The medium tells us that sometimes, when you die, you might get stuck. Well, stuck isn’t the right word — nobody gets stuck. Sometimes, though, you forget. Someone’s supposed to come and get you. Someone you knew in love, someone who loved you, someone who died first. They’re supposed to tell you that you’re dead, take your hand, and lead you on. Or so the medium tells us. 

 

Of course, sometimes it just isn’t enough. Sometimes you forget.

 

There is a ghost in the Pit. This is well-documented. While we talked with the crew from Paranormal Phenomena Research & Investigation, a paranormal society in Nova Scotia, members of the KTS linger at the periphery. They’re doing their own thing, but with one ear trained on us, half-listening. When I ask them, do you believe there’s a ghost in here? They are adamant. Yes, there is a ghost in the Pit. It’s not a matter of belief. 

It’s not an angry ghost, the crew tells us. It doesn’t mean any harm. It’s just that when someone’s in the Pit, they can be sure they are never quite alone. The medium tells us there’s no such thing as an evil ghost — at least not any more than there’s such a thing as an evil person. You are in death what you were in life — nothing more, nothing less. 

 

Jodi Russell is our medium. She’s slightly short, unassuming and wide-eyed, with a habit of steepling her hands together and closing her eyes while trying to sense the paranormal, as if in prayer. The other investigator, Pierre Filiatreault, tells us that all the fancy equipment in the world can’t replicate what she does. 

 

It’s only a few minutes into our foray into the Pit that she starts to feel something. Her chest feels tight, and there’s pain, tingling, running from her shoulder to the fingertips of her left arm. Marlo and I share a wide-eyed, startled look. 

 

Earlier, we made the decision not to mention much of anything to the investigators about the ghost of the long-dead janitor supposedly haunting the Pit. Not that there’s much that we do know, of course — but we at least have a purported cause of death: heart attack. 

Marlo’s the magazine’s publisher, and the person likely most qualified to be present for this investigation. Everything I know about hauntings at King’s comes from her; everything she knows is the product of hours rifling through the Library archives, scouring for records of ghost stories and paranormal encounters, the spooky tales of King’s past. She’s not sure she believes in ghosts, though. Not quite. It’s the same case for me — I’m generally afraid to say almost anything with any real certainty, but the thought that I might offend a passing ghost with a declaration of their nonexistence keeps me hesitant to do much of anything but waffle noncommittally on the subject.

 

Somebody told me once that I am about as spiritual as a particularly animated brick wall — this is mostly because I want it too much. I come on too strong; I scare them away. Even ghosts, apparently, are wary of desperation. 

 

But Jodi says anyone can be a medium. It’s not necessarily innate; it just takes study, and focus — and, above all, belief.

 

I’m curious, though, mostly about the logistics of it all. Where do ghosts come from? Why do they stick around? Why does it seem such an impossibility to prove their existence with any real substantiality? I ask Jodi about dimensional planes, if ghosts exist on some imperceptible, higher realm of existence than us three-dimensional living folk, (thinking mostly of Flatland, propelled by a deep and abiding love of science fiction and perplexing pseudoscience), but she says that’s not quite right. The ghosts are here — they’re just vibrating at a different frequency than the rest of us. 

 

The paranormal investigators show us their equipment — the stuff that’s not as good as Jodi — which they’ve rolled into the depths of the A&A by way of a nondescript black suitcase. An electromagnetic field (EMF) reader, something called a REM-Pod, a thermal camera and a Spirit Box, which is a sort of radio scanner that they’ve hooked up to headphones. To use the Box, you put on a blindfold and the headphones, then someone asks the spirit a question, and somewhere in the cresting waves of static now assaulting your eardrums, you are supposed to hear an answer. 

On a base level, the theory is sound. If ghosts do “occupy a different frequency,” existing just slightly outside our usual field of perception, then it stands to reason that rapidly scanning radio waves might at some point produce something —  a word, a voice, a ghastly, groaning howl. 

 

The reality is a little less exciting. At my delighted, imploring plea, Jodi hooks me up to the machine — they call it putting me under, which I find at first to be excitingly ominous but ends up ultimately anti-climactic, no drugging or hypnotism required — and for a few minutes I sit there, deaf and blind to the outside world, listening breathless for ghosts. It’s very loud, though not uncomfortably so, and at one point the roaring cacophony of white noise starts to sound a little like beat boxing and I more or less forget I’m supposed to be trying to make out any sort of coherent message in the static. Unbeknownst to me, the investigators turn to tell Marlo that, maybe I am a spiritual brick wall. But after we’ve all had a turn going under with nothing to show for it, it becomes safe to say that there’s probably just nothing to hear. 

So the ghost isn’t up to talking. That’s fine. Maybe he’s not the chatty type — I can respect that. He’s definitely there, though. Jodi says she can feel him. Him and one other, who turns out to be a manically depressed maid who killed herself sometime during World War II and is pretty peeved with us for attempting to push her to do anything but affably haunt Angel’s Roost uninterrupted. But mostly Jodi feels him. 

She says his name is Robert, or at least something that sounds like Robert. He’s a janitor. He has a little cleaning cart, and a cat, which is also a ghost. He likes horses, apparently, but not to ride — it’s possible he has a bit of a gambling problem. 

 

He also, notably, does not realize he’s dead. 

 

This happens, sometimes, with ghosts. Sometimes they forget; sometimes all they need to move on is one last push from the living, a reminder that they have options, that there is more they can do with their afterlife than simply keep on trucking along in the same manner they did while alive. At first I’m not sure what to think about this — the possibility of us disturbing this man’s blissful ignorance. If you had a chance to simply keep on keeping on, to never have to face the rattling truth of your finite mortality, wouldn’t you take it? And what will happen to his cat? 

 

But Jodi reminds me that all we’re really doing here is giving the ghost a choice. We’re not about to dig up his grave to salt and burn the remains or something. It’s nothing so dramatic. And right now the poor guy is working without pay. That’s just not right. 

He might know he’s dead now, though. We haven’t exactly been quiet about it. Maybe that’s why he won’t talk to us. 

 

There’s not much more we can do for him, anyway — the rest is up to Jodi, who will retain a connection with him for a while after she’s left, in an attempt to talk to him, to move things along. Pierre, personally, is of the mind that we should at least sleuth out the ghost’s identity. He says it might be nice, to erect some shoddy hint of a memorial in Maybe-Robert’s place of haunting, some secret commemoration. But all we really have is an occupation, and the possibility of a first name — and all this depends, of course, on whether we even believe. 

The investigators, whom Marlo and I have since taken to affectionately dubbing “The Ghost Hunters,” do not work for pay. On hunts, they carry a handheld gas monitor alongside the aforementioned EMF — which is used, Pierre says, with a note of contempt, not at all how you see it done on the TV. Nine out of ten purported hauntings end up not being ghost-related at all  — the EMF is supposed to check for faulty wiring and poorly installed outlets, health hazards, anything that could produce hallucinatory effects. The gas monitor is the same type employed by miners venturing deep underground, used mainly to detect carbon monoxide. They test for mold, toxins and run-of-the-mill creaky floorboards. 

 

Only then, after all other factors are ruled out, do they check for ghosts. 

 

Pierre says he doesn’t like to tell people what he does. He’s an older man, an engineer, retired from the Navy. He tells us, with cavalier flippancy, that most people just think he’s crazy. He doesn’t do what he does to convince anyone of anything. People will believe what they believe; all the ghost hunters are really here to do is help those who need it. To give people peace from what frightens them. To give others, after the bitter end, the possibility of a hand to hold. 

 

There’s no reason for them to deceive us. There’s nobody here to defraud. The matter-of-fact earnestness is at least somewhat contagious — I am not, by choice, a skeptic. I want to believe. So does Marlo. And sitting there, in the dusty, eerie blackness of the Pit, my hands on my knees, leaning forward and staring moon-eyed at Jodi in her unfocused, prayer-like contemplation of the dead, I can almost feel it. 

 

A tight, tingling shiver, from my shoulder to the fingertips of my left hand.