Chapter Four
Four
The next day, Harper gazed out at a small sea—a pond, really—of young faces.
They looked bored. Soporific, even.
Small but prestigious, Monterey College emphasized the sciences, especially those related to marine science: chemistry, biology, oceanography, and ecology.
Most of the students were focused on these courses; the “softer” disciplines, such as history, were neither their interest nor their priority.
They were in her class only because they had to complete at least one history course, and though they were bright and polite, they mostly cared about the effect their class grade would have on their GPA.
Harper took this as a professional challenge: She would find a way to make them care about the past.
That was not going so well today. The students were not in the least bit engrossed in today’s topic, the history and significance of Gothic literature in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Harper set aside her lecture notes and shifted gears.
“So, Halloween is coming up. Who here likes ghost stories?” she asked. “Or horror stories?”
The students exchanged glances, apparently wondering if she was serious. A few gave halfhearted shrugs, and one young man tentatively raised his hand.
“What is it you like best about those kinds of stories, Kevin?” Harper asked brightly.
“I dunno. It’s, like, cool and stuff?” Kevin said, then looked away and sank into his seat, as if hoping she wouldn’t ask him anything further.
“Did you know that almost every culture in the world has some sort of ghost story tradition? Why do you suppose that is?”
No response.
“It’s okay to jump in and make a suggestion,” Harper said. “That’s what this seminar is all about: exploring and evaluating ideas.”
The students avoided her gaze.
“Let me ask you this: Would you agree that ghost stories are an attempt to keep the past alive? A way human beings express their desire to believe that we leave something of ourselves behind, even after death? A way to reassure ourselves that, though gone from this world, some portion of who we are still lingers…”
Even as she spoke, Harper couldn’t stop her mind from drifting back to the events of the previous night.
Had Delilah Mason survived her ordeal? For some reason Harper had assumed the police would let her know, but why would they?
She had no relationship to the victim other than being among the first to discover her during the ghost tour.
Maybe she should call the hospital when she got back to her office. Would they tell her anything?
A student yawned, a couple of others shifted in their seats, and several were surreptitiously checking their phones.
Harper’s eyes felt gritty from lack of sleep.
Tariq had offered to stay with her last night, but all she had wanted was to take a very long, very hot shower and to extricate the Perles garden mud from beneath her fingernails.
Then she had lain in bed, exhausted but wide awake, her mind returning again and again to the evening’s horrifying discovery, like a tongue worrying a sore tooth.
What could possibly have led to Delilah Mason being buried alive?
She had lost her train of thought. The students who weren’t sneaking looks at their phones were staring at her, waiting.
Ghost stories, Harper.
“Often supernatural tales turn out to have a scientific explanation,” she continued, determined to pique her students’ interest. “For example, a carbon monoxide gas leak can cause people to feel dizzy or even hallucinate to the point that they ‘see’ ghosts. There are also documented cases of supposed haunted houses where it turns out that, unknown to the home’s residents, someone was living in the attic or watching them from the outside. ”
“Phrogging,” volunteered a student named Jenny.
“Excuse me?” Harper asked.
“That’s called phrogging. When people live in your home without you knowing. Or whatever. Creepers. I did a podcast on it.”
Half a dozen students had perked up and were now paying attention.
“Interesting!” Encouraged, Harper continued: “Did you know you can actually feel someone’s gaze on you?
The biological phenomenon is known as ‘gaze perception.’ Neurological studies have found that the brain cells that initiate this response are very precise, so that if someone takes their gaze off you by turning just a few degrees to their left or right, the eerie sensation quickly fades.
Humans are animals with instinctual knowledge, though we too often discount what we feel when there’s no obvious explanation.
People used to ascribe magical or religious causes for these kinds of phenomena, but in today’s scientific and secular world—”
“I’m not secular,” insisted the student sitting next to Jenny, whom Harper recalled was named Blanca. The young woman touched the cross at her neck. “I walk with Jesus.”
“Is that right?” said Harper, hoping she had not stepped on any religious toes.
“I’m a lapsed Catholic, myself. What I’m saying, though, is that our world is no longer primarily interpreted through magic and religion, but through science and logic.
Here’s another example: Recently in Spain there were several cases of hypertrichosis in babies.
It’s a condition also known as ‘werewolf syndrome,’ because it causes hair to grow all over the body. ”
“Seriously?” asked one young woman.
“Seriously. In the past this sort of thing might well have led to panic and concerns about magic, possibly even leading to trials and executions of suspected witches.”
“So what could cause hairy babies?” a young man in a baseball cap asked.
“When health authorities investigated, they learned that many of the caregivers had been using minoxidil to address their own hair loss and failed to wash their hands before handling the babies, leading to…”
“Werewolf babies!” said Kevin.
The students laughed.
“Exactly. But despite decades—or even centuries—of such tall tales being debunked, a great many people still believe in ghosts, and many still harbor fears of werewolves, or vampires, or zombies. And just about every culture in the world has developed a folklore around similar creatures.”
“I’m dressing as a sexy zombie for Halloween,” said one young woman.
“Excellent example,” said Harper. “Why do you suppose zombies feature so prominently in popular television, movies, and games? What’s that about?”
The students were now sitting up in their chairs and focusing on what she was saying.
I’m on a roll, she thought, and continued. “If zombies don’t actually exist—and I think we can agree that, apart from certain drug-induced cases of catatonia, they do not exist—then what might their prevalence in popular culture symbolize?”
“Maybe, like, they symbolize the fear of losing our humanity?” one student suggested.
“Yeah. Of becoming something horrifying—human but not human,” another weighed in.
“And deadly. Zombies aren’t just scary, they try to kill the living,” said a third. “Make us one of them.”
“Vampires do that, too,” Harper pointed out. “And again, there was a logic to it: There were many incidents of ‘vampire crazes’ associated in time and place with diseases such as tuberculosis and porphyria. People came up with stories to try to explain what was happening.”
“Hey, Professor, I read something one time? About vampires in China? And how you can save yourself from them with rice?” asked a student who until today had not said a single word.
“Rice?” another student guffawed. “Weird.”
“No weirder than repelling them with garlic,” a young woman pointed out.
“Do you throw the rice at them, or what?”
Harper jumped in. “According to Chinese folklore, vampires are compelled to stop and count small items. So to repel a vampire, one would place a large bag of rice by the door. If a vampire comes calling, it must first stop and count the grains of rice, thereby allowing the humans to escape. Also, these particular vampires don’t run or fly—they hop. ”
The students broke up laughing.
“Sounds more like a mummy,” one student said.
“Or a zombie.”
“Zombies shamble, they don’t hop,” another student said.
“Oh, and vampires do?”
“But this is all just superstition, right?”
The students looked at Harper expectantly. If it takes zombies and vampires to get them interested in history, then by God, I’ll talk about zombies and vampires.
“Here’s the funny thing about superstitions: Once you label something as ‘just a superstition,’ you close off inquiry into what a reasonable response to dire circumstances might be.
This is what I’m saying: There are reasons this kind of folklore is common to cultures around the world.
Remember, people in the past were every bit as intelligent as we are today, they just lacked many of the scientific tools we have.
There’s a certain logic behind beliefs and stories that sound fantastical to us.
Folk systems offer people a way to explain, and even attempt to control or manipulate, the world around them. ”
“I heard that they buried vampires differently,” said Jenny. “Like, face down, or whatever?”
“True,” said Harper. “And although scholars don’t agree on the causes of the vampire panics, a key detail unites them: The public hysteria almost invariably occurred in the midst of terrible tuberculosis outbreaks.
For example, a rural family contracted the wasting illness, and the survivors accused the early victims of becoming vampires who in turn preyed upon family members, who subsequently fell sick.
Often an exhumation was called for, to stop the vampire’s predations.
In some communities they tried flipping the ‘vampire’ face down in their grave, while others beheaded corpses, or bound their feet with thorns.
Sometimes they burned the dead person’s heart, in the belief that inhaling the smoke might act as a cure. ”
“Ew!” Blanca said, her nose wrinkled. “Imagine inhaling burnt vampire smoke.”