The First Ghost Named George

Foreword: This story is part of a collection, tentatively called “Ghost Whisperer: Stories from a Nordic Witch Stranded in the South.” They were mainly written during my first year in the Appalachian Mountains, having moved from Sweden, living at the end of a road, with no green card to allow me to work and my husband, Michael, working at the Monroe Institute. Being a stranger in a strange land those days, ghosts started to talk to me. I hope you enjoy it. 

It was Michael who found George, but George then found Michael something Michael needed. It was a shell, a great shell: seven inches long, with a cosmic spiral and a generous, oval opening.

Michael had talked to me again over Skype, of the white beaches of Progreso  in Mexico, about our long walks and early swims in warm water: bodies tumbling around each other. And, of course, about shells: shells of all kinds, one more beautiful than the other. We mused over the shell altars we had built in the sand, as well as all over the small rental above the restaurant - sun-feathered, spiky, rosy, bluish, closed, open, round, shining, with stripes and sometimes leopard spots - as pleasurable to look at and touch as our love had been in Progreso.

Now, I was in the considerably colder Sweden, and Michael in the Blue Ridge mountains in the company of bugs and snakes.

           

So, he much needed a shell. But first he had to find George.

           

What he found first was George's cabin, though he didn't know anything about the previous owner of the place at the time. He had followed the creek right into the green forest for thirty minutes when he stumbled over the long-abandoned house. What he saw was a simple, wooden house with cracked windows, so small it made his two-room cabin look like a mansion, nestled in the middle of the greenery, and the remaining boards of a fallen down shed close by. Inside the cabin floor was rotting away, leaving dangerous holes, half covered by falling apart rugs. Michael was mostly curious, but he was also lacking most material things due to the last years of change and travels and thought he might find some treasures. Which he did: some unbroken plates and bowls, and a wooden bar stool with forest green, slender legs. He carried them home, cleaned them up and eventually went to bed.

           

It wasn't exactly a noise that woke him, more a memory of a noise, the fading sound of somebody mumbling in the background. Michael went into the kitchen and drank some milk. The sensation didn't go away though. It was as if something was pushing against his mind, just out of reach for conscious thought to pick up the signal.

           

"Maybe you brought something back with you," I suggested during our Skype session the next day, "or someone."

"Like a ghost?"

"Yes, like a ghost," I said, not totally comfortable with the concept.

"I think you might be right," said Michael, much to my dismay. And then he continued, in the sudden bursts of knowing unseen things that are so typical of him, "He lived there by himself at the end. But there was a woman once, and a child. He is trying to talk to me. I think his name is George."

           

To be separated from the one you love is hard, and the technology we have at hand is both a blessing and a curse. The flat, cold screen sending images of Michael’s face was so insufficient to my needs. The thought of him without me in the cabin, the place filled with bugs and snakes, and now perhaps also a ghost, was worse.

"Just make sure he means no harm," I said cautiously. "If he seems angry you took those things, do bring them back."

           

It took Michael days to hear George's voice, and it seemed muffled and far away.

"It takes great effort for me to keep the connection to you," said George.

"Do you want me to bring your things back?" Michael asked quickly.

"No!" said George with emphasis. "I want to wake up. Please go back to my cabin. I will show you something."

           

So, Michael went back the next day. At the fallen shed he felt George push his arm.

"Down there," said George, as if speaking through a tube. "There is something you will like there."

           

And it was. Under boards and rubble Michael found the perfect shell. A memory of another man's happy times, by another beach, with another love. Michael brought the shell back home, and put it on his cabin altar, and George's voice suddenly became clear. As if the years between the two men were gone. The shell a telephone through time, if not space.

           

First published in September edition of The Echo World.

Photograph: "George's shell," by Sofia Karin Axelsson.