Ghosts of Stockbridge

I was returning home very late, closer to dawn than dusk. In memory the streetlights have halos, a street lined with angels, lighting my walk home. The houses in Stockbridge are set far apart, wide and deep pockets that could contain anything in their darkness. If I were a believer in the supernatural, I could imagine monsters, ghosts, werewolves lurking, waiting to pounce, but I’m basically a practical woman. Young still, 22, and filled with possibilities, and alcohol, and a bit of cocaine, but practical nonetheless.

I was living in a converted barn set back behind the Main Street houses; the driveway to the barn ran between the Sedgwick's family home and my landlord’s. Approaching the driveway, through the late night summer mist, I saw a young woman standing there. Painfully thin, wearing a mini skirt, but with a plaid flannel shirt on top. Densely populated with both tourists and wildlife, summer nights in the Berkshires can be chilly, the dark hiding memories, illusions, deer, and bear. You never know what you might encounter when the cool mists rising from the swampy areas along the Housatonic meet the fading summer heat, and the barn owls begin calling in the trees.

As I got closer, the woman turned and looked at me, her face a pale oval with deep-set eyes. Then she was gone. Did I look away? I didn’t think so. She was there. She was gone. Like a flash of memory, like a face on a passing train. I wouldn’t have been surprised by wildlife. This, however, was startling. I reached the end of the driveway; she had been right here. I was so sure. But there was nowhere she could have gone in an instant, no bushes, no trees ...

I hurried down the increasing darkness of the drive my heart dancing in my chest; I hadn’t thought to leave a light on when I left hours earlier. I looked back several times: no woman there; still no woman there; still no woman. Still.

Was it the ghost of Edie Sedgwick haunting her unhappy ancestral home 10 years after her death? Was it a late night vision brought from bleary eyes, streetlight sparkles, and a mind slightly unsteady with beer and coke? Was Edie Sedgwick herself a metaphor for all that could go wrong with the 1960s? I locked all my doors that night, even while thinking that in stories ghosts don’t care about locked doors. If a ghost wants to come in, won’t they just slip through the walls, their ethereal molecules fitting between the more solid earthly molecules of the boards? Was I really locking out my own fears and insecurities? Was I locking out a possible future where I was heading Edie’s way? Bohemian overindulgence and unhappiness followed by untimely death? Only time would tell.

The night passed with no more ghostly encounters. The summer went on, no more ghosts appeared, neither night or day ghosts. No ghosts at all.

Every time I have told this story in the years between then and now, I feel faintly foolish. Because we all ‘now there is no such thing as ghosts. Don’t we? I would stake my life on it (only to become ghost myself) and yet. There was that night in the summer of 1983 when I saw what might have been a ghost or at least what my brain interpreted as a ghost. She wasn’t just a wisp or a reflection or something seen in the blink of an eye: she appeared as a fully formed human who simply vanished from one second to the next. I will swear there are no ghosts, but I will not walk the streets of Stockbridge late at night.