“Perhaps we’re just now starting to notice that the world is a little bit weirder than we gave it credit for.” You think?

I start with this quote by John E.L. Tenney from a New York Times article published this weekend to do with ghosts. While the title, “Quarantining With a Ghost? It’s Scary” is obviously bait for readers, the piece itself actually portrays the humans sheltering with paranormal presences as (mostly) cool with it, and in some ways even comforted. I mean, for real, “a white man in his 50s, wearing a well-worn, World War II-era military uniform and cap sitting at the table” in your kitchen as seen by one guy in the piece is A) not going to eat any of your groceries—or use any toilet paper unless said spirit is capricious and hides it or uses it to teepee the neighbor’s house, B) is unlikely to be carrying the Covid 19, and C) as the guy who walked in on this spectral presence says, “It didn’t feel menacing at all. It almost didn’t even occur to me to tell my husband the next morning.” I hook into that word “menacing.” In a world, specifically the current one we’re living in, where what we can’t see until it’s already wreaking havoc strikes us with Alien-level terror, a few Casper’s—whether seen or no—may actually be both manageable and a relief. There’s history there. We’ve grown up with ghost stories whether told around a campfire, at a sleepover, in a book, or TV/movie. Stories are the thing that fuel a moment, yet the stories around the unseen-enemy Covid are not in any way built for entertainment in its current form. So we turn to the storytellers that can take us outside of ourselves. Of course Stephen King’s new collection is top 5 on the NYTimes bestseller list. My current favorite podcast, This Jungian Life‘s most recent installment is on UFO sightings, which are lately increasing. Is the sky less cluttered and therefore available for alien traffic? Is our psyche so tightly wound that it is attuned to a higher frequency? Because we’re home more are we just noticing things that we’d normally explain away? And/or are these original tenants just annoyed we’re around all the time (like maybe our pets are)?

In 1960, Carl Jung wrote: “Paranormal psychic phenomena … usually … occurs in acute psychological states (emotionality, depression, shock, etc.), … where the threshold to the collective unconscious is habitually lowered. People with a creative genius also belong to this type.” I’m pretty sure that this pandemic qualifies as an acute psychological state for the globe and the people on it. But it’s that last sentence about creative genius that most interests me. See, I’ve always wanted to have some sort of sighting, even though, truth be, I’m almost 100% certain I’d cry if it ever happened. But back in the day, when I had it in my head that I wanted to have a paranormal moment of my own, it was because all the people I thought were cool had some sort of spectral story to tell. Sure, most of them were probably lying or just really high. Some of them were dead poets. But still. I wanted one to. When I was in college, I lived with roommates in what had possibly (so the story went) been an intake office for foster kids. One of the small rooms was where I decided I would become a writer, and I did peck away on a typewriter in there on occasion. But soon another roommate moved in and took the room. Almost immediately he began talking about the weird dreams he was having. Then, one morning he described all manner of crazy stuff that had kept him awake the night before: A window flying open, children’s voices, floating above his bed and looking down on himself. I pretended sympathy but was mostly jealous. Soon after he moved out, maybe because he couldn’t get any sleep, but I think mostly because he and his girlfriend stopped fighting. I moved my typewriter back in hoping for my own story to tell. Nothing. I interviewed Lee Ving from Fear in that room, but even his crazy wasn’t enough to summon any ghosts.

Then I moved to New York City and found different ways to scare myself. And now I have a completely different view on the here&now, the in-between, and the hereafter. I know very little about any of it. And that’s becoming finer every day. To not be able to explain why something happens is pretty much the definition of life. I do think it’s interesting that we’re paying more attention to our senses though. Given that loss of taste and smell is a marker for Covid infection, could it be that our sensory hyper-awareness is tuning us up to notice things beyond our usual threshold?

Right now, existence seems otherworldly and although I’m not entertaining any spectral visitations, the world feels porous and individual items seem to hold lots of stories.

“All of our ghosts, …, they’re coming to us, we’re not going to them. … there’s some kind of meeting … between the internal and external world that is requiring something of us,” Joseph Lee. I would like to think what’s required is listening. Watching. Kindness. Hope. Honesty. Community. Let’s see.