The psychoanalysist, Stephen Frosh, argues ghosts are real, ‘manifestations of actually existing present tense losses...They happen because there are people who are made ghostly by the silencing of their voices’ (2013: 4). I have been thinking about writing about the Westgate Bridge collapse for many years, and though I have resisted, it has been impossible to dismiss. It is a kind of haunting : To be haunted is more than to be affected by what others tell us directly or do to us openly; it is to be influenced by a kind of inner voice that will not stop speaking and cannot be excised, that keeps cropping up to trouble us and stop us going peaceably on our way. It is to harbour a presence that we are aware of sometimes overwhelmed by, that embodies elements of past experience and future anxiety and hope that that will not let us be. (Frosh 2013:2-3) For Frosh ‘psychoanalysis and haunting go together’ because ‘psychoanalysis intentionally stirs up demons’ (3). The same might be said of fiction writing, at least for this writer, haunted by those ‘things that are left over from past happenings or left out of conscious recognition’ (3). Among the many arguments I had with my mother over the years, there was the one about not stirring up the past. ‘Stop writing,’ she demanded after having a cousin read her a memoir piece I had published in The Age, ‘Why can’t you just remember the good things?’ My mother was a storyteller too, but in her stories she remade people to into
When we have strong love for others, we take risks, we go against our beliefs, we put ourselves in danger, and we let our loved ones go. Without love, there would be none of that. In this book, The Dead and the Gone, written by Susan Beth Pfeffer, a comet smashes the moon closer to earth and it creates all sorts of problems. Alex, a teenage boy with two sisters, starts a long journey of survival and risks. This story is so realistic, at times was hard to read. You start to ask yourself these tough questions, like what you would do in a specific situation. Through out the whole story, love is definitely a recurring theme. It shows you how well love can hold a family is distress together.
Many Elizabethan bedsides were haunted from “the terrors of the night”. Back then their ghosts were nothing like the pasty blobs we call ghosts now. Theirs were quite gruesome. Ghostly visitations were claimed to have been very unpleasant. Not only this, but they claimed it cast them into a state of spiritual confusion.
Randall Kenan born in Brooklyn, NY 1963 was raised by his grandparents in a rural community in North Carolina. In 1985, he graduated the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a degree in English and creative writing. One of his instructors recommended him for a job for and editor at Random House where he was an eventual assistant to senior editor’s prestigious subsidiary, Alfred A. Knopf. (Fountain) Kenan’s first novel, A Visitation of Spirits, was published in 1989, and a collection of stories, Let the Dead Bury the Dead, followed in 1992. He has written five other works and has received numerous awards. (RandallKenan.com) Randall Kenan is a talented African-American author of the present era who writes about the human condition. He not only writes about what it is like to be a black man in the south, but he throws in homosexuality into the bible belt. Kenan repeatedly pits homosexual characters against an oppressive, closed minded community that is against new views of acceptance and equality of the times. With these themes of racial and sexual identity, forgiveness and acceptance; “Kenan, perhaps one of the first Southern authors to openly analyze the struggles of homosexuals, he subtly intertwines common concerns and ideals from the Civil Rights Era and parallels the Gay Rights Movement of today.” (Turley)
Every year and estimated forty five percent of american citizens reported seeing an or interacting with a ghost of some sort. Such is the focus of “The Ghost Boy” by Kenneth Oppel. There is an estimated three million shipwrecks on the ocean floor as is the focus of “Lost and Found”. The Ghost boy is a text designed for Scope that was adapted from “The Klack Bros. Museum” by Kenneth Oppel, original published for GuysRead.com. Lost and found is a text that was published by Scope and was written by Rebecca Behrens. The texts “The Ghost Boy” and “Lost and Found” have a multitude of similarities and differences including what the plot is centered around and the mood and way that the mood is created.
Why acknowledge history? The solution is because we essentially must to achieve access to the laboratory of human involvement. In the essay “Haunted America”, Patricia Nelson takes a truly various and remarkably gallant stance on United States history. Through the recounting of the White/Modoc war in “Haunted America,” she brings to light the complexity and confusion of the White/Indian conflicts that is often missing in much of the history we read. Her account of the war, with the faults of both Whites and Indians revealed, is an unusual alternative to the stereotypical “Whites were good; Indians were bad” or the reverse stand point that “Indians were good; Whites were bad” conclusions that many historians reach. Limerick argues that a very brutal and bloody era has been simplified and romanticized, reducing the lives and deaths of hundreds to the telling of an uncomplicated story of “Good Guys” and “Bad Guys”.
The introduction starts with explaining that there are usually always the same telltale signs of a haunted house. Quite often when someone speaks of a hauntings they mention cold spots, doors unexplainably locking, mysterious footsteps, and strange yet recognizable noises and/or odors. The explanation for this is typically a ghost, which modern researchers define as an image of a person, animal, or thing that appears regularly but unexplainably in a particular place. Surprisingly, in public polls
Charlotte Gilman, through the first person narrator, speaks to the reader of the stages of psychic disintegration by sharing the narrator's heightened perceptions: "That spoils my ghostliness, I am afraid, but I don't care--there is something strange about the house--I can feel it" (304). The conflicting
Ghostly representations of “the other” imagine a social evil that has not been put to rest. These images reoccur in the Western canon, marking the persistence of slavery long after its abolition. Haunting, ghosts and skeletons in Benito Cereno act as a vehicle through which the suppressed return to the stage with a message. The ghosts carry with them all that the imperialists wanted to control, including emotions, and more precisely, the emotions of the oppressed. I argue that ghosts and skeletons comprise an area of tension in which the appearance of the “other” reveals that the dominant party’s control is incomplete. Yet, the presence is merely ghostly due to the constant policing and lack of respect for the Other. These ghosts also break through the boundaries of the dominant culture’s paradigms and identities (Harpham 17), signaling potential political crisis. This text signals the fear of the retaliation of the Other through ghostly representations by projecting on to the other, their own identities of brutality and irrationality. “Benito Cereno” by Herman Melville overturns the racist images of the colonized by relocating evil in the order of slavery. Hauntings carry the perspectives and powers of the slaves by preserving the dead amidst the living and the past amidst the present, they muddle up the concept of time and therefore defy the Western dream of complete control.
The third Elizabethan belief in ghosts was that people were believed to be hallucinating if they believe they had seen a ghost. “Persons affected by mania or melancholy are most commonly subject to receive false imaginations
Repression of memories is a psychological concept that has haunted modern psychology for years. Repression of memories also known as “rememory” defined by the mind pushing away traumatic or shocking experiences into a dark corner of a person’s unconscious. As this idea developed and began to be studied more thoroughly, slavery became an institution in which researchers saw promise in drawing conclusions about the dangers of repressing memories. In Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved, the character narratives of Paul D and Sethe exemplify the dangers of repressing memories. Both disconnect from and push away unwanted emotional traumas or experiences from their past. However, this effort doesn’t pay off and their repression of memories is not successful. Through the use of symbols such as Paul D’s tobacco tin and Sethe’s scars and lost child, Morrison demonstrates how repression of the past isn’t effective and how it always comes back to haunt a person who doesn’t correctly cope with their trauma. Paul D and Sethe live unfulfilled lives as a result of repressed memories.
Far Far Away, is a Ghost story written by Tom McNeal with 368 pages. The main character or, (protagonist) is Jeremy Johnson, a teenager who has the ability to interact with those on Zwischenraum, a spirit plane between the living and the afterlife. The narrator is one of these spirits, Jacob Grimm who has been dead since the Saturday afternoon of September 1863. He is sent to look over or protect Jeremy from the Finder of Occasions, a villain whose intentions aren’t clear.
On the 15th October, 1970, during its third year of construction, the Westgate Bridge collapsed killing 35 men. The section of the bridge that collapsed was a 128 meter span that was being worked on at
A ghost, according to the article “History of Ghosts” on History.com, is a person's spirit once it has separated itself from the body after death. Also known as specters, ghosts continue existing even after the heart stops and the corpse is cold, and they fall under the category of paranormal phenomena. When something is considered paranormal, it simply means that science has no explanation for it. So if science can't explain it, it can't be real, right? Not necessarily. It just means that it hasn't been proven a fact, it's all in theory. But Jack Porter makes a valid point in his article, “The Study of Paranormal Phenomenon is a Legitimate Science”, when he says, “It is important to remember the Big Bang is a theory, but that is still
Dunwich, Gerina. "Ghostly Superstitions." A Witch's Guide to Ghosts and the Supernatural. Franklin Lakes, NJ: New Page, 2002. 162. Print.
While the woods of “Ulalume” seem to be haunted, they are full of quotidian characteristics—leaves, lakes, stars, and the moon. What does make the woods “uncanny”, however, is the narrator’s lack of knowledge at the time that he was indeed in a place that he admits, “once we had journeyed down here” (Hollander 245). This adds unfamiliarity to a familiar place. The woods are unrecognizable to the speaker because he has repressed the memory of his Ulalume. Further, Freud states that the “Uncanny” is “in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression” (“The Uncanny 13). Thus, the narrator is not recognizing the woods because of the repression of his trauma.