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…
From the get-go, I knew what I didn’t want “Little Boy Ghost” to be. I didn’t want it to be about my son’s fear of being alone. I wanted the essay to continue my fascination and obsession with the paranormal. This obsession started early in my childhood. My mother loved watching supernatural movies like they were comedies. Imagine a Thai woman’s unrestrained laughter when Jack Nicholson axed through the bathroom door in The Shining, while I, her son, had his hands over his eyes. I became my mother’s movie-watching companion. This was how my obsession began. This was the first genre of story I wrote—ghost and haunted house stories.
But how do I write a paranormal essay? Without sounding eccentric. Without saying, “I believe in ghosts. Ghosts are real. You should believe in them too.” When writing a supernatural essay, belief has to be taken out of the equation. The essay should examine not the strange and unexplained things that occur in our world—there are way too many—but rather, how the strange and unexplained manifest in the human psyche. After all, the mind is the most paranormal space we occupy.
This year I’ve had the privilege to live in the UK. I moved the family over and discovered that lore and ghosts are part of life here. Nearly every building, shop, pub, cathedral contains a haunting of some sort. Charles Dickens’s ghost occupies the back table. You can hear whispers in this pub. There’s a strange cold spot in that inn no one can explain. And for my family, who usually lives in a modern home surrounded by modern conveniences in Ohio, encountering buildings and items older than twenty years was a culture clash of its own.
And then my seven-year-old son, Bodhi, began fearing being alone.
That was the genesis of the essay. His fear. But I didn’t want the focus of the essay to be on him. Most of the essays I’ve written about my son aren’t about him. Rather, he becomes a jumping-off point to my many obsessions and fears. I became fascinated with how one calls a place “haunted,” and how that description sticks, and how the haunted house narrative is a narrative of labeling. The essay is arranged by how one tells a paranormal story, and how once something is labeled “haunted,” the label never leaves. It is forever haunted.
Like we are.
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.
