If you want to escape the tricksters tonight take a trip to a local bookstore for a new collection of ghostly stories by Michigan authors. I know I believe in ghosts and just not Casper, but also malevolent ghosts of the kind found in “Ghostbusters.”
So who you gonna call when you want to read about ghosts?
Naturally, “Ghost Writers.” That´s the title of a collection of short stories, written by 12 Michigan authors and edited by Keith Taylor and Laura Kasischke, both University of Michigan writing professors.
Kasischke, who contributed the story “Ghost Anecdote,” says she personally doesn’t believe in ghosts, but emphasizes that “my family was big into ghosts.” She said her mother’s side of the family was Irish and English, so it came naturally. (Not to mention Catholic.)
“She put on a good show for a child.”
The author of several novels — including the recent “The Raising,” which has tinges of the paranormal said that once you talk to people about ghosts, you find “there’s a lot of it going on.”
Her belief is that “since the material world is all there is for us, we want to believe in the impossible.”
She candidly admits that several stories in “Ghost Writers” got her going, including Laura Hulthen Thomas’ “Bones on Bois Blanc,” the tale of a woman trying to find a final resting place for her mother’s remains. Hulthen Thomas is from Ann Arbor and teaches creative writing at U-M.
“It really did creep me up,” Kasischke said. “It evoked that place so beautifully.”
She said she was also impressed by the 27-year-old writer Elizabeth Schmuhl from St. Joseph, whose short story “Belief” is set on a farm on the Paw Paw River. It is the first major publication for Schmuhl, who teaches high school. Read a review in the Detroit News detailing more about “Belief”
Keith Taylor says his short ghost story, “The Man at the Edge,” is a metaphor for race and the homeless, and that the idea for the book grew from Kasischke’s story “The Gray Lady of Lake Huron,” which she wrote for a collection titled “Fresh Water.”
“We were sitting around talking about ghosts and wondering how many people have those experiences,” Taylor said.
He said it dawned on them to put a collection together with only two requirements: All the authors needed to be from Michigan and the stories all had to have a Michigan setting.
Taylor said he believes that ghost stories have been popular throughout the ages because “we are bound by our own mortality and we are desperate to crossover. We put ourselves against limits and ghosts secure that line. When we lose people we love we can’t believe they are dead.”
He said that he’s not sure there will be another anthology of ghost stories, but he added, “I want to write some more myself.”
As we talked, Taylor conjured up the idea of tracking the path of his Irish grandmother, who died by her own hand on the barren plains of Alberta Canada early in the last century. He said no one knew she had committed suicide until 90 years later when he accidentally discovered an obscure book of Canadian police reports while sorting books for a sidewalk sale in Ann Arbor. That alone would make a great start for a ghost story. Read the essay on the discovery of the truth about his grandmother’s death here.
Not all the ghost tales in “Ghost Writers” will make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. U-M Professor Eileen Pollack´s short story, “The Devil in Cross Village,” is more of an essay about Father Weikamp and the time he spent in Cross Village, establishing a mission there in the 1800s. Weikamp’s crypt is just a short walk from the tourist attraction Legs Inn, where locals still tell tales of Weikamp rising from the dead. Pollack’s atmospheric writing would be right at home in a segment of “Tales from the Crypt.”
Steve Amick
Another Ann Arbor writer Steve Amick delves into local legend Harry Bennett, who built a “castle” on the Huron River in Ypsilanti, complete with a moat and lions. He also built a lodge in Northern Michigan, outfitted with extraordinary precautionary devices to protect against attack.
Taylor said Bennett´s name has slipped back into obscurity and he now has to explain who the anti-union thug was.
Bennett was the muscle for Henry Ford, but he also was said to be haunted by voices. Amick writes about the depths of Bennett’s depravity and the elaborate schemes he would undertake to eliminate the “haints” or voices. As those familiar with Amick’s writing would expect, “The Lake, the River and the Other Lake” is worthy of its own “Weird Tales” comic.
Other writers contributing to the collection include Nicholas Delbanco, author of 25 books and U-M faculty member; Lolita Hernandez (“Autopsy of an Engine”); James Hynes, whose most recent novel, “Next,” was a little creepy itself; and Elizabeth Kostova, author of “The Historian,” the bestseller written in pure Draculean prose. Read review in the Ann Arbor Chronicle here.
Taylor said he knows the collection is not as spine-tingling as others might like, “but that was kind of the point.”
“Ghosts become ways we understand our fears,” he said. “Maybe even our hopes. Sometimes they are the way we test belief. And, yes, sometimes they define place
