All The Lives We Cannot See

I feel most visible when connected to the invisible. This is a fact and not a philosophy for someone like myself: someone who feels so disconnected from the living that it almost feels like I myself am a ghost, transported to a time, jolting me out of comfort and into confusion.  Perhaps it is the speed of modern convenience, trading timepieces in for Teslas and fedoras for For You Pages, that causes such distance, making me yearn for days in which hours were savored, pies were baked — the leisurely infiltration of its aroma into the kitchen proof of the lure of unhurried hours, the butter churned by hand with slow deliberation, calluses proving one was wonderfully worse for wear. 

It is that very sense of overwhelming speed, where purpose and consideration are abandoned, that makes me feel at an incredible distance from my generation; a generation that all the remaining treasured human antiquities themselves, like my grandparents, are hopeful will change the world. In order to deal with often melancholy interactions with the modern folk, I, in my quirkiness and willingness to explore and test the bounds of friendship and connection, began to develop a penchant for the paranormal: ghosthunting. On a mission to feel a sense of being in touch with some fragment of the human world, either through life or death, I was drawn into a world of history and hauntings, an intellectually sinister universe of the merging of the past and the present, where I was searching for the deceased to find a connection so alive in the present. My adventures have taken me from bodies covered by concrete sidewalks and the souls that levitate above them, tortured feminine coughs in the echo chambers of my bathroom, to strapping young railway workers eerily next to me in my own dining room table. No matter who these strangers, unfamiliar apparitions are and have been, they are more of my kin than my peers of flesh and blood, begging the question: is friendship only defined by life or death, or is the spirit what connects us more than our bodies ever will? 

I first met Elizabeth one slightly chilled day in late March, crouching on my bathroom floor, pajama-clad, the static of my spirit box (one of the most legitimate pieces of ghost hunting equipment, a small tiny handheld radio, which you set to a certain frequency, turning it on to continuously scanning stations, and supposedly ghost communicate between the scanning of different radio stations because they communicate at a radio frequency) sending comforting chills of anticipation down my spine. At first, her voice was slightly timid, but her messages were not. Her voice was a slightly noticeable wisp, a distinct feminine echo breaking through the substantial crackle of my device. I felt myself immediately drawn to her, drawn to be an unconventional confidant, a transuniversal bosom buddy to this kindly female spirit. She slowly became comfortable with admitting the most intimate of secrets to me. She conveyed complexity in the makeup and the landscape of her identity, tempting me to want to know more about this mysterious shadow of a conversing apparition. Still, in her few words, it seemed she had managed to live a life of intellect, curiosity, and overall satisfaction, despite her hardship. Over the spirit box, I heard soft but tortured groans, coughs, and wheezes, suggesting an ailment, a struggle amidst her communication. Even in her small words, I gathered the metaphorical threads of the fabric of an unconventionally woven life. As I continued to pursue the most unorthodox of friendships, I threw caution to the spiritual wind and began to research her. 

At first, I had merely thought I had imagined our interaction over the fuzzy intercom of tele-apparitional communication, my wish for a comrade of quality convincing me of the presence and communications of Elizabeth — a presence more spirit in body but more substance than most bodies around me in my reality. I tore through digital Denver Library archives and to my astonishment came across an article concerning the death of a woman named Elizabeth — a politically active African American woman, who had moved to Colorado from Massachusetts and had a lifelong engagement in both women’s suffrage civil rights activism. She had died in Arvada, Colorado —my town — in the year nineteen eighteen from tuberculosis, a disease, a fact that perfectly fit the wheezes and coughs I occasionally heard broadcast from my spirit box. There she was, in writing, script that was the physical proof in a not-so-fully physical friendship. Clues to her suffering, to her torturous demise. I smiled to myself, for I had never felt happier that two realms had merged into one, where I was now ignoring the outside noise of house parties, superficial hookups, and rowdy sporting events, feeling contained and cozy in a kinship that connected me to the bygone world I felt misplaced from, connected to only in memory but not existence. I would much rather have worn a corset than ever make rager party small talk. 

As Elizabeth and I got closer, I could hear the echoes of her coughs through my speakers more clearly. As I opened up to her, she opened up to me, allowing our friendship to grow through glimpses into the most disconsolate moments of her life; the end of her days, the countdown to her demise. I felt honored and full, my heart brimming with an unquantifiable and unidentifiable set of emotions. I knew that Elizabeth and I were meant to connect. I knew that we were meant to exchange words and noises, to feel acknowledgment from each other, an emotional experience with such gravity that it replaced the lack of physicality. As much as I had despised that I detested the shallowness of modernity, I embraced the unconventionality of this connection — the merging of both past and present, jumping out of a sea of Lulu Lemon, and into a village of corsets and prairie dresses. 

Unexpectedly, and much to my delight, my connection to the other side did not end with my visitations with Elizabeth, my dearest activist female companion. Shortly thereafter, I unexpectedly made the acquaintance of a charming, but vulnerable and slightly awkward young railroad worker — convenient since a mere twenty or so steps from my house was, indeed, a railway track. It was a slightly breezy but overall lightly warm April day. I sat at my wooden dining room table conducting yet another conversation with the paranormal realm, an occurrence that had become increasingly and now much more regular, since I discovered my delight for the deceased. His name was Tom. He was twenty-one and worked many rough and tough jobs on the railroad line, even to the extent that he died doing this very line of work. I could perfectly picture him in my head: short, messy brown hair slightly dusted by gravel and soot, skin tanned from the sun amidst many a laborious afternoon, brown eyes that remained sparkling and shiny through the filth of labor, a plain but ruffled t-shirt, brown pants, and naturally a phenomenal pair of suspenders.

From the first moments of our interaction, I sensed that Tom was actively expressing something to me, that the physical and the metaphysical were closer than ever. I asked him if he knew my name and much to my surprise, through the intercom of my beloved spirit box, I heard “Emma….Emma….Emma….Emma,” my name repeated, as if it were a haunting hymn, a repentance, a confession, a cry in the darkest corners of a church. How he knew my name, how he said it was far more intimate than I ever imagined feeling a connection could be, with someone whose only physical mark was their voice vying to be heard over the crackling of a handheld sound system. To my further surprise, when I took an incredibly unorthodox chance and asked if he liked me, or had a crush on me, he replied yes — apparently I felt more bravery in romantically comforting an apparition than a flesh and blood man, yet who could not feel a slight sense of glee when one unexpectedly wins the affections of an old fashioned railway worker? 

Upon continuing our kinship and my inquisitiveness, he repeated the names of my father, mother, and grandfather, all of whom were present in the room when I began to inquire into Tom’s past and intentions further. Most surprisingly, I found out that he was, in fact, the ghost that had been following me into the bathroom whenever I was showering, and into my bedroom when I was changing — the handsome hellion admitted it ever so slightly. For a couple of weeks I kept peeking out of the shower curtain while showering, feeling as if someone or something was there, intangibly yet tangibly enough to feel it so strongly that I was convinced without proof, until now. I even felt a presence in my own bedroom and here was the proof that, in fact, I was being followed, I was connected to the spirit of a lovelorn railway rapscallion. Although I had no intentions of kindling a romance that would defy all of logic and the rules of physics, I could not help but smile to myself that in the years that had passed before I was made to be in existence, lay a love, but more importantly an era, a life, like that one I dreamed of nearly nightly. Everything I wanted in the world of kinships existed in this space where my heart lay connected but where my body did not. 

Tom, like Elizabeth, was everything that an apparition could be for me: tangible, but yet intangible enough to subtly be there with me, a confidant that fit perfectly in my metaphorical pocket, like a cell phone or travel-sized game. They were both the ideal friend, always there with me, transcending body and physical space. They embodied friendship rather than simply being friends. For me, the other side embodied ideals rather than the figures and the literal, perfect for the depth in my soul, the depth that I used to perceive and analyze, approach, and embrace every aspect of my life. Ghosthunting is an experience that maximizes depth and flourishes on depth as an approach and an ability, one in which a surface-level approach will not help you gain what you are searching for. Ghosthunting forces you to go beyond the surface, forcing you to reckon with the necessity for effort to retrieve and secure the valuables: in my case, lovely friends. These ghosts thus exemplify the possibility of what one is able to have and to hold if only one does not stop at the brainless, the shallow, and the trivial, if depth is not looked upon as the hard route, but rather the right route, the route of giving and receiving and thus the route of joy. 

Most days I spend too much time contemplating the distance between me and my peers — the subtle but powerfully unspoken culture that separates us from understanding and connection. I yearn to be transported to a time in which screens cease and TikTok’s tik is toked, where the speed of our century is confiscated for the leisure of barn dances, front porch conversations, and complex graniteware cooked and served dinners. While at the moment, transporting to a life in the past isn’t the most possible of occurrences, my adventures in ghosthunting and befriending the dead have creatively and alternatively made accessible the eras in which I find my heart displaced from my body in the present. Kinship with the dead has made me feel more alive than ever, truly proving that the past isn’t dead despite decomposition. Bygone eras never cease in their relevancy. The simplicity of the past is a comfort that disentangles the anxiety and busyness of modernity. My ghosts have shown me that to relieve the anxiety of my present, a concentration on approaching life with applying depth, reveling in the tediously slow, will ground me as time goes on. Life may never cease in its insanity, but, as dear Elizabeth and Tom as well as others have shown me, if I only I practice, if only I master grounding myself, all that life has to offer will quiet down, manageable in the palm of my hand and in the center of my mind. 

The paranormal has become my meditation, my practice to calm, to feel connected, to immerse myself in gratitude, and to be present in my now by being present in the past. Perhaps many will call me crazy, and perhaps sometimes I’ve wished for voices that are only whispers of my desires, but I happen to believe that the voices I’ve heard are not only kind assistants from the past but the fruit of my labor for living each day with the effort to look beyond the surface. Throughout my ghosthunting, I’ve heard tidbits of lives that were small but extraordinarily inspiring in their impact. If all these lives have taught me anything, it’s that finding appreciation for what’s come before you makes everything to come before you feel a lot less terrifying. Yet, even more significantly, the invisible quality of these lives, and my ability to be let into these lives and connect,  makes me feel reflected and thus seen when I feel so invisible in my own physical reality. I’ll always laugh to myself, how the terror of the paranormal has given me friends, life, and a sense of trans-era tranquility. The spooky have sedated my anxiety, pervasive in spirit, incorporeal in body.

• #Friendship
• #history
• ghosts
• paranormal
• paranormal investigation