clan heads they are proud of their lineage, whose prominence they say was lofty for centuries. They have a long list of family achievements which they claim stretches from the American colonies back to Anglo-Norman England and possibly to ninth-century France. The people of this family may have been statesmen, healers, princes, and men of God. Particular luminaries they say helped to develop medical care for the Continental Army, and others built a Crusader outpost for medieval pilgrims. When the Millers speak of their present disappointment with the earthly family as it now exists, they have much at stake themselves. It is as Mom and Dad that they disapprove. This is an exquisitely personal ghost story.
There is a common denominator among these various ways of being related to the eighteenth-century family. Something powerful is driving this. The prime mover in this couple’s work together in their houseful of ghosts is alarm — alarm over the fragility of the world and the things in it. Perhaps because they feel vulnerable themselves, they speak often of how they dislike the fact that people can be hurt, and they fixate on a world in which, as they imagine it, people were less likely to be hurt than they are now. They show this in their preoccupation with gentleness and gentility, in their sensitivity to sad stories like Dan’s hemophilia and their concern for their Vanessa’s emotional vulnerability between channeling sessions, and their reluctance to push her for too many answers during them, and they show it in their sense of necessary physical isolation from the noisy and unlettered world. This is not just a quest to find beauty, but to find safety, in other words. Their life together in the civilized company of their dead family of wraiths gives them a secure space to be alive, as odd as that sounds. Safety is the theme that unifies every anecdote they tell, and every speculation they make.
They have redefined the basic concept of life, expanding it enough to encompass death and undo it. In their worldview, life and death merge so fully as to undo the complete power of either life or death. Here in their house and yard is a place of guaranteed security from heartache, of safety from the panic that the rest of us feel over the threat of losing what we love. This is finally why their house is peopled with the dead. Why do they not use the living this way? Is it because the living can change? Can let us down? Can fail to understand us deeply enough? The answer is too buried in their psyches for me or anyone else to know in the space of a few visits. Perhaps the living are just too present, too obtuse, too loud. Maybe a ghost is the only sort of person who can really understand when they try to explain the unexplainable about their feelings. Norman and Muriel and all the bright souls who bustle by them in stockings and petticoats function in an empathic exchange with each other, a sharing of deep needs and wants. These ghosts are complex characters, with psychologies, and probably vulnerabilities; the Millers need them in exactly the way that they need the living. This is a bundle of relationships, a private history – to say it one more time, a family.
What will it take to finish their story? How will the tension that drives all this be released? Perhaps the story is not designed to be finished. The Millers are people who seek no exalted solution to the dangers and disappointments of human living, save only that there be some wider continuum (Norman’s word) than their own immediate lives. How reasonable a solution this might seem, after all, and how human. They are not interested in a glorious choir of beings around them, either, cleansed and perfected by death. Their ghosts are simply people, with foibles and shortcomings, and yet who will never fail to be on hand. This kind of story probably has no conclusion.
Time itself is of limited importance in this house. A.S. Byatt has a ghost-story protagonist[1] who reflects that her potted Christmas cactus represents a kind of eternity, the segments of its tendrils predictable, cyclical, unchanging. She wonders whether progression of life moves from family member to family member, functionally without end. It is in this way that the Connecticut house ghosts have gone about their daily lives in some cosmic way for twenty decades, reasoning, coping, loving, as they always had. Perhaps time doesn’t go the same way for the Millers’ dead as it does for us, and the schema for what’s happening in the Parson’s house is different altogether. To think like Norman does, the ghosts may not see a linear progression of events as we do, and so there is a sort of eternal Now — no distance at all between the eighteenth century and this one. One evening, that elderly anthropologist who introduced us, and who had been visiting, stepped out for a stroll under the moon. By all accounts she vanished. The Millers say she blinked out of existence, before their eyes. She did not reappear for nearly two hours. She herself reported nothing amiss — to her, she had just taken a walk. Where had she been? Miles away? In the same yard, only a century or two earlier? The mind reels at the possibilities. But the Millers don’t look for explanations. The metaphysics of the supernatural in the Parson’s house just don’t matter to them. What matters is only the existence of the family, happy in the house, happy with the Millers. Why does it matter so much? Because for the Millers it means there is no end to their own story.
[1] ‘The Next Room,’ in The Literary Ghost. Great Contemporary Ghost Stories, ed. Larry Dark (1991).