Tales of the Peculiar (illustrated)

The Woman Who Befriended Ghosts

here was once a peculiar woman named Hildy. She had a high laughing voice and dark brown skin, and she could see ghosts. She wasn’t frightened by them at all. Her twin sister drowned when they were children, and when Hildy was growing up, her sister’s ghost was her closest friend. They did everything together: ran through the poppy fields that surrounded their house, played stick-a-whack on the village green, and stayed up late telling each other scary stories about living people. The ghost of Hildy’s sister even came to school with her. She would entertain Hildy by making rude faces at the teacher that no one else could see, and help her on examinations by looking at other students’ answers and whispering them into Hildy’s ear. (She could have shouted them and no one but Hildy would have heard, but it seemed prudent to whisper, just in case.)

On Hildy’s eighteenth birthday, her sister got called away on ghost business.

“When will you be back?” Hildy asked, distraught. They hadn’t been apart a single day since her sister died.

“Not for years,” replied her sister. “I’ll miss you terribly.”

“Not more than I’ll miss you,” Hildy said miserably.

Hildy’s sister hugged her, ghostly tears standing in her eyes. “Try to make some friends,” she said, then vanished.

Hildy tried to take her sister’s advice, but she had never had a living friend. She accepted an invitation to a party but couldn’t bring herself to speak to anyone. Her father arranged a tea for Hildy with the daughter of a coworker, but Hildy was stiff and awkward, and the only thing she could think of to say was, “Have you ever played stick-a-whack?”

“That’s a game for children,” the woman replied, then made an excuse to leave early.

Hildy found she preferred the company of ghosts to living people, and so she decided to make some ghost friends. The trouble was how to do it. Even though Hildy could see ghosts, they were not easy to talk to. Ghosts, you see, are a bit like cats—they’re never around when you want them, and rarely come when called.^{10}

Hildy went to a cemetery. She stood around waiting for hours, but no ghosts came to talk to her. They watched Hildy from across the grass, standoffish and suspicious. She thought perhaps they’d been dead too long and had learned not to trust living people. Hoping the recently deceased would be easier to befriend, she started going to funerals. Because people she knew didn’t die very often, she had to go to strangers’ funerals. When the mourners would ask why she was there, Hildy would lie and say she was a distant relative, then ask whether the deceased had been a nice person, and had they enjoyed running in fields or playing stick-a-whack? The mourners thought she was strange (which, to be fair, she was), and the ghosts, sensing their relatives’ disapproval, gave Hildy the cold shoulder.

It was around this time that Hildy’s parents died. Perhaps they will be my ghost friends, she thought, but no—they went off to find her dead sister and left Hildy all alone.

She hatched a new idea: she would sell her parents’ house and buy a haunted one instead, which would have its own ghosts built in! So she went shopping for a new house. The real estate agent thought she was frustrating and strange (which, to be fair, she was) because every time she showed Hildy a perfectly nice house, Hildy’s only question was whether anything terrible had ever happened there, like a murder or a suicide, or better yet a murder and a suicide, and she’d ignore the generous kitchen and light-filled drawing room to go look at the attic and basement.

Finally, she found a properly haunted house and bought it. It was only after she moved in, though, that she realized the ghost that came with it was only there part-time, stopping by every few nights to rattle chains and slam doors.

“Don’t go,” Hildy said, catching up to the ghost as he was leaving.

“Sorry, I have other houses to haunt,” he replied, and hurried away.

Hildy felt cheated. She needed more than a part-time ghost. She’d gone to so much trouble to find a haunted house, but it seemed the one she bought wasn’t haunted enough. She decided she needed the most haunted house in the world. She bought books about haunted houses and did research. She asked her part-time ghost what he knew, shouting questions after him as he raced from room to room, clanking here and slamming there. (He always seemed to be late for some more-important haunting, which Hildy tried not to take personally.) He said something about “Kwimbra,” then left in a hurry. Hildy discovered that this was actually a town in Portugal—spelled Coimbra—and once she knew that, it was simple enough to track down which house in the town was most haunted. She exchanged letters with the man who lived there, in which he described being bothered day and night by disembodied screams and bottles that flew off tables, and she told him how pleasant that sounded. He thought this was strange, but also that she wrote very nicely, and when she offered to buy his house, his refusal was as gentle as could be. It had been in his family for generations, he explained, and so it had to remain. The house was his burden to bear.

Hildy was getting desperate. At a particularly low moment, she even entertained the thought of killing someone, because then their ghost would haunt her—but that didn’t seem like a very good way to start a friendship, and she quickly abandoned the idea.

Finally, she decided that if she couldn’t buy the most haunted house in the world, she would build it herself. First she chose the most haunted spot she could think of upon which to build it: the top of a hill that had been the site of a mass burial during the last outbreak of plague. Then she collected the most haunted building materials she could find: wood salvaged from a shipwreck with no survivors, bricks from a crematorium, stone columns from a poorhouse that had burned with hundreds of people inside, and windows from the palace of a mad prince who had poisoned his whole family. Hildy decorated the house with furniture, carpets, and objets d’art bought from other haunted houses, including that of the man in Portugal, who sent her a bureau from which emanated, at precisely three o’clock every morning, the sound of a crying baby. Just for good measure, she let bereaved families hold wakes in her parlor for an entire month, and then, just after the stroke of midnight in the middle of a howling rainstorm, she moved in.

Hildy was not disappointed—at least not right away. There were ghosts everywhere! In fact, there was hardly room in the house to hold them all. Ghosts crowded the basement and the attic, fought for space under the bed and in the closets, and there was always a line for the bathroom. (They didn’t use the toilet, of course, but liked to check their hair in the mirror, to make sure it was disheveled and frightening.) They danced on the lawn at all hours—not because ghosts especially liked to dance, but because the people buried under the house had died of Dancing Plague.^{11}

The ghosts clanked pipes and rattled windows and threw books down from shelves. Hildy walked from room to room introducing herself.

“You can see us?” asked the ghost of a young man. “And you aren’t frightened?”

“Not at all,” Hildy replied. “I like ghosts. Have you ever played stick-a-whack?”

“No, sorry,” the ghost muttered, and turned away.

He seemed disappointed, as if all he’d wanted was to scare someone and she’d robbed him of the chance. So she pretended to be frightened by the next ghost she met, an old woman in the kitchen who was making knives float.

“Ahhhh!” Hildy cried. “What’s happening to my knives! I must be losing my mind!”

The old woman ghost seemed pleased, so she stepped back and raised her arms to make the knives float even higher—and then tripped over another ghost who was crawling on the floor behind her. The old lady ghost went sprawling and the knives clattered onto the counter.

“What do you think you’re doing down there?” the old woman ghost shouted at the crawling ghost. “Can’t you see I’m trying to work?”

“You should watch where you’re going!” the crawling ghost shouted back.

“Watch where I’m going?”

Hildy started to laugh; she couldn’t help it. The two ghosts stopped bickering and stared at her.

“I think she can see us,” said the crawling ghost.

“Yes, obviously,” said the old woman ghost. “And she isn’t frightened in the least.”

“No—I was!” Hildy said, stifling her laughter. “Honestly!”

The old woman ghost stood up and dusted herself off. “You’re clearly humoring me,” she said. “I’ve never been so humiliated in all my death.”

Hildy didn’t know what to do. She had tried being herself and that hadn’t worked, and she’d tried acting like she thought the ghosts wanted her to, and that hadn’t worked, either. Discouraged, she went to the hallway where the ghosts were lined up to use the bathroom and said, “Does anyone want to be my friend? I’m very nice, and I know lots of scary stories about living people that you might enjoy hearing.” But the ghosts shuffled their feet and looked at the floor and said nothing. They could see her desperation, and it made them feel awkward.

After a long silence she slouched away, her face burning with embarrassment. She sat on the porch and watched the plague ghosts dance in the yard. It seemed she had failed. You can’t force people to be friends with you—not even dead people.

Feeling ignored was even worse than feeling alone, so Hildy made plans to sell the house. The first five people who came to look at it were scared away before they even got through the front door. Hildy attempted to make the house somewhat less ghost-infested by selling some of the haunted furnishings back to their original owners. She wrote a letter to the man in Portugal asking if he’d be interested in taking back his wailing bureau. He replied straightaway. He didn’t want the bureau, he said, but hoped she was doing well. And he signed the letter like this: “Your friend, João.”

Hildy stared at the words for several minutes. Could she really call this man her friend? Or was he just being . . . friendly?

She wrote him back. She kept the tone of her letter light and breezy. She lied and told him she was doing fine, and asked how he was doing. She signed the letter like this: “Your friend, Hildy.”

João and Hildy exchanged a few more letters. They were short and simple, just casual pleasantries and observations about the weather. Hildy still wasn’t sure whether João actually considered her a friend or if he was just being polite. But then he closed a letter with this: “If you should ever find yourself in Coimbra, I would be honored if you paid me a visit.”

She booked a rail ticket to Portugal that very day, packed a trunk full of clothes that night, and early the next morning a carriage arrived to whisk her off to the train station.

“Good-bye, ghosts!” she called out cheerfully from the front door. “I’ll be back in a few weeks!”

The ghosts made no reply. She heard something shatter in the kitchen. Hildy shrugged and started toward the carriage.

It took a hot, dusty week of travel to reach João’s house in Coimbra. During the long journey she tried to armor herself against inevitable disappointment. Hildy and João got along fine in letters, but she knew that in person he probably wouldn’t like her, because no one did. She had to expect it or the pain of yet another rejection would surely crush her.

She arrived at his house, a spectral-looking mansion on a hill that seemed to watch her from cracked-window eyes. As Hildy walked toward its porch, a wave of black crows took off screaming from a dead oak in the front yard. She noticed a ghost swinging by a noose from the railing of the third-floor balcony, and waved to it. The ghost waved back, confused.

João answered the door and showed her inside. He was kind and gracious, and took Hildy’s dusty traveling coat from her and laid out saucers of cinnamon-flavored milk tea and cakes. João made pleasant small talk, asking about her journey, about how the weather had been along the way, and about how they served tea where she came from. But Hildy kept tripping over her answers and felt absolutely sure she was making a fool of herself, and the more she thought about how foolish she sounded, the more difficult she found it to say anything at all. Finally, after an especially awkward silence, João asked, “Have I done something to offend you?” and Hildy knew she’d ruined the best chance she ever had to make a real friend. To hide the tears she felt coming, she got up from the table and ran into the next room.

João didn’t come after her right away, but let Hildy have her privacy. She stood in the corner of his study and cried silently into her hands, furious at herself and so, so embarrassed. Then, after a few minutes, she heard a thud behind her and turned around. The ghost of a young girl was standing at a desk, knocking pens and paperweights onto the floor.

“Stop that,” said Hildy, wiping away her tears. “You’re making a mess of João’s house.”

“You can see me,” the girl said.

“Yes, and I can see that you’re far too old to be playing childish tricks on people.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the girl said, and disappeared through the wall.

“You spoke to it,” said João, and Hildy was startled to see him watching from the doorway.

“Yes. I can see them, and talk to them. She won’t bother you again—at least not today.”

João was amazed. He sat and told Hildy about all the ways the ghosts had been making his life difficult—keeping him up at night, scaring away visitors, breaking his things. He’d tried to talk to them himself, but they never listened. Once he’d even called in a priest to get rid of them, but that had only made them angry, and they’d broken even more of his things the following night.

“You have to be firm with them, but understanding,” Hildy explained. “It’s not easy being a ghost, and like anyone, they want to feel respected.”

“Do you think you could talk to them for me?” João asked meekly.

“I can certainly try,” Hildy said. And then she realized that they’d been chatting for several minutes without a stumbled word or an awkward pause.

Hildy began that very day. The ghosts tried to hide from her, but she knew where they liked to go and coaxed each of them into the open to talk, one after another. Some of the talks went on for hours, with Hildy arguing and persisting while João looked on with quiet admiration. It took three days and nights, but in the end Hildy convinced most of the ghosts to leave the house, and asked the few who wouldn’t to at least keep it down while João was sleeping and, if they must knock things off tables, to spare the family heirlooms.

João’s house was transformed, and so was João. For three days and nights he had watched Hildy, and for three days and nights his feelings for her had deepened. Hildy had grown feelings for João, too. She found that she could talk to him easily about anything now, and was certain they were real friends. Even so, she was wary of seeming too eager and overstaying her welcome, and on the fourth day of her visit she packed her things and bid João good-bye. She had decided to go home, move to an unhaunted house, and try once more to make some living friends.

“I hope we’ll see each other again,” Hildy said. “I’ll miss you, João. Perhaps you can come and visit me sometime.”

“I’d like that,” João said.

A carriage and driver were waiting to take Hildy to the train station. She waved good-bye and started toward the carriage.

“Wait!” João cried. “Don’t go!”

Hildy stopped and turned to look at him. “Why?”

“Because I’ve fallen in love with you,” João said.

The instant he said it, Hildy realized she loved him, too. And she ran back up the steps, and they threw their arms around each other.

At that, even the ghost that hung from the third-floor railing smiled.

Hildy and João got married, and Hildy moved into João’s house. The few ghosts that remained were friendly to her, though she didn’t need ghost friends anymore because now she had João. Before long they had a daughter and a son, too, and Hildy’s life was fuller than she’d ever dreamed it could be. And as if that weren’t enough, one fine midnight there was a knock on the front door, and who should Hildy find floating there on the porch but the ghosts of her sister and her parents.

“You came back!” Hildy cried, overjoyed.

“We came back a long time ago,” her sister said, “but you’d moved away! It took forever to find you.”

“No matter,” Hildy’s mother said. “We’re together now!”

Then Hildy’s two children came out onto the porch with João, wiping sleep from their eyes.

“Pai,” said Hildy’s little daughter to João, “why is Mamãe talking to the air?”

“She isn’t,” João said, and smiled at his wife. “Honey, is this who I think it is?”

Hildy hugged her husband with one arm and her sister with the other, and then, her heart so full she thought it might burst, she introduced her dead family to her living family.

And they lived happily ever after.