Ghosts: “Frank”

Ah so, the ghosts I’ve met...

May 24, 2024

This is an excerpt from a storytelling show* I’m working on called Before I Leave for Lunastrasse, formerly called Shtetl Morning — or, okay, I still don’t know yet precisely what the show’s title will be, but here is a brief (edited for Substack) section from the larger script:

Ah so, the ghosts I’ve met. Frank.

It started with this little green light I had in my room in East Harlem. It was one of those lights you had to tap to turn on. There was no other way to turn it on. It was an old lamp and once upon a time you had to merely tap it, but as it got older, you had to smack it, hard, and remind it that it was even a lamp. It was green like the lamps you see in movies about accountants from the 1950s? (Or movies in which there are accountants. No one makes a movie about an accountant.)

One night at 1am the touch lamp went on in the darkness of my brick room. I woke up from a deep sleep to the green glow of a lamp that could only be turned on by a vigorous smack.

Well, it wasn’t my first time with ghosts, but it had been decades since my last. I was deeply unsettled and, also, a little bit annoyed. I had explicitly, as a child, and in no uncertain terms, asked that ghosts find a different little girl to bother. No one likes to set boundaries less than I do, especially once they’ve already been articulated.

I sat up in bed staring at the light. My room was the size of a prison cell and the rental price of a two story house in Detroit, as with all New York City apartments. From my bed I could easily see the base of the lamp. I looked for cockroaches. Could a heavy bug have jumped on the lamp? It was an absurd idea, but then, some people say ghosts aren’t real, but no one, no one says cockroaches aren’t big.

There was no bug. So I got up to turn out the light. With a good slap to its base, it was off. I got back into bed, wide awake. The room was still lit by the streetlights and bodegas and it wasn’t too dark, ever, with the curtains open.

I tried to fall asleep, deciding, against my instincts, that it was some sort of electrical fuse thing and not a ghost. As I fell into slumber, but just before, I felt a light brush to my hair, as if from a hand. Yearning and erotic in intention. I shot up in bed, turned around. Nothing but the brick wall behind my pillow. (This apartment had exposed brick and you better believe I’m still bragging about that to this day, even in a ghost story where it might not seem salient, to you.)

It was becoming difficult to ignore this ghost who was not only turning on a slap light, but now, also, moving his ghost hand through my hair.

It was a rough night and I folded myself deep under my covers, hiding from the ghost, whose name had come to me: Frank. A man who had lived in this very room in East Harlem in the 1920s. How I knew this is, well, you know things by intuition when you’re a grownup who formerly spoke to ghosts as a child, so that’s how it came to me.

I didn’t like Frank. I had never met a creepy predator ghost before, but I reasoned that, you know, he was dead and I was not, a power differential certainly in my favor.

So, getting into bed the next night, I thought, perhaps he’s passed on.

Again at 1am, the touch lamp slapped on, again with no bug to be seen. Another terrible night of harrowed sleep.

I arranged to stay at my boyfriend’s apartment for awhile and as days passed, I induced him to come sleep at my place, since the ghost was some lonely man who surely wouldn’t bother me with Luke sleeping by my side. The light never came on when Luke was there.

But the night did, inevitably, come when Luke couldn’t stay over and I couldn’t stay all the way with him in distant Sunset Park, and I was left to face the ghost alone. My friends and my boyfriend had, understandably, laughed good-naturedly about me and my ghost named Frank. It was a problem affecting my life and housing, so, naturally, I discussed it with those close to me, as one does with quirky neighbors or bad landlords. NYC-housing stress is more tolerable when shared and sympathetic listeners are easy to find.

Facing my first night alone in the apartment, since those two creepy nights a week-and-a-half ago, I called my mom, Rae, long esteemed an amateur shaman among, well, herself, but also me.

“I’m concerned,” she said over the phone upon learning of Frank’s presence and behavior, “because, this is not a spirit from the light.”

“No,” I agreed. “He touched my hair. Very out of line.”

“Here’s what you must do. Before bed tonight. Before you go to sleep, you are to speak aloud into the room ‘Only spirits from the light are welcome, Only spirits from the light are welcome, Only spirits from the light are welcome, all others are not permitted and must leave.’”

“But what if I don’t want any spirits present, from the light or otherwise?”

“That would be a mistake,” she said, immediately. “Spirits from the light are useful. Good to have around, actually.”

My queen-sized bed took up most of my bedroom and, from that vantage point, I began to picture my space as a kind of ecosystem, in which lived monarch butterflies, millipedes and friendly spiders, but also wretched mosquitoes and biting dust mites. And, as with pesticide, I saw that the goal was not to wipe out every living thing, but just the ones eating the crops. (In this case, the living things were dead things, ghosts, but the general metaphor stands.)

My mother, Rae, proposed sagely that this was a time of emotional flux, that my channel was open and I was in a period of transition, vulnerable and open to the shifting tides of energy and the attendant ghosts who pass through when you’re labile.

It was one thing to receive this advice and counsel, and another thing entirely to sit up in bed, legs bent up under my covers, as an adult woman of 29-years-old and to speak at a volume that the ghosts, namely Frank, could hear, but not my three roommates in their adjoining rooms. But I dutifully said aloud my incantation, ‘Only spirits from the light. Only spirits from the light. Only spirits from the light. All others are not permitted and must leave.’

And in doing this, I felt, initially, ridiculous, but milli-moments later,

very fucking creeped out.

Because my incantation did not fall on silence. By speaking it, a listener, or many listeners took shape to my consciousness. The air became thick and busy, populated by a prickling energy. I was acknowledging, aloud, by this action, that I was not alone, was never alone. Had never BEEN alone. AND, I was setting a boundary, which I hate to do with the living, as much as with the dead. Truly on all levels this night engaged my every pain point as a human sojourner through this life.

Frank now entered not only my awareness, but also my body, by which I mean that my legs lengthened and filled out with muscle, I saw myself in long, wide Oxford shoes, a blazer. My shoulders became thick and square and Frank, as he had been, arrived in me and visited the tangible world. I loved being a man, briefly, as I hadn’t been one since my previous life and I’d entirely forgotten how it feels to be tall and broad and to spread my legs on a subway bench or any scant space and to be full to the brim of unquestioned deserving. He passed through me like a roller coaster cresting and we dropped together and he was gone.

I had just met the boyfriend, Luke, who would later become my husband. It stands to reason, don’t you think, that ghosts would come for you as you fall in love? Eager to feel it themselves, especially if they’d been robbed of love in their own lives.

Frank put up no fight in his exit, but he seemed, as I was, stunned by my audacity to call upon him and my trust in the presence of the unseen.

Ghosts are mostly gaslit, told they aren’t real. So when they are entirely acknowledged, well, they’re understandably quite shaken by it.

As with my previous experiences banishing ghosts, namely when I was 8-years-old and Rae and I conducted a seance with sage, there was always, afterward, the conflicted victory. The sense of having prevailed, but over an enemy both ailing and wounded from the outset. Not an equal or fair fight.

I’m sorry, Frank, I thought, in the spacious new silence, that there was no place for you, in what must have been your old room. I felt certain that Frank had once lived there, in my brick room in East Harlem.

Frank never returned, via the slap light, the hair touch, nor any other means, and only, rarely, have I seen spirits from the light since (my grandma, more on her later).

What makes a person die and become like Frank? I do not want to turn out like him, haunting people, non-consensually. I want to rest. I hope he found rest.

Emma Tattenbaum-Fine's Substack

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