Alan Brown has been writing about ghosts for 20 years now. He’s authored 17 books about the ghosts of the South, including his latest effort: “Ghosts of Mississippi’s Golden Triangle.”
So Brown was an obvious choice for this month’s Table Talk at the Columbus-Lowndes Public Library on Monday, Halloween being just around the corner. Brown showed slides of photos from his book on the Golden Triangle ghosts, briefly describing what sort of ghosts inhabited the homes and businesses and sharing some of the history of the buildings. Tying the ghost stories to history, he said, is his favorite part of the exercise.
For Brown, assembling ghost stories from the South is mostly a hobby. His day job is professor of English at the University of West Alabama in Livingston.
For 20 years now he’s been chasing down ghost stories. In fact, he is a member of the Ghost Chasers of Mississippi group.
For all his ghostly obsessions, Brown is non-committal on the key point: Are ghosts real?
Maybe. Maybe not. His interest is not so much in proving or disproving the existence of ghosts but in collecting the stories.
That’s probably a wise position to take. Based on a 2013 YouGov poll, 45 percent of Americans believe in ghosts. It is also a matter of manners. Telling someone who has a resident ghost that it’s a fiction is like debating whether their baby is ugly. You might have all the empirical evidence to support your claim, but you’ll lose anyway. It’s just not polite.
If ghosts are, indeed, real they don’t seem to represent much of a threat, at least not in the Golden Triangle. Brown told brief accounts of about a dozen local ghosts and a pattern emerged as he spoke.
First, ghosts tend to prefer old homes and businesses. Most of the ghosts Brown has encountered here take up residence in buildings built in the mid-19th Century, usually the grand old homes you typically see on the Pilgrimage Tour. They are most often former residents of the homes or have some personal connection to the building.
Ghosts sort of strike me as snobs in that respect. A ghost wouldn’t be caught dead in a double-wide and while Mississippi University for Women has a ghost, East Mississippi Community College reports no such apparitions. Ghosts are not commuters, apparently.
The Commercial Dispatch has a ghost, according to Brown’s research. There are accounts of the press starting on its own and reports of ghostly figures walking along the catwalk above the press. There are reports of strange noises, too, although strange noises are pretty ordinary, especially around deadline.
Our ghosts tend to be a tragic bunch, often meeting an untimely end — suicide, disease, even murder. They just don’t seem to be able to get over it and move on.
Bitter though they may be, our ghosts are generally timid souls. They don’t make threats or terrorize people, at least not intentionally. Brown said most of the people who have ghosts take pride in their presence. It’s almost a status symbol.
If ghosts are, indeed, real, I have to say I’m sort of disappointed in their conduct. They don’t seem to be making much of a contribution to the households they inhabit, as far as I can tell.
Mostly, they just appear in hallways and stare blankly at the door until the unwitting resident discovers them. In this respect, they are not unlike dogs, you will note.
Sometimes they open and shut doors, again for no apparent reason. They move furniture, make noises and wander about the house at odd hours.
That’s all well enough, I guess. I suppose ghosts have earned the right to do whatever they want.
But it must be awfully boring to be a ghost if your whole day revolves around moving a chair across the room at 2 in the morning.
It seems to me that if they are determined to stay, they might make themselves useful. Yet in all of his research Brown has not discovered a single incident where a ghost has washed a dish, dusted the furniture or let the cat out in the middle of the night.
What’s the point of that? If we want somebody who just hangs around doing pointless stuff, we’ll grow us some teenagers.
So, forget about rearranging the furniture.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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