Little Boy Ghost by Ira Sukrungruang
“What I’m always looking for are new ways to tell a story,” Ira Sukrungruang explained in an interview for CRAFT several years ago. “Not new stories.” In his essay “Little Boy Ghost,” Sukrungruang finds new approaches to the oldest forms in the genre: oral storytelling, ghost stories, haunted house stories, and bedtime stories. Haunted house stories, dating back at least to the first century, were his favorites when he was young, and the first stories he wrote. Now he tells stories to his seven-year-old son, Bodhi, who plays the roles of listener and storyteller, collaborating with his father, as well as subject, as their stories feature the ghost of a little boy named Bodhi. Ghost stories take on new weight when the family moves to England for a year, where so many houses are old, some storied with tales of haunting. Ostensibly an account of Bodhi’s new fears after they move to the UK, “Little Boy Ghost” becomes an exploration of the phenomenon of haunting and what draws Sukrungruang to paranormal shows on TV. “Most of the essays I’ve written about my son aren’t about him,” Sukrungruang writes in his author’s note. “Rather, he becomes a jumping-off point to my many obsessions and fears.”
Like the device of a play within a play, a story within a story often mirrors or illuminates the larger narrative that frames it. “Little Boy Ghost” contains more than one embedded narrative, most obviously the father’s and son’s coauthored tales, which begin with words and ideas from both of them and then become stories told just by Bodhi’s father. Their stories often stop midway, when Bodhi tires and suggests, “Let’s make it to be continued,” or drops off to sleep in his bed. In that sense, the embedded narratives mirror the structure of the longer narrative, which closes with a fanciful tale the haunted father narrates to himself, a story that doesn’t end. —CRAFT
Since we’ve moved to England for the year, my son Bodhi fears being alone. He can’t verbalize what it is he fears. Everywhere we go he follows, hand linked into an arm or fingers pinching the fabric of a shirt. When he needs to use the bathroom, we follow and stand in viewing distance. When we need to go, he follows us and hovers around the bathroom door, waiting. When we steal away into another room—say, to retrieve a pair of socks—his voice rings with high-pitched panic: where are you, where are you, are you there, are you there?
My wife, Deedra, says it’s a phase. He’s in a new place. It’ll pass.
During the pandemic, when we were together 24/7, Bodhi and I made a daily excursion to a park near a dam for outside time. After exerting his boy-energy on slides and monkey bars, we walk the trail on top of the dam that drops off steeply on either side. At the bottom we can see the mechanics of the dam and pools of water. Sometimes, my son tosses pebbles into the pools. He jumps for joy at the splashes. It’s a nice trail, open to the expansive Ohio sky, which can be so blue it feels like you are being swallowed in lightness. Benches dot the trail every hundred feet or so. We sit on one and watch the robins peck and scatter, watch the circling vultures above. Always, we end up telling stories. Ghost stories. Bodhi craves them—just as I did—and fears them—just as I did.
At first, the storytelling is a collaborative activity.
“Where is the story located?” I say.
“Thailand.”
“Where in Thailand?”
“Where Ya-ya lives.”
“In Chiang Mai?”
“The mountains.”
“Spooky,” I say.
Our coauthorship lasts for a bit, before he tires and says, “You tell the story, Daddy. I’ll just listen.”
The stories I make up often revolve around a house. A haunted house. As a boy, haunted house stories were my favorite. My first pieces of writing were short haunted house tales. The haunted house in my imagination resembled our suburban home in South Chicago, a plain bi-level with a detached garage. It had a fireplace we never used. Instead, we parked a mammoth Zenith TV in front of it. In the backyard, my aunt’s garden blossomed every summer with vegetables like cucumbers, bitter melons, tomatoes, and zucchinis.
Our house wasn’t the classic haunted house. It had no locked attic, no creaky doors, no sliding bookcases that led to hidden passages. It did have a creepy crawl space where we stored our winter coats and jasmine rice, and where, when I entered my teens, my friends and I would play with the Ouija board. Other than that, it was an ordinary-looking home, built in the 1970s, furnished with ordinary-looking sofas and coffee tables and china cabinet, except for Buddha statues and portraits of the king and queen of Thailand everywhere. This was the house where I based many of my stories. Similarly, Bodhi wants his stories based in his grandmother’s home in Chiang Mai, a place he deeply misses, a place we wouldn’t return to for two and a half years because of the pandemic.
In the stories I tell Bodhi, there is a ghost of a little boy, and the little boy resembled my little boy huddled against my side—part fear, part early spring chill—his body a perfect warm fit on a bench at the top of a dam. The little ghost boy was lonely, wandering the rooms of the haunted house, which was pink, like Ya-ya’s house. The ghost had no one to play with. He could hear the voices of other children outside but couldn’t venture outdoors. His limits were the boundaries of the house. If the boy stuck his arm out a window, then the arm would disappear until he brought his arm back in. The little boy ghost—though lonely—didn’t want to disappear.
“What is the ghost’s name?” Bodhi asks.
“How about Bodhi?”
“That’s a good name, Daddy.”
One day, a new family moved into the pink house. It had been years since anyone occupied it. The family had a little boy, too, and the little boy was afraid of the house. He kept close to his parents, fingers always touching a part of them. His eyes darted from place to place, as if he were following a laser pointer that never stilled.
The little boy ghost, Bodhi, wanted to play with the little boy.
“Let’s call him Danny,” Bodhi says, “like my friend in preschool. I wonder how he’s doing.”
“Do you miss him?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry, bud.”
“Keep going, Daddy.”
So Danny didn’t like the house. He told his parents it was haunted. He said he could see shadows, like that one, and pointed at a wall; only it wasn’t a wall he was pointing at. It was Bodhi, the ghost. Danny’s parents couldn’t see Bodhi and said it was Danny’s imagination. They said he would get used to the house. It was old but theirs. Because they were busy unpacking, they told Danny to go play somewhere. Maybe he should set up his racetrack for his toy cars.
“I have a racetrack,” Bodhi says.
“I know you do.”
“And lots of toy cars.”
“Too many maybe.”
“Too little, Daddy.”
So, Danny took out his tracks and race cars. He lined them up on the living room floor, the tile cooling his bottom. The floor was covered in layers of dust. The cars left wheel marks in the dust. He vroomed the cars around the room. One of the cars rolled near a rocking chair.
Bodhi the ghost had been hovering over the chair, watching Danny intently. When the car rolled to him, he reached down and pushed it back. The car rolled toward Danny. Danny tilted his head. He pushed the car back in the same direction, and again the car rolled back. Danny said to the air, Is someone there? And the air whispered, Yes. And Danny said, Are you a ghost? And the air whispered, Yes. And Danny said, Are you a friendly ghost? And the air said—
Bodhi—my Bodhi—yawns, his eyelids heavy. The sun plays with the luster of his black hair. It lights up his face and ruddies his cheeks.
“Are you tired, bud?”
“Yes.”
“You want me to stop the story?”
“Let’s make it to be continued.”
“You want to go home?”
“Yes, Daddy.”
I scoop him into my arms and make our way back to the car at the bottom of the dam.
This is what usually happens. The story we start never ends. It remains in the perpetual state of suspense.
Before our move to England, Bodhi and I watched a paranormal show—an obsession of mine—which was probably not my finest parenting moment. The show we watched that day counted down the world’s most haunted places. A British male voice narrated the paranormal activity the places experienced. There was video footage of objects moving and shadowy figures and recordings of disembodied voices. About ninety percent of the show centered around destinations in the UK—castles, old pubs, abandoned churches and asylums.
So, this became Bodhi’s first understanding of the place we were moving to for the year.
Ghosts are everywhere there. Everything is haunted.
One of the earliest haunted house stories—some scholars have claimed it to be the first—was written in the first century by Pliny the Younger. In a letter to a friend, he described a house in Greece where unexplained things happened.
There was at Athens a large and spacious, but ill-reputed and pestilential house. In the dead of the night a noise, resembling the clashing of iron, was frequently heard, which, if you listened more attentively, sounded like the rattling of fetters…immediately afterward a phantom appeared in the form of an old man, extremely meagre and squalid, with a long beard and bristling hair; rattling the gyves on his feet and hands. The poor inhabitants consequently passed sleepless nights under the most dismal terrors imaginable.
In the UK, stories of the paranormal have been around for as long as the invention of story. The land is rich with lore. Here be the witches and faeries, the ghosts lurking in centuries-old cemeteries, the unexplainable structures like Stonehenge. Let us not forget the foreboding mansions of Gothic literature, like Manderley, or Wuthering Heights, or the Castle of Otranto.
The flat we moved to in Exeter, England, was on the second floor of a building built in the sixteenth century. Our new home had the look of the old, despite the inside being gutted and remodeled with modern bathrooms and kitchens and heating systems. From the outside, however, our home for the year looked as if it could be the perfect setting for a paranormal story—old stonework and big windows that looked like staring eyes and a door like a screaming mouth. The building contrasted with our house in Ohio, built in 2016, the year Bodhi was born, with new siding and roof and everything that connoted suburban living. In Exeter, the neighborhood surrounding us was also old, ivy growing up the façades of buildings like thick green beards, and St. Thomas Church, erected in 1657, extended high into the sky—a finger pointing at God—looming above the neighborhood.
Deedra and I were enchanted with everything about our temporary home, the way tourists love every place they travel to. Everything was new (in this case old). Everything had character (which meant old). Bodhi was skeptical. He walked with a slight tilt of his head. When asked what he thought of our new home, he didn’t respond. This didn’t matter to Deedra and me. We liked England. We liked old.
On our first night in the flat, our bodies still battling jet lag, the faucet in the kitchen came on by itself and then turned off. We looked at each other. Said nothing. From then on, Bodhi attached himself to us.
What is a haunted house without anyone to live in it? Just a house. A house without witness. A house that stands alone. A house without story.
A house becomes haunted once someone comes out to the public and says, “There is something not right with my home. I think it may be haunted.”
In those paranormal shows I love to binge-watch, I’m drawn to the people who inhabit these supposedly haunted spaces, as much—if not more—than whatever the paranormal investigators seek out. People provide story, context, circumstance. They tell of the rattling coming from the basement. They report the hearing of alien voices in the baby monitor. They describe the ball rolling along the living room floor on its own volition. Without the people to tell these stories, there would be no investigation. No need to travel dark hallways with EMF detectors. No need to conduct EVP sessions. Without these stories, the house would just be a house.
Perhaps I read into these people’s lives a little too much. Perhaps my brain does what it always does—it seeks another narrative to explain away the haunted house. After all, the primary motive of paranormal investigative shows is to debunk claims of the hauntings. They find “scientific” evidence to refute people’s experiences. I do the same, only I focus on the people, not the house. I notice how exhausted they are. How scared. How worried. Most of the time they live in a run-down home because it is all they can afford. They stay in these old homes because they don’t have the economic means to move. The lead singer of Alabama Shakes, Brittany Howard, talks about living in her great-grandmother’s haunted house and why she didn’t leave: “There’s some economic issues that go into staying in a haunted house that no one talks about…if you don’t have money saved up to make a move, you are still in this haunted house.”
Many times, when watching these shows, the fear these people experience extends beyond the paranormal. The fear becomes normal. Fear of living. Of sadness. Of hardship. Of loss. Of separation. Of loneliness.
Here’s a sampling of the people on the shows: A single mother senses something watching her everywhere she moves in the house. Her income is drained after a three-year custody battle for the kids. An elderly man claims to hear humming in the bedroom he shared with his late wife of forty years. It’s a song she used to sing when doing laundry. An only child of parents who work all day talks to someone no one sees. He says the someone is his only friend.
These glimpses into people’s lives do not explain away the haunting of their homes. Rather, they reiterate what we already know. Living is hard. When living is hard and we don’t know what to do to ease how hard everything is and we feel at the end of our tether, we seek explanations for our broken hearts, our tired souls. Sometimes the easiest culprit is a ghost in the house. Something we can’t see. Something to focus our energy on. Because that something, as far-fetched as it sounds, is better than what really ails us.
We don’t talk about the kitchen faucet. We don’t talk about the bedroom door sometimes shutting by itself. We don’t talk of the wheeze and whine of the pipes at night. We don’t talk about it because we don’t think there is anything paranormal about these happenings. It’s an old building. Old buildings are filled with drafts and creaky floorboards and bad plumbing (two leaks happened during the month we moved in). We don’t talk about it because Bodhi will pick up on our fear and make it his own.
In the States, we made haunted houses a game. On our long car rides around Ohio, we pointed at houses we thought were haunted.
“That one for sure,” I said. “Look at it.” I pointed at an old, dilapidated barn, red paint peeling like sunburned skin.
“That one,” Bodhi said. He pointed at a white house with a black roof, shrouded in the shadow of gigantic pines.
“No,” his mom said. “That one.” She pointed at an abandoned shack in the middle of a cornfield, roof crooked from Midwestern gusts, old tires piled around it.
Our fingers pointed from one house to the next. We explained our choices. We disagreed. We laughed.
In England, we can point at any building and say it’s haunted and it probably is. Like the White Hart Hotel we pass every day to take Bodhi to school, where there are sightings of men in togas passing through walls. Or The Turks Head pub, where one can find Charles Dickens milling about in the corner.
Here, every place has a story. Every place, a lingering ghost.
Deedra and I sit in the school counselor’s office. It’s been six months. Nothing has changed. Bodhi follows us everywhere we go, our little shadow, and though we love our boy to death, going to the bathroom with him right there has gotten old. We tell the counselor our circumstances. We’re here for the year. He doesn’t leave our side. Everywhere we go, he goes. The flat we live in is tiny, made tinier every time we turn and bump into him. Bodhi can’t explain why he’s so attached to us, though he says it isn’t fear of anything coming to get him. It isn’t ghosts. It isn’t the flat. I believe him, though I’m the type of father who will believe anything his son says. Still, I don’t think he fears our flat. I don’t think he fears ghosts. He doesn’t move in the space as if he’s afraid of it. He just needs us to be there. It is easy to blame Bodhi’s attachment to us on the fear of the unknown, or the fear of new spaces, or the fear of a new way of being, or the fear of a new culture, or the fear of being the new boy at school with the American accent. Or it can be all these fears rolled together, like a rubber band ball that keeps growing and growing and growing.
Fear on fear on fear.
The school counselor is a kind and patient woman. She listens to everything we say. She nods and takes notes and asks elaborative questions. She tells us Bodhi is going through lots of changes, and his attachment is normal for a seven-year-old who has traveled across an ocean to a country so different from what he is accustomed to. She says she has spoken with his teacher, and his teacher tells her that Bodhi is popular among his classmates and doesn’t seem like he has difficulty making friends. She says she will meet with him weekly to play games and ask him questions. She sends us home with a book about anxiety and says she’ll be in contact soon.
When we leave the school, Deedra and I feel like a weight has been momentarily lifted off us. The sun is out—a rarity. We make our way home, passing old homes and old buildings. One building has a gargoyle perched along the ridge of a roof. It surveys the street below. I think, in that house is the ghost of a little boy. And the little boy ghost comes outdoors sometimes to sit on the head of the gargoyle. And the little boy waves to everyone who passes but no one waves back, no one takes notice of him, until one day—
IRA SUKRUNGRUANG is the author of four nonfiction books: This Jade World, Buddha’s Dog & Other Meditations, Southside Buddhist, and Talk Thai: The Adventures of Buddhist Boy; the short story collection The Melting Season; and the poetry collection In Thailand It Is Night. He is the recipient of the 2022 Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year in Nonfiction, the 2015 American Book Award, the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Nonfiction Literature, an Arts & Letters Fellowship, and the Anita Claire Scharf Award in Poetry. His work has appeared in many literary journals, including The Rumpus, American Poetry Review, The Sun, and Creative Nonfiction. He is one of the founding editors of Sweet: A Literary Confection (sweetlit.com), and is the Richard L. Thomas Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College. Find him on Twitter @sukrungruang.
Featured image by Zoya Loonohod, courtesy of Unsplash.
