We came up with the dozen stories here, some of them eerie, others funny or bittersweet, some even a bit troubling in their picture of things happening here now. We thought we might be able to find some new stories out there in our state, so we asked some of our best writers- some very well known and others just at the beginnings of their careers-if they knew or imagined something ghostly they might want to write about. Others appear for no reason, when they are not needed and when they are certainly not wanted. Others appear when the living are going through significant changes in their lives or are overcome with anxiet ies. Others might be tied to places that frighten the teller of the story, or the created characters who must confront those places.
While editor Keith Taylor was discussing this phenomenon with his eighteen-year-old daughter Faith, a young woman who has grown up through troubled economic times in her home state, she said, "Well, good for the ghosts! At least they still call it home.” Some of those homebound ghosts seem to be benign, even protective. The ghosts in Michigan, perhaps like ghosts everywhere, seem to stay close to home. We'd heard stories of apparitions on Belle Isle in Detroit, in the towns of Niles, Alpena, Cross Village, or Trout Lake. We shared a former student who, while professing not to believe in such things, is heir to a house above an orchard outside Benton Har bor where some of her relatives see things. We knew of a house on the west side of Ann Arbor that seemed to carry a horrible history and, possibly, the ghosts of dead children. And we lived in Michigan, so many of our ghostly references were entirely local. The ghosts either inhabited these places or were desperately trying to get back to them. Many of the ghost stories we knew-either the ones told around campfires or those col lected in volumes, whether intended for a popular audience or for an audience that considered itself literary-were cen tered on a particular place. We recognized a need to tell the story and our own desire to listen to it.
HANDLESS BAGPIPE PLAYER GHOST WINDOWS
We didn't try to ex plain those stories, although we admit that we saw them more as windows into the minds of the people who reported them than as descriptions of reality. Sure, we'd both heard pretty convincing stories about something strange that happened, once, to someone who seemed sane-someone not known to be a liar or prone to hal lucinations-under circumstances that lent some credibility to the strangeness, the possibility that what had happened was not easily dismissed as a prank, the shifting light, the physics of wind in the hallway of an old house. Even when we finally popped that question, we equiv ocated. Byron, Don Juan preface: grim reader When the editors first started talking about ghost stories sev eral years ago, we talked for a quite a while before we asked each other if we actually believed there were such things as ghosts. GRIM READER, DID YOU EVER SEE A GHOST? no blit you've HEARD-I UNDERSTAND-BE dumb! AND DON'T REGRET THE TIME YOU MAY HAVE LOST, FOR YOU HAVE GOT THAT PLEASURE STILL TO COME.
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