My childhood brushes with ghost lore

Despite writing about supernatural folklore, I rarely think about my childhood brushes with ghostly stories. I thought I might rectify that here—by reflecting on two examples of ghost lore I was exposed to in my youth.

Before I begin, I should point out that children’s folklore is just as vital and dynamic a phenomenon as its adult equivalent. Children’s Folklore: A Source Book (1999) is one example of a text that documents the folkloric creativity of children (as opposed to their passive receptivity). The book shows that wherever children come together, they form what folklorists call “folk groups.” The only criteria for the existence of such a group is that “two or more people. . . share something in common—language, occupation, religion, residence”; that they “share ‘traditions'”; and that they have the opportunity to meet face to face.

The Grey Lady

I’ll start with my childhood experience of belonging to a large “folk group” at my prep school, Tockington Manor, in South Gloucestershire. Every child in the school belonged to this folk group, because everyone, at some point, learned about the Grey Lady who haunted the manor’s halls. The boarders at the school were terrified of this lady: they said she wandered the manor at night—the spirit of a nurse who’d fallen from a skylight when the building served as a hospital during the First World War. I don’t remember much about this nighttime revenant, but she’s clearly a variant of a folkloric figure found at boarding schools everywhere: the Grey, White, Black, or Brown Lady.

In my school, older students, already initiated into the ghostly mystery, passed on stories about the drab-colored lady to the younger children, who did the same for the incoming class. I can only assume that telling stories about the Grey Lady allowed us to share anxieties in a fixed, personified form, which helped us adapt to unfamiliar surroundings. It also mythologized the building’s space, especially for boarders—those who couldn’t leave. Separated from their family homes, they created bonds and associations through the emotions that ghost stories evoke.

The story of the Grey Lady may have been one of the most memorable aspects of our folk group. But one story doesn’t create a culture. We also played games like marbles and conkers and had a shared language (words like cave—Latin for “beware”—were used to signal that a teacher was coming). Sometimes we sneaked out of school to gather in an old stone quarry, a place now dense with ivy-covered trees. The aura of this place—which we called simply “Quarry”—will forever remind me of the childhood capacity to create mythological worlds in spaces dominated by adults.

The Yellow Lady

Another example of supernatural storytelling from my childhood occurred during a trip to a Catholic boys’ camp in the summer of 1991. There too the sharing of ghostly legends created belonging among the boys. Despite sharing a tent with my brother, a cousin, and members of my cousin’s family, I felt unsettled in my new surroundings, and I remember how powerfully the nighttime telling of ghost stories allowed us to bond through fear. 

The only story I remember clearly (because it terrified me) was inspired by a local landmark. Visible from the camp was a house that glowed an eerie yellow at night. The sight of this building alone would be enough to inspire a haunted house tale. But in our case, the color became detached from the building, and we gave it to a supernatural figure who roamed the grounds at night. Apparently, a mysterious revenant called the Yellow Lady haunted that house, and she visited the meadow where we slept. Pricking up her disturbingly large ears to listen for wakeful boys, the Yellow Lady prowled the rows of tents, determined to steal a child. 

Although I remember thinking at the time that the Yellow Lady must have been a ghost, she differs in one important way from the Grey Lady mentioned earlier. While the latter was merely a scary presence that never interacted with students, the Yellow Lady was relational, embodying the discipline of the adult world (“no talking after lights out”). Her eerie color and super-sensory abilities—a result of her inhumanly large ears—suggest that she was a kind of supernatural bogeywoman, perhaps even close to a fairy.

The extreme effectiveness of this Yellow Lady legend meant that all of us had trouble sleeping that night. The next day we rushed to mass, hoping to find protection in proximity to a sacred ritual. The impulse was in keeping with much ghost lore, where holy symbols ward off supernatural threats.

Interestingly, while researching “Yellow Lady” stories (to see how commonplace they are), I came across a blog post in which the writer talks about a Yellow Lady story he learned at a camp run by monks. He then turns the tale into a literary short story—an embellishment, perhaps, of a fragmentary tale like mine. It seems to me that the writer’s camp may even have been the one I attended. Either that or the Yellow Lady haunts a number of such camps.

Haunted houses and witch houses

Besides my encounters with the Grey and Yellow Ladies, the only other ghost lore I can remember from my childhood are stories about haunted houses. These were always abandoned homes in the neighborhood, their shattered windows revealing darkness inside, the absence of family life. Repeating things we’d heard or inventing stories on the spot, we called these houses “haunted” or the former resort of “witches”—words that described the rupture in our sense of what a family home should look like. One of these houses sat at the corner of Charborough Road and Dunkeld Avenue in Filton, Bristol (I can still picture its dilapidated state). Another was on a road branching off from Charborough Road: they said that if you looked into its broken, upstairs window, you might see a witch looking back. (The latter is a vague memory that may even have been my own thought.)

Considering all this lore, it seems to me that ghosts fill the gaps where social meaning decays, whether through separation from home, abandonment of a home, or maladjustment in a place that’s not yet fully home. When I consider these crucial functions, I understand why empirical approaches to ghostly “phenomena” bore me: they arguably fail to understand ghosts at all.

Read about more ghost lore here.

Sugar Beets

They planted sugar beets over the dead.

This was the first thing the old woman told me, and she said it without looking at me, as if the sentence itself were a window she dared not face.

We were standing at the edge of the field beyond Demmin, where the earth sank and rose in shallow, uneven swells. It was late autumn. The beet leaves lay dark and rubbery against the soil, wide as tongues, veined like the hands of the very old. Beyond them the river moved with the dull patience of something that had learned not to answer questions.

“You are writing a history?” she asked.

“A story,” I said.

“That is worse.”

Her name was Frau Ilse Kröger, though she had been a child when the town burned and the people went down to the water. Her coat was buttoned to the throat. Her hair, white and thin, had been pinned so tightly that her face seemed pulled backward by memory.

“You must not make ghosts of them,” she said.

“I thought perhaps they already were.”

At that she turned to me. Her eyes were pale, not weak, but faded by long endurance.

“No,” she said. “Ghosts are the dead who cannot leave. These were the living who were not allowed to remain.”

The wind moved through the beet leaves. They rustled low to the ground, not like plants, but like a crowd whispering with its face in the dirt.

I had come to Demmin because of a sentence in an old magazine, a line in a later book, a footnote beneath a national silence. Some said seven hundred. Some said a thousand. Some said more. The numbers rose and fell like bodies seen through river water. There had been war, terror, propaganda, vengeance, collapse. There had been flames in the town and soldiers in the streets and stories told so often in fear that fear itself became a door. Mothers carried children to the river. Men tied themselves to stones. Families vanished into reeds. The Peene, the Tollense, the Trebel—all waters became witnesses.

And afterward, when the new order came, the dead were inconvenient.

So they let grass grow high.

Then they plowed.

Then they planted sugar beets.

There is a peculiar obscenity in sweetness drawn from such soil.

I asked Frau Kröger if she remembered the field.

“I remember my mother’s hand,” she said. “I remember the smoke. I remember how the sky looked too low, as though God had leaned down to see and then could not bear to look any longer.”

We walked along the furrows. The earth clung to our boots in black-red lumps. Here and there the beets pushed up from the ground, pale shoulders emerging from darkness. They resembled skulls that had changed their minds and decided to become vegetables.

“Did anyone speak of it later?” I asked.

“Not aloud.”

“But in homes?”

She stopped.

“In homes most of all we did not speak.”

The field seemed to hear this and approve.

That night I stayed in a small room above an inn where the wallpaper peeled in long strips like shed skin. The radiator hissed. The window looked toward the rivers, though I could not see them, only a blackness where the land dropped away.

Near midnight, I woke to the smell of wet soil.

At first I thought I had dreamed it. But the smell thickened—earth, roots, river mud, and beneath it a faint sweetness, cloying and raw, like sugar spilled in a cellar.

Then came the sound.

Scraping.

Not at the door. Not at the window.

Under the floor.

I sat up.

The boards beneath the bed gave a soft, deliberate creak, though I had not moved. Then another. Then many small sounds together: scratching, pressing, shifting. Like roots growing upward. Like fingernails beneath wood.

I lit the lamp.

Nothing.

The room was ordinary again, ordinary in the way a corpse can be ordinary once the scream has left it.

I did not sleep. Toward dawn I looked from the window and saw, in the paling gray, a line of figures walking beyond the last houses toward the fields. They were indistinct, blurred by mist, and moved slowly, not like soldiers, not like mourners, but like people following instructions they no longer understood.

At breakfast, I asked the innkeeper whether there was a memorial nearby.

He wiped the counter though it was already clean.

“There is a stone,” he said.

“A stone?”

“For those who need stones.”

“And for those who need truth?”

He looked at me then with a kind of pity.

“Truth?” he said. “Truth is heavy. People say they want it, but mostly they want a stone small enough to walk past.”

Later I returned to the field alone.

The beets had been harvested in part. Great heaps stood near the road, pale and earthen, piled like bones awaiting judgment. A truck had left deep tracks in the mud. Crows hopped among the clods.

Near the center of the field I found a place where nothing grew.

It was not large. A rough oval of bare ground. The soil there was darker than the rest and soft despite the cold. I knelt and pressed my fingers into it. Water welled up at once.

Not rainwater.

River water.

It rose around my hand, cold and brown, though the rivers lay some distance away. I pulled back, startled. The little hollow filled silently, reflecting the sky. In its surface I saw, not my own face, but the white blur of beet roots hanging downward, though there were no plants above it.

Then a voice behind me said, “Do not dig.”

Frau Kröger stood at the edge of the furrow.

“I wasn’t.”

“You were thinking of it.”

That was true.

She came closer, slowly, leaning on her cane. “There were men who dug after the war. Men who made lists. Men who counted what could be counted and buried what could not. But later the counting became dangerous.”

“Because it accused someone?”

“Because it accused everyone.”

The wind pressed her coat flat against her body.

“The dead asked too many questions,” she said. “Why did you believe the lies? Why did you fear more than you loved? Why did you stay silent? Why did you come too late? Why did you plant over us?”

A crow called from the beet heap.

“And now?” I asked.

“Now they ask nothing. That is worse.”

From the hollow in the ground came a faint sound like breathing.

Frau Kröger heard it too. Her face tightened.

“When I was a girl,” she said, “we stole beets from this field. Children are always hungry after wars. My brother carried one home under his coat. My mother slapped him when she saw where it came from. Not because he stole. Because he brought it into the house.”

“What happened?”

“She cooked it.”

I stared at her.

“What else could she do? We were hungry.”

Her mouth trembled. Not with tears, but with a terrible, bitter smile.

“It was sweet,” she said. “That was the worst of it.”

The hollow had widened.

Water slipped along the furrows now, thin shining lines threading through the field. The beet leaves stirred though the wind had fallen. From beneath the soil came a low murmur, not words, but the sound of many people speaking with mouths full of earth.

Frau Kröger gripped my arm.

“You wanted your story,” she whispered. “Here it is. This town did not bury the dead. It buried the question of why the living could be driven to the water. It buried fear. It buried shame. It buried the terror of armies and the poison of the Reich and the helplessness of mothers and the guilt of neighbors and the convenience of silence. Then it planted sugar over all of it and called the sweetness harvest.”

The ground shuddered.

One beet near my boot loosened itself. Its root twisted upward, slick with mud. For one instant it looked horribly like a hand.

Then another rose.

Then another.

All across the field the sugar beets began to lift from the earth, not quickly, not violently, but with the slow resolve of the dead being remembered. Soil broke. Leaves trembled. Pale roots emerged, round and blunt, each carrying clots of black mud. The heaps by the road shifted and rolled, collapsing outward.

The air filled with sweetness.

Too much sweetness.

The kind that coats the throat and makes breathing difficult.

From the direction of the river came bells. Not church bells. Smaller. Duller. As if stones were striking beneath water.

Frau Kröger began to pray, but not in words I knew. Perhaps no language survived intact in her after that year. Perhaps prayer, after such things, becomes only the soul refusing to be silent.

The water in the furrows deepened. It ran around our boots. The field had become a map of rivers, every row a tributary, every hollow a mouth.

Then I saw them.

Not ghosts exactly.

Figures in the mist, standing among the beets. Women in dark coats. Children with pale faces. Old men bent beneath invisible burdens. They did not accuse. They did not plead. They only stood where the earth had held them, gazing toward the town that had gone on living.

Their silence was unbearable.

I wanted them to speak. I wanted a curse, a revelation, a sentence to carve onto stone. But they gave none.

That was their judgment.

They had been made into numbers, then rumors, then taboo, then crops. They had been reduced to a place one passed without lowering one’s voice. Now they returned not to frighten the living, but to make evasion impossible.

Frau Kröger stepped forward into the water.

“I remember,” she said.

The figures did not move.

“I remember,” she said again, louder.

The mist thickened around her.

“I remember my mother’s hand. I remember smoke. I remember the river. I remember the field. I remember that we ate what grew here. I remember that we did not speak. I remember.”

At that, the sweetness in the air broke.

Not vanished. Broke.

Like a fever.

Like a spell.

The beet roots sank back into the soil. The water withdrew into the furrows. The figures faded, though their absence remained visible, like the shape left on a wall after a picture is removed.

Frau Kröger stood very still.

When I helped her back to the road, she was weeping soundlessly.

“Will you write it?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Then do not make it beautiful.”

I looked across the field. Dawn had begun to rise, gray and reluctant. The town lay beyond us, roofs dark, windows catching the first weak light. Somewhere a church bell rang the hour. Somewhere bread was being sliced. Somewhere children were waking without knowing what slept beneath the ground that fed them.

“I don’t know how to write such a thing without beauty,” I said.

She nodded, as if this were the oldest failure of language.

“Then make the beauty ashamed of itself.”

Years later, when I think of Demmin, I do not first think of death.

I think of sugar.

White crystals in a bowl. Sweetness stirred into coffee. Cakes dusted for weddings. Beet fields under a low northern sky. The ordinary miracle by which earth becomes food.

And I think of what the earth remembers when we do not.

For every country has its sugar beet field.

Every people has some place where the dead were covered, where the official mouth closed, where the plow passed over grief and called it necessity. Every age plants something over its horror and prays the harvest will be useful.

But beneath the sweetness, the roots know.

Beneath the furrows, the waters wait.

And sometimes, when the wind lies down and the mist comes low over Demmin, the field begins to whisper—not to the dead, who already know, but to the living, who still pretend they do not:

Remember us before we rise.

First ebook from my podcast, out this week!

Leave scrolling behind with a walk in the spooky/funny/slightly delirious storybook world of "30% Wild"

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Before proposing marriage to strange, pale women in abandoned castles, you should really do a proper background check.

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Meet tonight’s storyteller, David Hirt.

A seasoned voice with a lifelong passion for storytelling, he brings ghost tales to life in a way that lingers—somewhere between a smile and a chill.

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