A Garden Full of Ghosts
Grandma’s bones and other nightmares from my childhood…
When I was a child, ghosts and bugaboos kept me awake at night. Like most children, I kept a light on in the hall so that I wouldn’t feel the icy fingers of the night wrap themselves around me. I imagined the darkness like a cold fist, clenched and corpse-like against the warmth of my shivering little body.
I used to imagine things creeping in the bedroom window, and would often stay awake arguing with myself over which sleeping spot was best in the bed I shared with my sisters. Should I sleep closest to the window? Anything creeping in might not notice me, crawling lithely over my body to snatch up my sisters instead. Or would they see me first and get me, snatching me up right through the window, leaving the others behind out of sheer convenience? Of course, if I survived the snatching thing in the dark, would I be able to bear the guilt of being left behind? Should I sacrifice myself to whatever toothy, many-legged thing was surely there, crouching beneath the windowsill, waiting for me to drop off to sleep?
When I was very little—three or four—I used to flip through my dad’s old medical textbooks and look at the photographs of carved-up cadavers. They were beautiful and horrifying, as only a corpse can be. Here was a body, its skin peeled away from the torso, folded back on either side like an open book. There was a real human heart inside—plump and glittery and wet, its veins splayed out like the roots of a downed tree. Here was a hand, the tendons stripped away from the flesh like long slithery flower petals. And here was a skull sawn neatly open, the eyeball visible inside its socket, staring dead eyed at nothing.
I don’t remember it, but my parents told me that one night I came into their room, inconsolable after a nightmare. What was the nightmare? “Grandma’s bones,” I said. “Grandma’s bones were chasing me.” I don’t remember that dream, but I do remember other dreams where I was followed by armies of skinless bodies—eyes bulging, veins pumping, pink muscle stretched taut and sinewy around every limb.
After that, my dad no longer left his textbooks lying around. He hid them in a cavity beneath his headboard (I found them very quickly) and I learned to only take a peek when I knew my parents were busy. They caught me more than once, and told me to stop—I would give myself nightmares. But I didn’t stop—I couldn’t. I had to keep looking. So I fed my nightmares, and they grew.
Later, my dad brought home a model human brain. It sat inside the hollowed-out cavity of a plastic head, the top of it sawn off like some horrible mental patient from the early days. The head—its brain half-exposed—lived in a cupboard beneath the computer desk. We would take it out and lobotomize it, removing its brain one lobe and segment at a time, spreading out the pieces in front of its face and putting them back in, all mismatched and out of order like we were a gaggle of deranged scientists. Sometimes I would be sitting alone at the desk, knowing the head was there, just out of sight. I often had to open the cupboard to make sure the face wasn’t alive—that those plastic eyes hadn’t suddenly sprung open, bright and blinking and full of wicked revenge.
When I was seven or eight, I started reading Goosebumps books. I read my way through every single book in the series—usually at night as I fell asleep. Once or twice I got so scared that I turned on the light in my bedroom, waking up all four of my siblings so that I wouldn’t be alone in the dark with those disembodied hands playing piano, or the ghost child trapped in the attic mirror. I always made up some excuse for why the light was on—I dropped my pillow off the top bunk, or I fell asleep with my glasses on and couldn’t find them in the bed, or I had to pee and just couldn’t see in the dark.
I don’t know if they believed me. They definitely complained—squint-eyed and groaning—about being woken up in the middle of the night. But I thought that even their irritated, half-asleep company was better than the things that waited for me in the dark.
Then the next night—or the next morning, in some cases—I’d pick up the book just where I’d left off, disembodied hands and all—nightmares be damned.
There are lots of reasons to scare yourself in this world. There is something delicious about it—there’s some perfumed secret that seems to only unfold in the dark. It’s terrifying and wicked and blissful all at once.
It’s so many other things, too. It’s the delight in sharing ghost stories and haunted songs and tales of the stumbling undead around a warm fire. It’s our longing for something to exist instead of nothing. It’s our attempt to cling to this beautiful, singular life—the secret wish that our memory will haunt this world even when we’re no longer in it—even if it’s a claw, or a clammy hand. It’s the dreadful hope that when we reach out in the dark, there’s something reaching back.
The sun is returning. It’s Spring where I live, and being Spring, it hardly seems the time to talk about ghosts and shadows and haunted things. But at this time of year, as the seeds sprout and blossoms pop, I remember all the rot that must happen before they can crack open and send their tender shoots towards the sky. They feed on so much death.
And so, my whole garden is full of ghosts. There are so many, I hardly know what to do with them.
Happy Spring, my friends, if it is Spring where you are. Thank you so much for being here. You are beautiful and dying and so very precious. Reach out and send me a note if you’re feeling the weight of things.
I’m always here. In the dark. Reaching back.
All my love,
💀Becca Lee, the Haunted Librarian💀
Such beautiful, haunted memories!!!
“And so, my whole garden is full of ghosts.”This is such a beautiful sentiment. I will think about it as I attempt to tame the ghosts of my garden this year. Happy Spring!