If you ask me, I will tell you I do not believe in ghosts. I do not believe they are oohing and wooing in old dark houses. But at the same time, I do. There are definitely shades over the South End Burying Ground. They swoop low, pointed on either end and thick in the middle, like puffs of chimney smoke with a will of their own.
Further evidence; My little dog, Sweetpea, a querulous but sensitive soul, absolutely refuses to walk up Buell Lane on our nightly hygienic perambulations, standing firmly on her four dainty paws and straining at the leash, for reasons only she knows but that hint at the supernatural. What is she seeing in the dark that I cannot see, just beyond the green lawn where the snowdrops grow in March and the daffodils in April? Is it the ghost of the Reverend Buell, standing there on the spot where he died with an elk skin Algonquian sash in one hand and his book “A Faithful Narrative of the Remarkable Revival of Religion, in the Congregation of Easthampton, on Long-Island” (1809) in the other? I mean, I don’t believe it, but I do. The world is a much more mysterious place than you thought it was when you were young and certain.
I do believe the mystery is much more lyrical — and possibly more humorous — than our pinched and feeble human imaginations would lead us to expect.
There was a smell of coal smoke in the heart of the village tonight, near the village green, as Sweetpea and I were on our walk just now. I am familiar with the generally forgotten scent of coal smoke because it was in the air most memorably on a trip I took once, 31 years ago, to the city of Kolozsvar in Transylvania, where they were still warming their kitchens with coal in 1994. Who is burning coal over Main Street tonight? The ancestors.
There’s a great deal of disturbance and turmoil in the world today. It doesn’t feel entirely natural or explicable: Why all of this, all at once? Current events feel a bit biblical, or, at least, straining at the leash of what we understood to be explainable and rational according to the fundamental laws of science as we learned them in eighth and ninth grades, do they not?
The BBC reports this month that the earth’s inner core has been discovered by scientists to be soft and mutable, and to have shifted shape measurably between 2003 and 2023. Magnetic north, the scientists say, rolled sideways slightly — about 10 degrees — in the year 2010, between the release of the iPhone 3GS and the iPhone 4. Executives in charge of the international airport at Tampa, Fla., said they had to repaint the compass headings on the tarmac of the north-south runway because pilots were stymied by the discrepancy between the heading on their craft’s compass and the heading previously indicated on the ground.
Right about then, in 2011, an Inuit elder named Ludy Pudluk was interviewed on NBC News insisting that the sun no longer set in the same position over the horizon, doubling the window of daylight for seal hunting in wintertime. “Perhaps the earth has tilted on its axis,” said Mr. Pudluk, who, to the surprise of scoffers, has been proven correct. Another elder, Inookie Adamie of Iqaluit, Nunavut, agreed: “The earth has changed its tilt.”
I admit I don’t know nothin’ about the location of the setting sun over the Arctic archipelago, just as I cannot begin to explain how it came to pass that a buffoonish cartoon billionaire from South Africa arrived in Washington, D.C., to throw Nazi salutes and tear at and rend the very fabric of credible reality, but in this context of jaw-dropping unbelievability in global events, is it too much to say that I have seen shades over the Burial Ground? They seem friendly enough.
Guests not infrequently step inside our house here on Edwards Lane and inquire if we have ghosts. It’s an old place; the living room was a silversmith’s shop 200 years ago, and the rest of the rooms became attached to that earliest structure like an accretion of barnacles over the years; and I can think of three people, off the top of my head, who have died within these walls. We have all the requisites for cinematic hauntings: the creaky floors, chiming grandfather clock, and crackling open fireplace. But I would say no, there are no ghosts here in this house. We may have memories, but not ghosts of the actual specter kind. No phantoms.
My old house on Accabonac Highway was another story. It may have had ghosts. Everyone who stooped as they came through the low kitchen doorway asked if we had them there, too. That house was stuffed with all the accessories and appurtenances of a good, old-fashioned haunting: antique rocking chairs that may or may not have rocked with no one in them; a junk shop’s pile of Dominy bedsteads in which previous generations had been born and had died; yellowed Scottish lace curtains; hand-hewn ceiling beams so low men were prone to crack their heads on them as they poked about with martini in hand on a cocktail-party house tour; mysterious cabinets and cupboards built into the walls in odd places; three gigantic fireplaces with bricks crumbling to dust, and floorboards nearly four feet wide that a modern Hamptons interior decorator might commit actual murder for (a good motive for a cozy New England detective mystery). I sold the Accabonac saltbox about seven years ago, but it is in good hands and remains one of the oldest standing structures in the Town of East Hampton. It faces due south, as Home, Sweet Home and the Mulford Farm do, turning its back on New England and the gales of winter.
We did hear strange noises in the night in that house, when the kids were little, but it turned out to be red foxes, mother and children, who had made a den and bedded down under the floorboards beneath the perilously steep back staircase. A baby fox’s cry is eerie indeed. I never actually saw a ghost when we lived on Accabonac, and neither did my small children, but you knew they were there. They left a lingering aroma, the faint and slightly rancid pine scent of violin rosin, an amber note.
The house had been constructed by the Conklin family around 1720. I assured my children and their uneasy slumber party guests that this afforded us protection: My great-great-grandmother was Adelia Conklin, and this genealogical fact indicated irrefutably that, when they came, they might wander through the rooms and watch us silently as the clock chimed 2 a.m., shades in long white nighties curious to see who was sleeping in their bed, but, if so, it was with the most benign intentions.