Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places (2016)

EPILOGUE

GHOSTS OF A NEW MACHINE

Allendale, CA

When Jessamyn West and her sister, Kate, moved into their father’s home in Westport, Massachusetts, after his death in 2011, they didn’t expect to find it haunted. Their father, Tom West, had been a hardware developer and program manager who’d achieved a certain measure of fame when his work was documented in Tracy Kidder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Soul of a New Machine. Kidder’s 1981 book followed West and his team as they developed a new computer for Data General: the Eclipse MV/8000. As a result of Kidder’s book, riding as it did the early wave of the 1980s computer revolution, Tom West came to be seen as something of a symbol for the burgeoning tech economy, a standard-bearer of a brave new future.

And yet he left behind ghosts. When Jessamyn, who works as a community technology librarian, and Kate, an administrative officer in the Massachusetts State Police, moved into what they came to call the Museum of Dad, lights would turn themselves on and off without reason or human input—as though their father’s spirit was still there with them, moving through the house, making his appointed rounds. A motion sensor set up in the driveway would go off randomly, even when no one was near the house, signaling the imminent return of something only it could see. Jessamyn told me, “I often thought the house was lonely without my dad in it.”

There was, of course, an easy explanation for this, even if not an easy solution. Tom West, always on the cutting edge of technology, had wired the house with an X10 automated lighting system and a series of other automated systems, all of which were set up to follow his rhythms without having to have him lift a finger. In many rooms outlets and light switches had been replaced by nodes embedded in the walls that were driven by a configuration file on his laptop.

West’s house was an early incarnation of what’s now called the Internet of Things: a future in which not just phones and computers are connected to the Internet but light switches and refrigerators and security alarms and laundry machines—all connected via Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, automating our homes in myriad ways. The Internet of Things was still at a relatively primitive stage when West wired his house in 2010, and so mostly he only was able to automate the lighting and plumbing, but this was more than enough to create strange and unsettling effects after his death.

Jessamyn and Kate noticed at one point that their electricity bills had spiked. After some sleuthing they found an irrigation pump that had come on mysteriously—a pump that, as far as Jessamyn could determine, hadn’t worked for several years. In the basement a Shop Vac would turn on by itself mysteriously at random hours. The toilet water became inexplicably hot at one point, breeding bacteria in the toilets that left the bathrooms with foul odors.

These are the kinds of freak occurrences that lead people to think a place is haunted, but in the case of West’s house, it was more obviously a complicated electronic protocol that was gradually falling apart, without a clear blueprint that would allow either daughter to understand the problem. Jessamyn found herself trapped in the garage one day when she realized that the only way to open the door was through a remote that had gone missing; ultimately she had to dismantle the door manually. The toilet problem, the women learned, was the result of a water pump in the basement whose existence—let alone purpose—was unknown to them until it failed.

Even knowing that the lights in West’s house weren’t being controlled by spirits, they still posed problems. Some of the lights were timed in ways that made sense, such as coming on at five in the evening; others followed Tom’s more idiosyncratic routines—routines that were never spelled out in a will or passed on to his heirs. The lights abruptly turning off at ten at night were meant to urge West to go to bed, a feature that was infuriating to anyone not on a similar schedule. To compound the confusion, the hard drive on the laptop that held the data crashed, making it difficult (though by no means impossible) to reprogram the house. Jessamyn and Kate debugged the most egregious programs and hired electricians to work through the rest. What remains, they’ve since learned to live with—the back porch still doesn’t have a light switch.

When West worked for the microcomputer manufacturer Data General, he was known for a saying he’d written on a whiteboard in his office: not everything worth doing is worth doing well. When Tracy Kidder asked him for a translation, he offered, “If you can do a quick-and-dirty job and it works, do it.” Now, after his death, his daughters are living with the strange ramifications of this philosophy as it relates to West’s own house, where an idiosyncratic and sometimes jury-rigged home infrastructure is now gradually falling apart.

A house that more or less operates under its own control, automated and animated and no longer requiring input from its living inhabitants—in such a strange new dwelling lies one glimpse of the future of hauntings. The house was set up for Tom West himself—his rhythms and habits, his patterns and haunts. With him gone, the house continues in many ways to respect those patterns of being, asserting them on its new occupants as though they, too, are obliged to adopt their father’s modes of being. And should the house be sold, Jessamyn admitted, the next occupants will have to reckon, one way or another, with these same protocols, since there’s no way to rid the house entirely of them, short of gutting its electrical and plumbing systems altogether. Which is to say, the house is cursed—benignly cursed, but cursed all the same. The spirit of Tom West is going to inhabit it for a long time to come.

Ray Bradbury had already imagined the Internet of Things in a 1950 short story that’s turned out to be one of the more prescient stories of all time: “There Will Come Soft Rains.” Set in the year 2026, the story follows a day in the (artificial) life of a fully automated house in the possibly fictional town of Allendale, California, a house that goes about its domestic duties—washing dishes, cleaning rooms, reciting poetry for entertainment—all the while unaware that its inhabitants, the McClellan family, are all dead, atomized in a nuclear explosion. It’s a rare science fiction story that, aside from the nuclear holocaust part, has so far accurately predicted the future—an automated home so fully integrated that it can essentially function without us. If we’re not there yet, this is certainly the dream of futurists, designers, and advertisers, and 2026 seems a pretty reasonable date.

Often characterized as science fiction, Bradbury’s story is also a ghost story: a story of a haunted house. Sentient, the house acts of its own accord, an inanimate place animated, its poltergeists moving about. “Bridge tables sprouted from patio walls. Playing cards fluttered onto pads in a shower of pips. Martinis manifested on an oaken bench with egg-salad sandwiches. Music played. But the tables were silent and the cards untouched. At four o’clock the tables folded like great butterflies back through the paneled walls.” Bradbury gives us the kind of house one expects from Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion, where unseen ghosts flit about, frolicking and enjoying themselves as though still living. The story’s title comes from a Sara Teasdale poem, which describes how nature will be unaffected by humanity’s destruction, how the frogs and birds and trees will remain oblivious to humanity’s final wars, apathetic and unmoved by the end of us—which Bradbury in turn extends to our technological marvels, continuing, undead and ghosted, after our own dear departures.

But in Bradbury’s futuristic ghost story, who is haunting whom? The house, after all, is mostly self-sufficient, and the real ghosts are its missing occupants. The only remaining traces of the McClellan family are the ghostly traces on the walls outside:

The entire west face of the house was black, save for five places. Here the silhouette in paint of a man mowing a lawn. Here, as in a photograph, a woman bent to pick flowers. Still farther over, their images burned on wood in one titanic instant, a small boy, hands flung into the air; higher up, the image of a thrown ball, and opposite him a girl, hands raised to catch a ball which never came down. The five spots of paint—the man, the woman, the children, the ball—remained. The rest was a thin charcoaled layer.

No longer living inhabitants, the McClellan family haunt their own house. Their lives, their hobbies and relations and jobs and desires and loves, are evident everywhere in the house, but they themselves are not. The true protagonist is the house itself, and it is the house’s own life-and-death struggle that we witness, its former inhabitants now merely the specters that haunt its walls. In this way, too, Bradbury might have been onto something: With the coming of the Internet of Things, automated houses may mean not that the houses themselves are haunted but that we ourselves become the ghosts, mere guests obligated to the thing that once represented security.

Which isn’t to say there aren’t scientists working to disabuse us once and for all of our belief in spirits, proving them to be nothing more than phantasms of the mind that can be easily controlled and replicated in the laboratory. In 2014 researchers from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, in Switzerland, figured out a way to manufacture ghosts, thus suggesting that they’re really all in our minds. A participant in their experiment would control a robot directly behind her or him, causing the robot to touch the participant’s back when commanded. But sometimes the robot would delay its actions by a half second, sometimes not. The confusion caused by the expectation of a reaction and the slight delay interrupted participants’ sense of their own sensorimotor input enough that they thought their own actions were that of another person—creating the “feeling of presence” in the subjects: a ghost behind them who wasn’t really there.

“Our brain possesses several representations of our body in space,” researcher Giulio Rognini explained. “Under normal conditions, it is able to assemble a unified self-perception of the self from these representations. But when the system malfunctions because of disease—or, in this case, a robot—this can sometimes create a second representation of one’s own body, which is no longer perceived as ‘me’ but as someone else, a ‘presence.’” For skeptics, studies like these can be powerful ammunition to convince those who’ve “felt something” that what they’re really feeling are just manifestations of their own minds.

Even if science can help explain to us how our brains concoct ghosts, it won’t explain their importance in our lives, and it will do little to dispel our belief of them. For even though communication technologies have made mammoth strides since the days when the telegraph inspired Spiritualists, the same technological static and gremlins are still with us. YouTube videos, with their often low resolution, shuttering frame rates, and other technical glitches, seem to some to evidence the paranormal. The conspiracy-minded and those looking for proof of spirits scour online videos for such static to interpret. A video of a young Japanese girl titled “Look at Her Face, Scary,” in which her face dissolves slightly as she delivers a classroom presentation, has more than sixteen million views.

On the contrary, as technology changes our world at a speed so fast we can barely keep pace, it may be the case that our world will become increasingly haunted. Take the well-known phenomenon of the “Uncanny Valley” as one example: as computer-generated images and robots become more and more lifelike, they will paradoxically become more, not less, creepy. The closer they are to human, the more tiny faults—dead eyes, jerky movements—become magnified and unsettling. Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori has been credited with first theorizing the problem, known as far back as 1970, but the idea didn’t really gain traction until after 2000, when digital animation advanced sufficiently to make it a reality. And though designers and animators have made progress since first diagnosing the problem, what the Uncanny Valley reveals is that technological innovation often creates ghosts as fast as it dispels them.

Part of the reason that ghosts stay with us is that they remain a compelling mechanism to explain so much that is unknown in our lives. They enter and reenter our lexicon to explain the unexplainable, to represent the unrepresentable, to give a word to that which we don’t understand. If scientists truly believe they are capable of dispelling the ghosts from our lives, then we’ll have to replace them with some viable cultural conversation that offers an equally meaningful way of understanding death and the past.

And then there is social media, which has also created its share of ghosts. For several months in 2009, Facebook urged me to “reconnect” with a friend I hadn’t spoken to in a while—but what Facebook was asking was impossible, since she had died earlier that year. To see her profile show up occasionally on my Facebook feed was never not jarring, particularly since Facebook’s algorithms could not tell (and seemed to have no interest in learning) that she was dead. Because your online life lives on after you (unless you leave specific instructions on deactivating it) and because these sites depend on constant engagement, those who’ve left us have become cyber revenants.

This return of the dead happens more often than we think, and often with disturbing resonances. Images of Rehtaeh Parsons, a seventeen-year-old Canadian girl who committed suicide after a campaign of cyberbullying, began appearing after her death online as part of ads that beckoned: “Meet Canadian girls for friendship, dating or relationships. Sign up now!” The algorithm that crawled the Web, grabbed these images, and repurposed them for advertising had no idea—was never programmed to have an idea—about Parsons’s life, her backstory, her death, or how her image’s sudden reappearance could be so traumatic for those suddenly faced with it. This is how ghosts will continue to haunt us in the coming years: the unintended return of the dead via sites and algorithms that aren’t yet programmed to let the dead rest.

Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have in many ways replaced (or at least complemented) the cafés, parks, and bars where we gather; it’s little wonder, then, that they’ve also become populated with ghosts. Physical places become haunted because of creaky doors, odd construction, and other quirks of architecture that get transformed in our minds into the paranormal. Online it’s still a question of architecture: coding and algorithms with unintended consequences, like an uncanny hallway, which open up unexpected nightmares. And, as with physical architecture, it’s unlikely that we’ll ever dispel these ghosts in the machine entirely; coding, after all, is a human endeavor, and like architecture, it’s prone to a thousand variables that can never be fully controlled.

Our belief (or lack thereof) in ghosts ultimately reflects the way we face death. Those of us who fear mortality can often find comfort in a belief in life after death, and those whom we fail to mourn properly may return to haunt us. If we can’t find a way to design our cyber temples of the future in such a way as to accommodate the departed, we can expect their return in ways as surprising as they are unsettling.

Ghost stories are about how we face, or fail to face, the past—how we process information, how we narrate our past, and how we make sense of the gaps in that history. During my conversation with Eric Meharry about the ghost of Thelma Taylor, he mentioned that we may see fewer ghosts like Taylor’s in the future, simply because we’re so inundated with information, particularly about gruesome killings and other tragedies that tend to be fodder for ghost stories. “Lack of information is part of the recipe,” Meharry told me, and today’s ubiquitous news coverage—an endless online stream of updates, gossip, and posts by citizen journalists—is making that air of mystery more scarce. “Information,” he said, “is killing ghost stories.”

When I asked him if this was a good thing or not, he replied, “I don’t know. The romantic idea of a lonely person haunting a place is slowly disappearing … the idea is becoming a ghost, I guess.”

Then again, the glut of facts and the preponderance of evidence create as many gaps as they fill, leading to a swirling cacophony of information. There will never be a complete record, particularly when it comes to scenes of great emotional complexity. We can, for example, expect ghosts to continue to follow national tragedies—ghosts such as the mysterious woman who appeared in the Fresh Kills, New York, landfill in the days following September 11, 2001. Dressed in a World War II Red Cross outfit, holding a tray of sandwiches, the spectral aid worker appeared to a number of individuals, who claimed to be able to see her only from a distance and who said she vanished as they approached.

Besides, even if we could dispel them once and for all, we need them too badly. The language of ghosts is a means of coping with the unfamiliar, and if they sometimes require that we overlook the truth, that may be a price we’re willing to pay. In some ways we don’t want to know too much about the true story, since whatever happens, we can’t break the spell—because the ghost is too important.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book could not have been written without help. Thanks to everyone who shared with me a ghost story or who directed me to a haunted house, hotel, prison, park, cemetery, or other haunted place. I’m also grateful to everyone who accompanied me on various ghost tours and ghost-hunting adventures, particularly: Elise Blackwell, Emily Mandel, Elizabeth Harper, Chelsey Johnson, Eric Bebernitz, Alex Dickey, Karl Erickson, and Gretchen Larsen. Thanks to all of the ghost hunters, historians, and tour guides who spoke with me for this project. In particular, thanks to Robert Kirkbride, Michele Yu, Kim Cooper, Richard Schave, Ben Miller, Margaret McGovern, Erik Meharry, and Jessamyn West, whose ideas gave me much-needed perspective throughout the process of writing this book.

Special thanks to Paulette Jarrett for sharing her stories with me.

Suzanne Fischer helped me work out the structure and format of this book through our early conversations, and I’m grateful for her feedback and her friendship. This book also benefited immensely from talks with Michelle Legro, Franz Potter, Kara Thompson, and Evan Kindley. Special thanks to Liberty Hardy for her unwavering support of this project and her all-around excellence. Thanks to Brenna Murray for research assistance.

Some of the first ideas of this book were worked out at lectures I presented at Machine Project in Los Angeles, Acme Studio in Brooklyn, Odd Salon in San Francisco, and Death Salon Philadelphia at the Mütter Museum. Thanks to these venues and their staffs, particularly Mark Allen, Annetta Black, and Rachel James. Thanks to Dan Piepenbring at the Paris Review and Jane Friedman at the Virginia Quarterly Review for publishing early essays that would go on to become parts of this book. Thanks also to Fred Ramey and everyone at Unbridled Books.

I’ve also been fortunate to have surrounded myself with several different communities of writers, artists, and scholars who’ve helped nurture this project from its very beginning. At the Morbid Anatomy Museum, thanks to Tracy Hurley Martin, Joanna Ebenstein, Tonya Hurley, Laetitia Barbier, and Cristina Preda, without all of whom this book might not have happened. Thanks also to Caitlin Doughty, Megan Rosenbloom, Sarah Troop, and everyone at the Order of the Good Death for their constant support and inspiration. And thanks especially to the fabulous people at Betalevel: Jason Brown, Heather Parlato, Sean Deyoe, Amar Ravva, Dave Eng, Ariana Kelly, and Amina Cain.

A writer could not ask for a better agent than Anna Sproul-Latimer, whose enthusiasm for this project, along with her constant insight and expertise, made it happen. I am overwhelmed with gratitude for the support I’ve received from her and everyone else at the Ross Yoon Agency. At Viking, my editor, Melanie Tortoroli, shaped and refined this manuscript and made it far better than I could have on my own. Thanks also to everyone else at Viking who’s worked so hard on this book.

Thanks to my parents for taking me to the Winchester Mystery House so many times when I was a child and for supporting my youthful Stephen King obsession. Above all, thanks to Nicole, for having come so far with me through all the strangeness and for making the journey so much fun.