The Ghosts in the Wall

Note: Ordering books through the Bookshop.org links in this article supports The Flytrap.

Tens of thousands of years stretched between the time when prehistoric peoples originally left their mark on Grotte Font-de-Gaume and the steamy August afternoon in 2019 when I followed a short queue into one of the last European cave art sites that preservationists make available to tourists.

Entering Font-de-Gaume was the culmination of a life-long dream that began with a pile of second-hand National Geographic magazines offloaded onto my parents by a neighbor when I was in elementary school. I was an earlier-than-early reader, and my folks were always looking for something to put in front of me that had a lot of big words but also pictures. I still remember—I can still smell—those yellow spines, posturing officiously among Babysitters Club and Sweet Valley Twins books. Somewhere in their musty pages, I learned of prehistoric cave art. Decades later, I would study journalism and cultural anthropology—archaeology was literally too muddy for me—in an attempt to make sense of the stories humans tell ourselves and each other.

So there I was, finally, having a pseudo-religious experience in a French cave. And there also: some Boomer dude, probably dragged along on the tour because his wife had read a Rick Steves book. (Rick is always right! No shade on Rick.)

As the tour guide described 20,000-year-old painted animal figures in her gentle, accented lilt, augmented by a flashlight meant to imitate ancient firelight, the Boomer dude leaned into the cave wall, his nose mere centimeters from the rock.

“I don’t see it,” he complained, even as the guide outlined the animals on the undulating wall, demonstrating how flickering light made bison and deer appear to move as if running across a vast expanse. His wife sighed, elbowing him forcefully before insisting: “It’s right in front of you, Irv.”

Shortly after the trip, I bought my first Roomba and named him "ERV.” Because obviously, “electronic remote vacuum,” but also “Irv,” because this dip-ass disc was, like Irv back at Font-de-Gaume, often unable to see what was right in front of it. I was always disentangling ERV from various cords, fishing him out from under the sofa, or pulling him back from the great abyss of the laundry room threshold.

Because I couldn’t help but think of Irv when dealing with ERV, the vacuum always reminded me of the nigh-inconceivable vastness of time itself, and thus of my own mortality. There he’d be, cleaning under the table while I was trying to eat my breakfast, or running headfirst into my ankles while I was washing dishes, or ramming himself into the bathroom door as I was having a pee. With every hapless smoosh, my little robot emphasized for me the majesty and mystery of humanity, the inevitability of death, and the ineffable, enduring spookiness of the human need to share our stories across the ages.

Places where people choose to leave parts of ourselves behind—intellectually, creatively, even physically—are incredibly special and, at least to me, also incredibly spooky (complimentary).

Perhaps it is no accident that I’ve also cultivated a life-long interest in the supernatural. In particular, I love a Standard Ghost™. You know who I mean: A shadowy lady draped in gauzy nonsense, hovering menacingly on a staircase, haunting the moors, or roaming a creepy basement. I wore out my elementary school library’s copy of Real Ghosts, and my original editions of the Scary Stories books are among my most prized possessions. Standard Ghost™ films are my favorite for Halloween season; give me Crimson Peak (2015) and The Woman in Black (2012)! Book me a room in the haunted hotels from Hokum (2026), The Innkeepers (2011), or the Ghosts sitcoms (BBC version preferred).

The Standard Ghost™ is a staple of horror fiction, but real ghosts—echoes of humanity across spacetime—needn’t scare us.

Alas, I’ve never witnessed a corporeal apparition, but it’s not for lack of trying. I stay in haunted locales whenever I can, and I’m an absolute mark for even the corniest, tourist-trappingest ghost walk. I have had some creepy experiences, though. A sparking, buzzing VCR in the middle of the night once sent my boyfriend and I sprinting into the hallway of San Antonio’s historic Menger Hotel in our pajamas (you won’t convince me it had anything to do with hundred-year-old electrical wiring).

On a ghost tour of downtown Dallas some years ago, I got the heebie-jeebies so bad in a brightly lit, working hotel basement laundry that I had to skip the last quarter of the tour. According to the psychic medium accompanying us, this identified me as some sort of supernatural empath. I’ve taken it as a compliment. Perhaps it explains my affinity for ancient art, too.

I simply love to be in places where the spiritual remnants of the human creative drive to share information about ourselves and our world persist—whether through art, architecture, worship, work, or what-have-you. It’s why I find cemeteries beautiful, but not usually evocative of the goosebumps I seek; the dead don’t carve their own tombstones.

When I visited the seventh-century burial mounds at Sutton Hoo, I was enraptured, but Ye Olde Bell and Steelyard, a nearby pub built in the mid-16th century, felt vastly eerier. In contrast, visiting the neolithic monuments in Ireland’s Boyne Valley gave me chills for days, despite visiting during a midsummer heat wave; these passage tombs are more akin to Stone Age houses of worship, precisely constructed and intricately decorated more than 5,000 years ago by people who I would love to believe could be my own ancestors.

Closer to my home here in Texas, when I climbed up to the White Shaman mural in the Lower Pecos for my 42nd birthday, I found myself breathless, only partly because the hike was exhausting and mostly because it is haunting indeed to witness the continued existence of ancient Indigenous art, especially in a geography as colonized and contested as the borderlands.

As my Flytrap cofounder Nicole Froio wrote in her excellent “Ghosts Are Just Vibing, Man!” essay from last year’s Flytrap Fridays series, “... spirits are just like us. Whoever those spirits were, they were looking for connection, which is a deeply human need.” The Standard Ghost™ is a staple of horror fiction, but real ghosts—echoes of humanity across spacetime—needn’t scare us. Quite the opposite, at least for me: I didn’t love crouching my way down the tunnel entry to the Newgrange monument, but my nerves got to me because I’m extremely claustrophobic. By the time I was able to stand up fully inside, taking in a carved chamber used by the prehistoric people of Ireland for purposes modern folks will never fully understand, I was truly tingling—spiritually and physically.

The academy has a framework for emotional-social-sensory experiences like this, triggered by places and people and art and memory and really everything across the anthropological spectrum of making and doing and seeing things: affect theory. It’s brilliant and useful, but I find that it only gets wonkier and harder to conceptualize the more one tries to unpack it. Nevertheless, supposedly haunted, or even just very old, places do unlock something in us that’s difficult to describe, so we often default to describing them as scary. (For further reading: Colin Dickey’s Ghostland is a very fine exploration of the historical and social phenomena of “haunted” destinations.)

Certainly it can be unsettling to encounter direct evidence of the fleeting ephemerality of our own short lives in the grand scope of the universe. Nothing does this to me more than prehistoric hand prints, the very oldest (known) examples of which were very recently discovered in Indonesia. At nearly 68,000 (!!!!!!!!!!, I repeat, !!!!!!!!!!) years old, the negative prints—created by blowing pigment over the hand to leave an image on a cave wall—are both confounding and powerfully legible. It is one thing to see a big cat or bison on a cave wall and imagine who might have created it; it is another to receive, essentially, an “I was here” message from a specific person across many millennia.

Perhaps I should find things like this scary, or scarier; the Indonesian prints are made spookier by the fact that some of the fingertips, blown in blood-red pigment, appear to have been deliberately shaped into points. Then again, I myself occasionally sport stiletto nails. Could it be that ancient Indonesians simply wanted to brag about their own fabulously shaped fingernails, or signal to others that the locals style their hands this way, as opposed to preferring almond or square tips? I joke, but I don’t. Ancient nail selfies are as likely an explanation for the prints as anything else. And the ways we modify our bodies—including our fingernails—can signal quite a lot about who we are and what we believe.

It is precisely the unknowability behind something like the Indonesian hand prints that draws me to them all the more. We can’t even know, really, whether the prints were meant to be seen by anyone besides their maker(s), though I think it’s likely they were. Humans long to connect with each other; Genevieve von Petzinger’s The First Signs offers ample evidence for reading, as it were, non-figurative prehistoric art and symbols as the earliest media.

I like to think I would write for myself even if I was sure no one would ever read my words, but I do so love creating things for and with other people. I live for the discourse, and so I dread dying. Like my Flytrap cofounder Katelyn Burns, who wrote on the eminently human desire to cheat death earlier this year, I find “the unavoidable prospect of suddenly not existing for the rest of time absolutely terrifying.” The existence of an afterlife featuring pearly gates or the River Styx is to me a not-particularly-comforting fiction. But get a few whiskeys in me, especially this time of year, and I’m apt to turn full woo-woo, opining on fourth- and fifth-dimensions and how little we really know about time and space and consciousness and the universe.

We know almost nothing at all about what makes us human, the hows and the whys of it, except for this: we are storytellers and creators.

We humans do silly things, like naming our Roombas. We do aesthetic things, like illustrating manuscripts or tattooing our bodies. We compose and sing ballads to be sung across generations; we dance and teach our children to do so. We make wine from old vines and brew beers and ales and teas like our ancestors did, ensuring age-old flavors and foodways live beyond our lifetimes. These things keep us alive, long after we are gone.

For all the time I’ve spent looking for Standard Ghosts™ in haunted hotels, I’ve actually experienced more of the afterlife, whatever it is, in ancient places where skeletal apparitions and gauzy gowns are wholly absent, but the creative stuff of life remains abundant.

I believe in coincidences and fate. If I truly know anything, it’s that we know almost nothing at all about what makes us human, the hows and the whys of it, except for this: we are storytellers and creators. We create Standard Ghosts™ with stilted backstories in horror films, and we blow pigment on our hands in caves. We crave affective experiences that make us feel all kinds of things at once. We seek to share those experiences with others: With our contemporaries so that we know we are not alone in what we experience, and with people yet to come, so that they might know we were here, and we felt and did and made things, too.

This piece was edited by Chrissy Stroop and copyedited by s.e. smith.