I believe in ghosts, mainly because of Aunt Betty.
There were other friends in my Southern upbringing who claimed to have haunted houses. There was the Beards’ big brick place outside of town, with columns and a dilapidated slaves’ quarters, which had phantom chills. There was the family my dad knew, whose poltergeist pulverized dinner dishes in the sink and slammed the shower door back and forth. (I used this detail in my first novel, A Good and Happy Child.)
But Aunt Betty was the only person I knew directly who had lived through a house-haunting.
Aunt Betty is not an aunt, but a close family friend called “aunt” in the way of Southerners. Aunt Betty is not a kooky-Confederate-widow-type. She’s a Louisiana Jew with a catering business and a sharp eye for antiques.
When I was eight years old, Aunt Betty and her family decided to tear out the old boxwood hedge and put in a pool. Soon after, curtain rods in her house started pulling themselves off the walls. Flowers leapt out of their vase in front of dinner guests. Finally, a figure appeared, standing over Aunt Betty’s children. The children cried out. When Betty came to them, they described an elderly woman with glasses.
Betty asked around town. She was able to match her children’s description to the former owner of the house: a woman who, everyone agreed, had put her heart and soul into nurturing those boxwoods.
Only in my fussy, history-proud Virginia hometown would a lady gardener return from the grave to express disapproval at her successor’s landscaping choices.