Wm. F. (Bill) Sattelmeyer

Writer

Interactive Designer

Ghosts!

What comes after life? No one knows.

Many hope they know. Most people, I would wager, believe in something, even if that something is nothing.

But no one knows.

You might think this would make the afterlife fertile ground for a writer: write anything you want; no can prove you wrong. But the realm of death is too large a canvas. At least for me. All of death must surely be larger than life, for though every creature is mortal, what comes after lasts for an eternity.

So, I chose one moment, “immediately after.” And a special condition of that moment: that which was unexpected … not being fully dead.

Everyone expects to die some day. I suspect no one plans on becoming a ghost … half alive, half dead. A large body of literature seems to bear this out, over thousands of years and many cultures. It just happens, whether a trick of the Gods or some unplanned attachment to the living.

Ghosts have been depicted as good or evil or avengers or messengers. Ghosts have either returned to visit the living to perform some task or because they are lost. Ghosts appear at night and during the day. They come only once, or they haunt a particular place or time. They appear solid or as an ill-defined mist. They wear white or black or the clothes they wore in life. They speak or are silent. They are the souls of the dead, or they are merely a hallucination.

Could they be imaginary? Some trick of the light or wish fulfillment? Perhaps. Yet many apparently reliable witnesses have claimed to have seen a ghost or felt a mysterious presence, often at the same time as others nearby.

As I writer I don’t have to know that something is real, but I have to convince the reader that the places and characters could be. But just as a novel’s protagonist shouldn’t be able to do something out of character or impossible, I felt it was important that the ghosts in Once Dead and Twice Die have a tangible connection to reality.

Hilary Evans and Patrick Huyghe, in The Field Guide to  Ghosts and Other Apparitions, proposed a typology in which they classified ghosts as “Ghosts of the Past”—visitors from the dead—“Ghosts of the Present”—apparitions of people still alive—and “Ghosts of the Future”—ghosts who warn of a future calamity.

In the class of visitors from the dead, they proposed three sub-classes: Revenants, a ghost that appears only a few times immediately after death, Haunters, ghosts who reappears over and over at a particular place, and Time Slips, in which entire events or locations appear from out of the past, like the Flying Dutchman.

What was missing in all of the accounts of these spirits was, of course, any explanation for the observations—other than the premise that it might all be an overactive imagination. A writer’s job, however, is to propose a “What if…” and then answer the question for the reader.

Several questions stood out for me. How is it that a ghost—apparently insubstantial—maintains the shape and mannerisms of the living? Why are they almost always dressed in clothes? Surely clothes don’t die or have a soul of their own. Why is it that ghosts seem to obey gravity … walking on floors, climbing stairs … but can walk through walls and doors? If a ghost is substantial enough to stand on the ground, isn’t it too “material” to pass through another solid object? And, finally, do all ghosts come from the same place? Do they drop back to earth from some Elysian Field or do they come from someplace between the here and the hereafter?

So I took for my premise “What if ghosts were real?” That was still too general for a story, so I began creating a world for my spirits, one in which there were underlying rules as inviolable as those in “real life.” If ghosts haunted the physical plane and were required to honor basic physics, then might not there be some subset of physics at work in the afterlife?

It also seemed obvious that if ghosts could visit us in places we inhabited, then they must have some analogue of the world we lived in. Perhaps it was the same world, but—in terms of wave theory—out of phase.

Now, if these ghosts really are “live” in some sense and must obey the operational principles of the universe, then they must use energy of some sort, meaning they must acquire it in some manner. Surely there couldn’t be ghost food? And, if there weren’t, wouldn’t that be a terrible loss in itself?

Bit by bit the rules appeared until I encountered what must be the principle problem of the newly dead. How did you learn the new rules? Was there some sort of manual? Did you get a ghostly-ability brochure when you passed on?

How do the new ghosts feel about that? In fact, how do they bear up emotionally now that they are dead? Do they still retain their emotions—for surely emotions are an important part of who we are? Or, stripped of life, do our souls no longer feel anything? If not, why come back to warn or protect? If ghosts still do feel, then mustn’t they experience the same loss, pain and confusion as their loved ones?

And, hey, how do you become a ghost in the first place? Is there no choice in the matter? Could you choose to remain, to protect a loved one? Could you become un-ghosted and continue your journey through the afterlife or were stuck in the spirit world forever, at the beck and call of any séance or ghost hunter?

And, how crowded is the afterlife?

And, thus, Maggie McAuley, as other spirits before her, found herself in a world she could recognize but yet so very different from the one that she had known only a brief time before. Lost. Confused. Lonely. And about to embark on a journey she could never imagine.

You can visit the Links page to see some of the references on ghosts and the afterlife if you are interested in the phenomenon.