BOO!

By Ben Greenman

from forthcoming collection, as yet untitled

One of the many hurdles facing a new ghost is that of passing the only test that matters so far as specters are concerned—the test of haunting. That may seem to be an obvious statement, or worse, but it is not nearly as obvious as it appears. The difficult is not that of finding someone to frighten, but of being frightening. We cannot know whether The Whispering House is the first haunting conceived by the ghost of Thomas Brady, a hardware salesman killed when he slipped on black ice and cracked his skull on a concrete retaining wall, but it has all the markings of a debut production, and not for the better. Visited upon Ralph and Nola Walker, a youngish couple with two small daughters (Adrienne, nine, and Carrie, seven) who recently moved into the house, the haunting has sinister moments, certainly, as the whispering seems to emanate from the walls themselves in a kind of vibratory effect, and Brady’s preferred method of appearing in a room (glowing brightly for one moment, fading, and then coming up again in a slow glow) can be genuinely eerie. But the sense of foreboding is often stronger than the actual sense. Near the bottom of the staircase, for example, Brady’s ghost hisses “Beware your first step, mortal.” Would this admonishment not have been better delivered at the base of the stairs? Addressing an inhabitant of the house as “mortal” introduces a staginess that undermines the rest of the warning. Brady’s ghost knows its mission, certainly, as shown in his adroit handling of the upstairs bedrooms, especially the children’s rooms, and his sense of humor surfaces at unexpected moments. “A world of pain,” whispered as either Ralph or Nola approaches the master bedroom’s large picture window, is an execrable pun, but it seasons the haunt with wit. There is a conspicuous shortage of situational frights (the closets positively cry out for them), and Brady’s lack of skill in deploying even the most rudimentary theatrical effects—his phased appearance is a rare exception—hampers them further. Perhaps the most egregious failure concerns the wall. It marks the perimeter of the backyard and connects to the house just beneath the children’s bedroom.  Brady died there. And yet, his ghost can do nothing more at that site than a perfunctory “Boo!” a tepid exclamation that has not carried any charge since the days of Le Fanu. Perhaps the next haunting will uncover more of Brady’s ghost’s talents. Until then, it is hard to resist the rather unkind notion that Brady died in vain. The limits of the entire haunting are perhaps best summed up by a remark made by Adrienne to her sister: “I feel like I’m supposed to scream or something but I can’t figure out why.”