Chuck Palahniuk
The Ghost Who Came to Say He Was Sorry
Scanned from The Week, Dec 6, 2002
Originally published in The London Independent © 2002
When novelist Chuck Palahniuk invited friends to a haunted-house party, he was more prepared to snicker than hide behind the sofa. But his murdered father had other ideas.
A friend of mine lives in a "haunted" house. It's a nice, white farmhouse in the country, surrounded with gardens, and every few weeks he'll call in the middle of the night to say, "Someone is screaming in the basement. I'm going down with my gun, and if I don't call you back in five minutes, send the police!"
It's all very dramatic, but it's the kind of complaint that smells like a boast. It's the psychic equivalent of saying, "My diamond ring is so very heavy." Or, "I wish I could wear this thong bikini without everyone lusting after me."
My friend refers to his ghost as "the Lady," and he complains about not getting any sleep because the Lady was up all night, rattling pictures on the walls and resetting the clocks and thumping around the living room. This is a practical man who's never believed in ghosts. I'll call him Patrick. Until he moved out to this farm, Patrick was like me: stable, practical, reasonable.
Now I think he's full of it.
To prove this, I asked him to let me house-sit his farm while he was away on vacation. I needed the isolation and quiet to write, I told him. I promised to water the plants, and he went off and left me there for two weeks. Then I threw a little party.
This man, he's not my only deluded friend. Another friend -- I'll call her Brenda -- says she can see the future. Over dinner, she'll ruin your best story by suddenly drawing a huge gasp, covering her mouth with her hand, and rearing back in her chair with a look of wide-eyed terror on her face. When you ask what's wrong, she'll say, "Oh... nothing, really." Then close her eyes and try to shake the terrible vision from her mind.
When you persist, she'll take your hand in hers and beg you, "Please, please. Just stay away from automobiles for the next six years."
For the next six years!
Brenda and Patrick, they're odd but they're my friends, always hungry for attention. "My ghost is too loud..." "I hate being able to see the future..."
For my little house party, I planned to invite Brenda and her psychic friends out to the haunted farmhouse. I planned to invite another group of stupid, ordinary friends who aren't troubled with any special extrasensory gifts. We'd drink red wine and watch the mediums flit around, lapsing into trances, channeling spirits, doing their automatic writing, levitating tables, while we laughed politely behind our hands.
So a dozen people arrived at the farmhouse. And Brenda brought two women I'd never met, Bonnie and Molly, both of them already swooning from the ghost energy they felt there. Okay, all my friends were swaying a little. But for the sane ones, it was the red wine. We all sat around the dining-room table, a couple of lighted candles in the center, and the psychics went to work.
First, they turned to my friend Ina. Ina's German and sensible. Her idea of expressing emotion is to light another cigarette. These mediums, Bonnie and Molly, they'd never met Ina before, but they took turns telling her how a woman's spirit was beside her. The woman was named Margaret and was showering Ina with tiny blue flowers. Forget-me-nots, they said. And suddenly, Ina put down her cigarette and started crying.
Ina's mother had died of cancer several years earlier. Her mother's name was Margaret, and every year Ina sprinkled forget-me-not seeds on her grave because they'd been her mother's favorite flower. Ina and I have been friends for 20 years, and these are details even I didn't know. Ina never talks about her dead mother, and now she's weeping and asking for more red wine.
Having reduced my friend to a mess, Bonnie and Molly turned to me.
They said a man was near me, standing just over my shoulder. He was, they both agreed, my murdered father.
Oh, please. My father. Here, let's just take a little break from the nonsense.
Anyone could know the details of my father's death. The strange, ironic circle. When he was 3 years old, his own father had shot his mother, then stalked my father around the house, trying to shoot him. My dad's first memories are of hiding under a bed, hearing his father call, and seeing his heavy boots walk past, the smoking barrel of the rifle hanging near the floor. While he hid, his father eventually shot himself. Then, my dad spent his life running from the scene. My siblings also say he spent his life trying to find his mother by marrying woman after woman. Always divorcing and remarrying. He'd been divorced from my mother for 20 years when he saw a personal ad in the newspaper. He started dating the author of the ad, not knowing she had a violent ex-husband. Coming home from their third date, the ex-husband shot them both in the woman's house. That was in April 1999.