The Book of Kansas Ghosts
The boxes full of books creaked on the back seat of the Camry every time I took a turn. They were stacked high enough that I couldn’t entirely see out the back window, and there were more in the trunk.
I mentally checked off the inventory I was carrying, giving an assessment to the success of each.
“Quilts of Kansas” had been a bust; we had figured there was a surefire market for the glossy coffee table book, but a little market research would have shown that we were two generations late. Not only were the original quilters gone but even their immediate offspring were no longer with us for the most part, and the grandchildren’s generation hadn’t an interest in the world. “Quilts of Kansas” had come unravelled.
“Famous Historical Sites of Kansas” was not a bad book — hey, I was the editor, and we had good photos, good interviews, and good historical background — but what we didn’t have was good timing.
A professor at KU had published more or less the same book — “The History of Kansas Through Its Monuments” — a week earlier, it just so happened though that his had been published by the press up there at the University. They had a world of academic contacts throughout the state and a mailing list that put ours to absolute shame. Ours sunk like a stone.
“Scenic Highways of Kansas,” oh, now there was a lovely book. You want expensive four color print images of lone stretches of roadway highlighting the flora and fauna of the state? We had it!
Unfortunately, so did the Kansas Bureau of Tourism, who had a book twice the length of ours, four times the number of photos, and half the price. “Scenic Highways of Kansas” turned out to be the road to nowhere.
“Native Dishes of the Plains” left a bad taste in my mouth, “The Nesting Patterns of Native Kansas Birds” flew into the wild blue yonder, and “River Beauty of the Flint Hills” dried up into a parched, cracked creek bed.
But “Ghosts of Kansas,” ahhh, “Ghosts of Kansas,” I could kiss it, and did every time I had one in my hands.
That was the one that had made the entire publishing venture worthwhile, in fact, it was the one that had put us on the map, and it was the one that had made us profitable after a long dry stretch in the start-up phase.
We couldn’t keep enough in stock; people absolutely had to have one. And do you know why? I’ll tell you.
But first let me humble brag that it was all my idea.
We were in the conference room at the Press, each of us – Cecilia, Claire, Georgie, Louis, Ben – pitching ideas to each other. The ideas were flying – Kansas desserts, Kansas crops, Kansas stone fences, Kansas wells – when I said, “Wait.”I had just had an idea. “Finish this title for me: The Book of Kansas….”
“Stones?” said Celia. “Tourist sites? Rest stops?”
“Barbecue, bed and breakfasts, bookstores?” said Ben.
“The Book of Kansas….. Ghosts,” I said. “The Book of Kansas Ghosts.”
They all took that in.
Claire looked up quizzically. “Well do we know anything about Kansas ghosts?”
“No, and that’s the beauty of it.” I asked them to let me explain.
“You all have been with the Press from the beginning. What has always been our major expense?” There was only one answer to that and they all gave it at once. “Research.”
“Yes, that’s right. Research.”
You simply have no idea how much time, and money, and gasoline, and lodging expenses go into to tracking down of every blasted quilt in the state of Kansas, all the while keeping the quilting societies happy, ensuring you had a good coverage across the entire state, and, let’s admit it, learning some damned thing or other about quilts themselves, which are more complicated and expressive than you would think.
If you were setting yourself up as experts on quilts – our first mistake – then you had to know the subject inside and out. Plenty of people, plenty, delight in rooting out and publicizing any mistake you might make along the way.
Research. It ate into our budget and time, leaving little of either to spend on marketing, which was my bailiwick.
“Now, what kind of research do you have to do for ghosts?”
“Well,” said Louis seriously, “you’d want to explore each locale in the state, work your way through the history books, and do a slew of interviews tracking down every last detail.”
“Yes,” I said patiently, “that is what you would do if you were going to do it right. But what if we weren’t going to do it right?”
They all looked at me blankly. I was going to have to spell it out for them.
“What if we just…wrote them?”
A light started to dawn. “You mean make them up?” asked Georgie.
“I mean make them up,” I said with complete satisfaction. “Because, because…”
“…because they’re made up anyway!” Celia nearly shouted. “No one can prove us wrong!”
“Not only can they not prove us wrong….they’ll be thrilled to have their very own ghost.”
I sat down to a bit of ironic applause.
The more we talked about it, the clearer the plan became. We would write as many stories as we could, assigning each ghost or goblin to a different city or town, figuring everyone in that town would want to have the book once they saw their town was mentioned.
We would Google each town to get enough details on the surroundings, keeps certain things vague – like addresses and street names and years – and stick to certain common settings, like rotting barns and shadowy creeks and dilapidated bridges. Every town in the world had their fair share of those, certainly every Kansas town did.
Bring on Abbyville, Ashland, and Allen, we would say, Blue Mound and Bluff City, Cambridge and Caldwell, through the entire alphabet through Zenda and Zurich, we welcome you all. Congratulations, you fine citizens of these fine towns, on your excellent ghost.
Oh, you didn’t know you had one? Well, allow us to introduce you.
Thus was born The Book of Kansas Ghosts.
My God, the writing of it was a drag and then a chore, and then something different, almost an obsession.
So many towns and so many stories, the only way it was going to happen was for me to immerse myself in the topic for months on end – the others for all their good will knew that I was the best writer among them – and dwell among demons and ghouls and witches and werewolves and zombies and haunted bridges and haunted churches and haunted theaters and haunted farmhouses.
I shared lodgings nonstop with footprints that left no tracks and scarecrows that climbed each night from their perch, and The Furnace Witch and The Field Witch and The Roadside Witch and The Phantom of the Furrows.
Brides trapped in trunks, actors hanged from the ropes of the opening curtain on opening night, stone houses that whispered and spoke at night.
From the local library I ordered and checked out Haunted Missouri, Haunted Iowa, and Haunted Nebraska, and Weird North Dakota, and Weird Oklahoma, and Weird Colorado, anywhere on the Great Plains that spoke of vast empty spaces, isolated towns, declining populations, and the kind of submerged violence you get in the real histories of these places, like an aquifer spreading below you.
Where I could I lifted the stories, lock stock and barrel, turned them to my own purposes, swapped out local details and stocked them with windmills and grain bins and wagon ruts and Bloody Kansas massacres and feedlots and lowland creeks cleft into the hard earth, the usual scenery set pieces of these kinds of stories that tells the reader where they are and gives them something to hand their hats on imaginatively, and churned out the pages.
But many times I couldn’t, most times in fact, the fit just wasn’t there.
And so I sat there in front of that damned computer and just let my imagination run wild.
It was, I see now, a kind of delirium, never knowing where the next idea would come from. Yes, I was in a kind of delirium.
And you know what? It worked.
People ate this stuff up! The book flew off the shelves and orders came into the website nearly every day. Libraries wanted us to read, book clubs wanted us to discuss, the Elks and the Moose and the Legions couldn’t wait for us to sign copies.
It was a success beyond our imagining, and whenever anyone in Clifton or Corning or Culver, say, thought they had us stumped and asked us exactly where we got the information, all we had to do was say, “that’s proprietary, ma’am,” and look quickly away, as if the story of the Clifton Ghoul or the Corning Beast or the Culver Ghost of the Scythe had come to us in mysterious and even unseemly ways, perhaps even in ways that were unsettling.
We just wouldn’t talk about our sources. That was confidential.
Then came the biggest order of all, we had a client that wanted to buy out the entire edition!
A note had come into the web site from Granary City, unsigned, but promising to buy out the entire remains of the print run and asking that the ‘main author’ come down to do a reading.
That’s what I had in the back seat, along with the Quilts, Recipes and Historical Sites of Kansas, all of which I hoped to unload at the reading… for the right price of course.
It was getting dark, and Granary City was out there, I mean out there. It hardly made the map at all.
I lost track of the twists and turns along the deserted highways, only followed the directions I had received. At each stretch I felt certain that I had lost my way, until at the last minute – each time –I found the next turn.
I seemed to be driving not across the land, but into it, as though furrowing deeper and deeper into the dark earth.
While I drove – I rally should have done this back in Topeka – I tried to remember, well, I’m embarrassed to say…what was their ghost all about there in Granary City?
Let me tell you, at about story #44, you start to lose track of the entrances and exits of the spirits, their nature, the things that made them…well, that made them eerie.
Eeriness. You get that with a good story, spooky or not, that tingle at the top of your spine. People talk about the hairs on your neck rising, but for me it’s always a cold tingle at the base of my neck where it meets the top of my spine. Even writing as fast as I was when I was producing the book, now and again I knew I hit on something that touched a primal fear.
Who knows where these ideas come from?
But what was it? What was the idea, the story? I remember there was a technical problem of some sort. Was it getting the ghost on and off the stage so to speak? Maybe managing the passage of time? Some contravening of logic that revealed itself only at the last minute?
I was glad for the riddle to wrap my mind around, for now and again as I drove I nearly started to drift off entirely. It is no fun to jerk your head awake and find that you are halfway off the road and have absolutely no idea where you are. I must have been more tired than I thought. I recalled one of the ‘authentic’ horror stories of the plains O had come across where the indigenous well, demons, lured single wagons off one of the big trails, the Santa Fe or the Oregon, separating them from the wagon train in the dark and drew them further and further into the night, until they were eventually set up and….what? Killed surely, but then what?
Something horrible no doubt.
I know what it was! It started as a single ghost, well, not really a ghost, ghosts is too friendly a word. There was nothing friendly about this. It was wolfish, devouring, soulless.
It ‘blew in off the dark fields like an evil seed,’ yes, that is how I put it, ‘like an evil seed,’ nice phrasing there, and it planted itself first in one man, who passed it to another, who together passed it to two others, who together passed it to four others, until first families, then neighbors, then blocks, then stretches of blocks…well, you get the picture.
The whole town was taken over past a point. The technical issue, you see, well, there were three of them, three problems.
The first was more of a decision, whether the haunting was of the quiet, uneasy-making type…or whether it was of the type that was ‘red in tooth and claw.’ The answer to that one came as though I had looked it up in the encyclopedia, no, this wasn’t unease, this was terror. This was death.
Second, once the whole town was taken over, they must have had victims, I mean they couldn’t very well eat each other now, could they? That would defeat the whole purpose! It was to eat humans. That was their whole purpose. So….how to draw victims? Well, not so fast.
Give them the ability to pass for….human….during the day, and to ‘cloud men’s minds,’ as the old radio serial had it, to confuse them, to make them lost, to make them weary beyond endurance….then they could herd victims right into the center of town.
Hide the car after, yes, that’s good, hide the car I(just like the local devils hid the wagons they lured from The Trail, the thought came to me, man, that would have been good to thread into the story, bring a little history into it), people disappear all the time. And plus, they were all in it together, these pale things with the sharp teeth. they all turned at night into things that used to be people, it’s not as though – past a point – they had to fool each other.
They just had to fool the victim.
Now what was the third problem? I needed to get it straight in my head, for I had turned off the final highway — man, I could hardly see, I was so beat right now, I don’t know how to explain it, just so absolutely beat — and I needed to wrap my mind around something to keep in focus.
What was the third problem? I was driving into the square now, I’ll tell you one thing, these small isolated towns surely aren’t well-lit, they surely aren’t that.
Yes, the third problem: how did they keep from being known? Wouldn’t rumors arise? Fears? Wouldn’t people simply stay away? Then how could they…eat?
They would have to be so careful, so very careful about what was known about them, and forever keep themselves alert to danger and forever be ready to do anything, anything at all, to make that danger go away.
I parked the car by the courthouse, and nearly tumbled out of the car I was so weary. But I was starting to get myself together, to get my speech clear in my mind, to get clear in my mind what it was about Granary City that made it so terrifying. This was something I needed to know, something I badly needed to know.
Because here they all come for me now.
