Ghosts are restless spirits of people repressed or banished from history. Historical figures banished in one way will reappear somewhere else, haunting the places they used to flourish in when alive. Somehow they seem to redress retroactive cancelling. The more we censor the past the more we need ghosts, for re-balancing.
It's not only historic personalities but historic social habits that erupt again in our thoughts, haunting us like secret underground unconscious desires -- products of taboos.
On the morning of Halloween, at the laundromat I smelled cigarette smoke. I swear it was there, a ghostly odorous emanation, even though no one was smoking and the walls were plastered with “No Smoking” signs. The diagrams on these signs made the images of wasted lungs look like skeletons: very Halloween-ish, very appropriate for hallows-evening! The night before All Saints Day, night when the non-saintly ones get out and express themselves.
More ghostly things happened to me that day: at the cash machine outside the bank I put my card in ... and it disappeared. Some evil force stole it and left a creepy message: “insufficient funds”.
This meant less cash with which to buy Halloween candy for the trick-or-treaters. I knew I'd have bad luck at the store and sure enough, a black cat crossed my path. A free one! Just walking along! We rarely see a free cat since the “lock up your cat” lobby forced everyone to keep them indoors – for the sake of birds. The spooky crows in the trees overhead seemed real enough. They cawed raucously, jeering at the black cat, who vanished down a dank alley. These crows had spent the summer killing baby robins, for which cats got blamed – a criminality of crows they were, black against a darkening sky. They soon flew off, evaporating like shadowy wisps ...
Some people say ghosts are mere imaginings, products of our need to hang on to things we've lost, things like history and the habits that used to be robust choices in our personal lives ... let letting our cats go out. This seems to suggest that ghosts are “real”, and that whatever we ban comes back to haunt us.
In my town, the City Council decided it was wise to ban the statue of Canada's first Prime Minister because some aboriginal people didn't like walking past it. His statue's gone now, but Mr. Macdonald isn't: I saw a shadowy top-hatted frock-coated figure on Government Street the other night, flitting round a corner under the moon as the clock chimed midnight.
He'll stick around. History has a way of not going quietly.
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