Well, you all know I live in a house with a seemingly friendly but unsettled ghost. But let’s say that it’s gotten more crowded lately. Wednesday night my son called his dad into his room during the night– he said that he was scared of mean faces he thought he’d seen in the room but that he had clearly seen our ghost (not the first time by a long shot, but the first time as part of some larger narrative) and felt protected by it— and the clincher? He had seen the ghost of the aged Walt Whitman in his room, standing by our ghost and also protecting him. Whitmaniacs, dream on.
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Is the question posed in the title rhetorical? If not, I’m there. I’ll bring the candles.
Hmmm . . . I poked around & found out Whitman himself had a way with macabre spooky stuff. Here’s from section 8 of “Song of the Broad-Axe”:
I see the European headsman,
He stands mask’d, clothed in red, with huge legs and strong naked
arms,
And leans on a ponderous axe.
(Whom have you slaughter’d lately European headsman?
Whose is that blood upon you so wet and sticky?)
I see the clear sunsets of the martyrs,
I see from the scaffolds the descending ghosts,
Ghosts of dead lords, uncrown’d ladies, impeach’d ministers,
rejected kings,
Rivals, traitors, poisoners, disgraced chieftains and the rest.
Or (a little less gruesome) from “The Sleepers”:
I am the ever-laughing—it is new moon and twilight,
I see the hiding of douceurs, I see nimble ghosts whichever way
I look,
Cache and cache again deep in the ground and sea, and where it
is neither ground nor sea.