Southern Lady Code: Essays(13)

Mama says, “I was looking down on you while you were sleeping, and I saw the black shoes by the foot of your crib. I looked up and there was this woman. She was just standing there. Looking down at you, too. So I ran out and hollered, ‘There’s a woman in Helen Michelle’s room!’ Your father—never one to ask questions in a crisis—flew up the steps and found no one in the nursery. He checked the whole house and found no one.”

In all the times I’ve heard this story, not once has the experience been attributed to postpartum depression, one too many whiskey sours, or sleep deprivation. Mama was not hallucinating. There was a ghost in my room.

At first, Mama wished it was her mother, who’d died a few months earlier. Later, she admitted the ghost’s face was unrecognizable and that in all honesty she couldn’t imagine her mother wearing something so drab, so it could have been someone who died on the property. Then, for a while, she thought it was a nun. Mama’s side of the family is Catholic and has been in the South since 1738. Like some families have politicians, we’ve got nuns.

We also have ghosts. There’s the story about Great-aunt Belle, whose perfume drifted through the house at her funeral reception. Our great-great-grandmother’s dog dug a grave the night her husband died at sea. Mama’s parents loved ghosts so much, on Halloween they’d throw on bedsheets and sit in the shrubbery to horrify trick-or-treaters.

Mama laughs. “Oh, Helen Michelle, there was a lot of pee-pee on our porch!”

Papa’s side of the family does not have ghosts. Or, as he’s said, “They aren’t something we spoke about.”

Like other families don’t admit to Darwin’s theory of evolution or diabetes.

But Papa has never contradicted Mama. On any parenting choice. He supported her decision to raise my sister and me as tomboy artistic feminist hoots. And he let us be raised to believe in ghosts.

Elizabeth and I grew up in a haunted house. In an otherwise happy home—where Alabama football was on the TV in the den and Little Debbie snack cakes were overstocked in the kitchen cupboards—there were two rooms that frightened us.

Elizabeth says, “The living room was pure evil.”

I say, “I still get the creeps when I see eighties pastels.”

The living room was to the right of the front door. It had the good couch. It had my father’s four-piece stereo set. It’s where the Christmas tree went. It was the one room in the house that the neighbors could see free and clear from the street. And my parents were proud of it. So every morning, they opened the four sets of shutters. And every night, it was my sister’s or my job to shut them on the way up the stairs to our bedrooms.

But by then it was dark. And the living room was even darker. And on the other side of the windows were things waiting to get in. Some people have outside cats, we had outside ghosts.

Both my sister and I—for our entire adolescence and without discussing it with each other—shut the shutters with our eyes shut. Five steps in, knees on the couch, hands on the shutters. Shut, shut, shut, and shut. Get out. Once you see a face in a window, you don’t want to see it again.

Directly above the living room was my sister’s room. She had three closets, and inside one of them was a tiny door. The tiny door looked like it had been cut out of the sheetrock with a chainsaw. Instead of a knob, it had a turn latch hammered in with a nail. The tiny door led to an attic. And something existed inside of that attic. When we heard it go bump in broad daylight, not once did we ever think possum or squirrel.

On my sister’s twelfth birthday, it came out of the closet.

She was having a sleepover and telling ghost stories. Her friends were on her bed, and Elizabeth was across the room in a rocking chair next to the closet with the tiny door. I don’t remember the ghost story, but the refrain is: Oh Mama, oh Mama, don’t care for me. Chop my head off, chop my head off! And as soon as Elizabeth said those words, she was whacked in the neck.

No, nobody saw what hit her, but there are six living witnesses who saw my sister flinch, clutch her throat, and scream. And then everyone saw that the closet door and the tiny door were open. They had opened all by themselves.

The girls ran down the stairs to our parents, hollering, “There’s a ghost in Elizabeth’s room!” Papa—once again, never one to ask questions—flew up the steps and found no one in my sister’s room. He checked the attic and found no one. He let the slumber party sleep in the den.

My parents never followed up with a trip to a child psychologist or antianxiety medication. Elizabeth was not crying out for help or having some sort of episode. There was a ghost in her room.

And she, like me as a baby, had to live with it.

My family’s attitude toward ghosts is the same that we have toward hornets’ nests and noisy hotel neighbors: don’t bother them and they won’t bother you in a worse way than they are already bothering you. Ghosts are real. It’s the South. Our homes are built on battlegrounds and centuries-old horrors. Everybody’s house has some dead relative knocking around or rearranging the furniture. Got a ghost stomping across the hardwood floors and waking you up every night? Install wall-to-wall carpeting. You don’t move, you make do.



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Megan, Dani, and I were two hours into our spooky owl puzzle and working on forest leaves. Half the puzzle was forest leaves—all orange or burnt orange—so we were laying out pieces according to shape. One knob and three holes, two knobs and two holes, four holes—you get the idea: this was the hard part. But puzzling women are patient. We’ll take the time to make sense out of something that’s broken.