You must not think that what I have accomplished through you could have been accomplished by any other means. Each of us is to himself indelible. I had to become that which could not be, by time, from human memory, erased. I had to burn my hungry, unappeasable furious spirit so inconsolably into you you would without cease write to bring me rest. Bring us rest. Guilt is fecund. I knew nothing I made myself had enough steel in it to survive. I tried: I made beautiful paintings, beautiful poems. Fluff. Garbage. The inextricability of love and hate? If I had merely made you love me you could not have saved me. — Frank Bidart, “The Ghost” By Robert Lowell: Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Ghosts
I’d Like to Believe in the Existence of a Loving God . . .
. . . but I can’t. The quality of evidence is very poor. Do you believe in ghosts, fortune tellers, psychics, werewolves, vampires, astrology, alien visitations . . .? I don’t believe in any of those things, but they’re all out there and a lot of people do believe in a lot of things for which the quality of evidence is very poor. Do you believe that a cow jumped over the moon? I remember reading about it but the quality of evidence is very poor. It seems to be just another made-up story . . . Read more →
Twitter: 2010-08-28
Amateur NC ghost hunter looking for ‘ghost train’ hit and killed by real train http://goo.gl/0TaL # “Bonus?! I thought we were all going to get *boners*.” — Disappointed office worker # RT @capricecrane: They say “don’t cut off your nose to spite your face” yet they don’t offer an alternative way to spite your face. # Read more →
The Winchester House Effect
Background The Winchester House in San Jose was built by Sarah Winchester, heiress to the Winchester (“The Gun That Won the West”) Repeating Arms Company fortune. After her daughter and husband died, she came to believe that the family was haunted by the ghosts of people killed by Winchester rifles. She consulted a medium in Boston, who told her to move west and build a mansion that would never be finished. As long as she kept building, she would never die. (Whether or not you believe in spiritualists, you’ve got to give high marks here for originality.) In 1884, Mrs. Winchester moved to San Jose, which was then a rural community, and bought an eight-room farmhouse. She kept builders employed at the house 24 hours a day for the next 38 years, until her death in 1922. By that time, the house was four stories high (it had been seven… Read more →