May 2025
On Ghosts and Ghosting
05/23/25 Filed in: Moments
What is a ghost? I am not asking a metaphysical question. I am asking about our common use of the term. Are ghosts beings who appear when you don’t expect them or ones that don’t appear when you do expect them to?
When someone uses “ghost” as a verb, it suggests the latter. “She ghosted me” means, “I expected her to call/show up/write but she didn’t, and I have no idea why.”
But if we are talking about ghosts, not ghosting, we mean the opposite. A ghost is not the person who does not show up when you expect him to and then fails to provide an explanation. A ghost is the person who appears even though the explanation of his absence is an accepted fact. Death makes one’s presence, no matter how much it is feared or desired, an impossibility in most common sense or scientific worldviews, and it serves as the one excuse for not keeping an engagement for which even the strictest system of etiquette does not require an apology. Logically, then, the language of relationships should use the verb “to ghost” to cover the actions we variously call “stalking,” or “not getting the message,” or “not being willing to make a clean break,” rather than for one of the many ways in which one is told that someone “is really just not that into you.” But who expects logic in matters of the heart?
While I have been ghosted, my experience of actual ghosts is quite limited. Although I have had something to with several old, scary houses and any number of badly maintained graveyards, neither strangers nor acquaintances have ever returned from the great beyond to so much as rattle a chain. That is not because I am not open to a visitation from the beyond. My literary interests dispose me to welcome a haunting. And my theological studies have not made me less welcoming, though they may have put off the ghosts. They may foresee my tactless questions. “Have you been through your particular judgement? If so, are you in heaven, hell, or purgatory? Are you here to help me, to get me damned, or as part of your own penance?” You can tell that Hamlet’s father would have preferred it if he hadn’t begun pestering the old man about whether he was a “spirit of health” or a “goblin damned.” Both the Hamlets probably talked more than is good for any relationship, whether with live people or dead ones. Or course, many ghosts don’t leave any opening for conversation. It wasn’t Banquo’s talking too much that broke up lady Macbeth’s party.
One ghost story from my own circle involved neither conversation nor even a visual appearance. After my mother died, both my brother and our housekeeper said that they thought she had been in the car with them while they were driving alone. What made them think that? They could suddenly spell her perfume. Even today, if I experienced an olfactory haunting, I would be able to greet the phantom is the passenger seat by her “signature scent.” If she was one of the aunts who became my guardians, I would know it was Allie from Toujours Moi or Katie from Bal de Versailles. If the scent were Chanel No. 5, it would be my mom. But I never smelled it. That is one of the reasons I believe this haunting was real. It would be just like mom to visit my brother and the housekeeper and not bother with me.
But back to ghosting.
A few years ago, my former fiancée ghosted me. We had stayed distant friends for decades, but she then just stopped sending me Christmas cards and didn’t respond to an e-mail I sent about a student. I didn’t see why she would ghost me as a friend so long after she had dumped me as a boyfriend or jilted me as a fiancé. (We hadn’t announced an engagement when someone taller, thinner, and more successful arrived to be, as she assured me, only the “catalyst” in our inevitable break-up, but somehow, I took her instructions on what ring to buy and the fight over what to name the children as tantamount to an engagement.) But after a few years, I stopped sending Christmas cards, too. (I didn’t want to seem to be a Yuletide postal stalker.) And now one of my occasional “Where are they now?” Google searches tells me she has died, and not even left me on a list of people to be informed. (She’s on mine. Time to revise that.) So, this ghosting is final. Not that I think it will be literal. I have no reason to think I am important enough to her, wherever she is, to merit a spectral visit. Besides, how could a disembodied spirit haunt me anymore than she has already? Some rattled chains would at least show that she still cared. They wouldn’t terrify me: it would be like finally getting a Christmas card.
When someone uses “ghost” as a verb, it suggests the latter. “She ghosted me” means, “I expected her to call/show up/write but she didn’t, and I have no idea why.”
But if we are talking about ghosts, not ghosting, we mean the opposite. A ghost is not the person who does not show up when you expect him to and then fails to provide an explanation. A ghost is the person who appears even though the explanation of his absence is an accepted fact. Death makes one’s presence, no matter how much it is feared or desired, an impossibility in most common sense or scientific worldviews, and it serves as the one excuse for not keeping an engagement for which even the strictest system of etiquette does not require an apology. Logically, then, the language of relationships should use the verb “to ghost” to cover the actions we variously call “stalking,” or “not getting the message,” or “not being willing to make a clean break,” rather than for one of the many ways in which one is told that someone “is really just not that into you.” But who expects logic in matters of the heart?
While I have been ghosted, my experience of actual ghosts is quite limited. Although I have had something to with several old, scary houses and any number of badly maintained graveyards, neither strangers nor acquaintances have ever returned from the great beyond to so much as rattle a chain. That is not because I am not open to a visitation from the beyond. My literary interests dispose me to welcome a haunting. And my theological studies have not made me less welcoming, though they may have put off the ghosts. They may foresee my tactless questions. “Have you been through your particular judgement? If so, are you in heaven, hell, or purgatory? Are you here to help me, to get me damned, or as part of your own penance?” You can tell that Hamlet’s father would have preferred it if he hadn’t begun pestering the old man about whether he was a “spirit of health” or a “goblin damned.” Both the Hamlets probably talked more than is good for any relationship, whether with live people or dead ones. Or course, many ghosts don’t leave any opening for conversation. It wasn’t Banquo’s talking too much that broke up lady Macbeth’s party.
One ghost story from my own circle involved neither conversation nor even a visual appearance. After my mother died, both my brother and our housekeeper said that they thought she had been in the car with them while they were driving alone. What made them think that? They could suddenly spell her perfume. Even today, if I experienced an olfactory haunting, I would be able to greet the phantom is the passenger seat by her “signature scent.” If she was one of the aunts who became my guardians, I would know it was Allie from Toujours Moi or Katie from Bal de Versailles. If the scent were Chanel No. 5, it would be my mom. But I never smelled it. That is one of the reasons I believe this haunting was real. It would be just like mom to visit my brother and the housekeeper and not bother with me.
But back to ghosting.
A few years ago, my former fiancée ghosted me. We had stayed distant friends for decades, but she then just stopped sending me Christmas cards and didn’t respond to an e-mail I sent about a student. I didn’t see why she would ghost me as a friend so long after she had dumped me as a boyfriend or jilted me as a fiancé. (We hadn’t announced an engagement when someone taller, thinner, and more successful arrived to be, as she assured me, only the “catalyst” in our inevitable break-up, but somehow, I took her instructions on what ring to buy and the fight over what to name the children as tantamount to an engagement.) But after a few years, I stopped sending Christmas cards, too. (I didn’t want to seem to be a Yuletide postal stalker.) And now one of my occasional “Where are they now?” Google searches tells me she has died, and not even left me on a list of people to be informed. (She’s on mine. Time to revise that.) So, this ghosting is final. Not that I think it will be literal. I have no reason to think I am important enough to her, wherever she is, to merit a spectral visit. Besides, how could a disembodied spirit haunt me anymore than she has already? Some rattled chains would at least show that she still cared. They wouldn’t terrify me: it would be like finally getting a Christmas card.