Why I Write Ghost Stories

By James Steeves

TW: Grief, Loss, Covid-19

Snowflakes swirled in giant circles outside the large hospital window as I stared into the darkness of a cold, February evening. Below me, high ice-crested snowdrifts lined the large parking lot, trapping the few remaining cars of visitors, like myself, for whom the world, and time itself, had frozen.

            I had left a tumultuous school year of labour protest in Ontario to fly to Moncton, New Brunswick, to celebrate my father’s seventy-fifth birthday. It was one of many trips that year as I watched a rare disease called Corticobasal Degeneration take my father’s legs, his arms, and eventually his voice. A weekend trip to celebrate became a week of late-night hospital visits, sitting at my father’s bedside, staring out the window at the snow, wondering if each staggered breath from my father in the bed beside me would be his last.

            After my father passed away, I stayed for another week to be with my mother and siblings while my wife and children returned to normal life in Ontario: work, school, basketball tournaments. My first week back in Ontario, I endured the incessant lip-biting as well-intentioned colleagues expressed their condolences, reminding me of my father’s passing. I dragged myself to church, determined to return to my old routine of singing in the choir, but I could only mouth the words. I was unable to sing them out loud as I recalled singing hymns with my father in the small church choir in New Brunswick as a child, and singing beside him just two months earlier in the nursing home.

            Within a week, I joined thousands of teachers who scurried to grab whatever they could carry out of the school as Covid-19 was declared a pandemic and classes were diverted to online. As a teacher librarian, I filled bins with books and hauled them home with the thought that they might be useful. My wife (also a teacher) and my three teenage boys quickly adjusted to the new reality of isolating ourselves in our little spaces at various points in the house and trying to stay connected to the world through a screen. For me, it was in the attic, hidden behind piles of books, my only window to the outside world a tiny skylight above me, covered in ice and snow.

            As teachers watched their boisterous classes transform into rows and columns of silent avatars, I stared at my email, waiting for somebody, anybody, to contact me - to be needed. I watched my colleagues create online activities for children and instructional videos for teachers on how to use various programs. I did the same but received little response. I had never realized how much my role as a teacher librarian relied on serendipitous visits by students and staff to the library. My school library imploded to a small shelf of books in a corner of the attic under the skylight, the sunlight blocked by wintery clouds and snow.

            I started recording myself reading children’s stories and posting them online for students to listen to. Though, I had no idea if anyone was listening. I felt like Marie-Laure in Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, blindly broadcasting her readings of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea during World War II in the dead of night while her French town was under siege by the German army. Only for me, the enemy was a forced isolation brought on by the pandemic and the bitter cold of winter.

            In a strange way, though, reading and sharing those stories helped me realise that, more than ever before, in the cold, dark days and nights of the lockdown, I needed to stay connected to others through the art of storytelling. The world needed more stories. They could be about anything because the power of story is not only in the plot and the setting and the characters but in the activities of sharing them and listening to them. Stories connect us to others in ways that we could never anticipate or imagine.

            I had been thinking about writing children’s stories for a while and thought to myself, “If I don’t do it now, it will never happen.” I imagined a series based on ghost stories and local haunted sites as a way to get middle grade children interested in local history. I developed a character: a young boy who uses clues from visions and missing letters on tombstones to stop a curse that is threatening to kill him and his father. I started to write, first a paragraph and then a page. A couple of chapters quickly turned into a sequence of scenes. I became obsessed with writing. I would wake up in the middle of the night with a new idea for the plot and quietly scribble it on a sticky note beside my bed in the dark. And then, in under three weeks, I had my first draft of a novel.

            I contacted an author I had met at a conference who directed me to local writing groups and introduced me to the world of children’s authors. Soon I found myself involved in several critique groups, sharing my experiences with other writers across the country and exchanging feedback with them. I quickly started to feel a part of their stories, a part of their lives, and felt more connected to them by allowing them to become a part of my stories as well. In September, when many teachers and students returned to “bricks and mortar” schools, I started recording my own stories and sharing them with students. I was amazed by the reception I received from teachers and students, and even started a writing group for students in the school, passing on tips I had learned over the year. Now, after two years of writing, I have completed three manuscripts and have started a fourth and met lots of interesting people along the way.

            As the world acknowledges the two-year anniversary of Covid-19 being declared a pandemic, I acknowledge the two-year anniversary of my father’s death. Covid-19 may not have taken his life, but it took away my ability to grieve his death in any normal sense I had come to know. Repeated shutdowns, border closures, and travel restrictions have kept me from visiting New Brunswick since my father’s funeral, so in many ways, I have still not been able to mourn properly: I haven’t experienced visiting my mother and noticing an empty chair beside her; I haven’t stood in my childhood church on Christmas Eve to sing the bass line of a traditional carol, wondering where my father’s tenor line has gone. Ironically, as I have researched many cemeteries in Ontario for my ghost stories, I still haven’t been able to go to the one cemetery I most want to visit: Fair Haven Cemetery in Moncton, New Brunswick, where my father and all my grandparents now rest in peace under a blanket of snow.

            As I begin submitting my stories for publication, I know that many will be rejected and passed over. But I continue to remember that dark, winter night, staring out the window of my father’s hospital room, wondering why his story needed to end and where mine was destined to lead me. We are all storytellers in our own way, whether we weave our tales with words or pictures or create them through our actions like my mother’s quilting or a simple act of kindness to a stranger. A phone call to a distant relative. A warm meal for an old friend. That is what keeps us going, in the sunny times of summer, yes, but especially on those cold, winter nights when everything seems hopeless.

For me, what keeps me going on those cold, winter nights is writing stories. I write them for myself, for my family and friends, for the people from the places I write about. And I write them for my father.