Day One:

It took me nineteen years to find my way back. Of course I knew where it was on a map, I could plot it with precision, and I was intimately acquainted with the longitude and latitude. But it was never more than that, a place held in the back of my mind like a document in an old filing cabinet. I had never expected to pull out the file again. 

I wasn’t unhappy. 

I feel like that’s important for you to know.

It wasn’t like I went home to my brownstone and cried myself to sleep every night. It wasn’t like I’d get drunk at parties and end up puking out my problems in the bathroom three hours later. It was like- watching a movie, this really great film, and being in a completely empty theatre. And turning to your side to see if the person next to you was also laughing, but then you’d remember that you’re alone. I guess it was a little like that.

And then you start to enjoy the movie just a little less until you hate the fact that it’s just actors and sets cobbled together under a budget less than your net worth. It’s a loneliness of sorts. I would often wonder if in the next theatre over all the rest of the world was watching the same film, laughing and crying together. I wondered why I had a ticket for a separate show.

Greg once said to me “You’re on a whole other planet, you know that?” and I never quite understood what he meant until now. So that’s why I’m here. Trying to find Earth, you could say.

I came here once before, when I was eleven years old.

Each summer Uncle Valentine and I made a distinct couple driving around the eastern seaboard and visiting bed and breakfast, after mansion, after castle. Sometimes when we’d check into a hotel we’d get raised eyebrows as if we echoed Dolores and Humbert on their infamous road trip. I didn’t fully internalize, until years later, why he wouldn’t buy me a pair of heart shaped sunglasses I had so earnestly pined after. Needless to say, we could afford separate rooms.

But my uncle was the kindest man, the type who could have something nice to say about a dilapidated pile of rubble wrapped in faded wallpaper. He loved to compliment strangers as we walked through small towns. He could connect to the people of a place he’d only just stepped into. Even if he didn’t fit, he’d find a way to fit in.

Uncle Valentine was a large man with a tiny camera. He carried around the polaroid, looped on his neck with a strap, to every location we visited. As the tour guide brought us through hallways and along banisters my uncle would level his camera searching for the one shot, and he would only allow himself the one, that perfectly encapsulated each historical home.

“I could fix up that chair and sell it for three-fifty, maybe four-hundred dollars,” he’d tell me as we wandered behind the group, often trailing the slowest. Uncle Valentine was always admiring the fine details of our tours. He appreciated the value of every rug and sconce and chandelier. His one photograph, even though it was printed on a tiny photo sheet, would somehow be comprised of everything about the place that made it wonderful. 

In all honesty I don’t remember many of the hundreds of buildings we visited. His photos are sitting somewhere in a house in Phoenix, under stacks of legal documents and postcards. I could find them if I wanted, but I don’t really care for the warm dryness, sunny dispositions, and scorpions. 

But there was one castle I remembered. Castle might be too grand a word. “Manor” is in the title after all.

It was a large feat of architecture hosting countless rooms. We must have only visited a small fraction during our tiny tour. Each corner of the building was capped with a spire. It was built in the mid 1800’s in a gothic victorian style by a man who didn’t earn his money and who apparently wanted to live out his life in the dramatic flair of European architecture. It never would fit with the skyline of the small town it resides in. But not much would.

I’m sitting in that castle now. 

In fact, I own it.

I like writing that. I like saying it out loud. I own Whitlock Manor. It’s mine.

I didn’t set out in life to have the means to afford Whitlock Manor, but if I’m being completely honest with myself it’s always been a keystone in the framework. Uncle Valentine gave me a love for real estate that ended up staying with me way past our summer trips. Way past his death, even.

But there’s something else I haven’t told you. I am afraid you won’t believe it because I barely believe it myself. And when I look at it and hold it up to the light it exists in striking black and white. The evidence is there no matter how underdeveloped the negative.

My uncle was working on finding his one shot as we were led down the spiral staircase that connected the master bedroom to a tall dressing room, the walls filled with old books and artifacts instead of clothing. The light from the bedroom above cast tall shadows in gold across the staircase and against the wooden floor. I think that was going to be his photo. If I were him it would have been mine.

I was mentally creating the frame in my head, looking at all the different angles he had available. I brought my hands up to my eye and made a square as if I too were looking through the lens of a camera. I took a step backward and my heel caught something fateful, and I stumbled. Luckily there was a dusty green settee to catch my fall- although it wasn’t so lucky for the settee. The frame cracked loudly underneath me.

“Get up you useless girl, before it crumbles to pieces!” A man hovered a foot from where I’d fallen. He was cast in a blueish, smokey hue, and when he moved the edges of his frame blurred in green and red chromatic aberration as if my eyes weren’t used to looking at something like him. And they weren’t. 

He glared at me as I peered up at him, but his eyes softened into confusion as he read the fear in my face. 

“You can… how can you see me?” he asked, his voice muffled slightly as if he were speaking to me from behind a pane of glass. 

And then he disappeared. There was a burst of light, and I remember a puff of smoke. Even if there wasn’t one, that’s the form the memory took. I’ve mulled the moment over enough that little details might have dulled, but the important bits have at least stayed bright.

If you think about it, and I have, extensively, it was only a few seconds that shaped my entire life. I have also spent a lot of time wondering if that’s normal. Have other people warped their entire existence around something that only took a few seconds of time? Something that could easily have been a hallucination, or a corrupted memory?

I guess it’s useless to wonder if this was the right decision as it stands, because it’s a decision I’ve already made.

They weren’t happy about my purchase, the town, but they also couldn’t afford to turn down my eight million dollar offer. It’s not my fault that they’re in a financial tailspin still climbing out of a hole knocked into the fiscal landscape by the recession. I should be regarded as the Hilltown hero. I’m afraid I might be remembered as a villain- my evil deeds taught in their school classes like Columbus- who turns out wasn’t that great of a guy after all.

So, the thing that you may be wondering, and that I was wondering, and at large the entire world wonders at some point is this:

Are ghosts real?

It was important that I find out, that I change and uproot my entire life to understand because, well, I feel like there’s something more. I’m not sure what. Something beyond the theatre where the images are being projected for us to watch. And maybe in that answer is the answer to the problem of loneliness. 

Or maybe that’s a whole load of bullshit.

I’m not sure what to tell you. I’m a few glasses of wine in and I’ve started writing this to keep me sane. Also I’m pretty sure that they can’t read, or at the very least don’t care about reading. So keeping record of my sanity in these pages seems like the best way to keep it intact. 

They don’t seem to have much interest in me yet, although that makes me even more on edge than before. I’m waiting for my introduction and wondering what they’ll think of me. What if they want to drive me out as much as the town does? And perhaps even worse, what if they don’t want to let me leave?

Yes, ghosts are real. Very real indeed.