Giving Up the Ghost

Athena Dixon on letting go of what haunts you

The first haunted house I visited was in a squat, concrete building next to a set of small railroad tracks in my hometown. Located in a long-abandoned cluster of industrial structures, each autumn the space transformed into a scare house. One day the block of buildings would be normal and then seemingly overnight there were lights beckoning the brave to come on in. I’d seen the way crowds stood outside. Girls huddled next to their boyfriends and ragtag groups laughing and trying to scare each other before they stepped single file inside. A few parents were usually milling about waiting to drive their children home or to the next spooky activity like a haunted trail ride or a trunk or treat.

The year I was finally brave enough to go, in the late October air, a group of four of us stood at the double glass doors draped in black fabric to hide what was inside. There was Lisa, my closest friend, and two boys. Maybe it was a double date and maybe it wasn’t, but one boy has since been lost to my memory. The other was the boy who’d months later in the summer I’d count as my first boyfriend during a sticky sweet and all too brief moment in time. No matter what brought the group of us together, I had two rules that night. Don’t leave me behind and don’t let me be the end of the line. I didn’t want any of the ghouls and ghosts who’d been hired for the season to touch me. I didn’t want to be pulled away from the group and I certainly didn’t want to look over my shoulder and see some shadowy figure lurking down the path behind me.

The haunted house, which seemed just a simple square from the outside, was cavernous once inside. The black draped paths twisted and turned and seemed to go on forever. In the dim light we dodged cobwebs and hands reaching out from the darkness. Screams and moans echoed on loop from speakers somewhere in the distance.

Eventually, in the chaos and fear of it all, the boys shifted and I became the tail clinging to the back of one of their shirts. My greatest fear for the night came true. We turned a corner and when I glanced back there was a figure following us slowly. Logic should have told me it was just a local high school kid in tattered clothes and a mask. Common sense should have told me that there was no real way the person stalking us would hurt me. Fear didn’t care about any of that. So I screamed and scrambled and tried to move the boy behind me with no success. The figure got closer and closer and the spooky soundtrack kept echoing. Then there was another corner and then a faint strip of light signaling the end of the haunted house. I’d survived even if my heart was beating out of my chest and over 30 years would pass before I set foot into another scare zone.

Even though I’ve never been one to purposely seek out fear as entertainment, I’ve known hauntings since that night. Most of it has been the normal adult worries I can shake off with a few drinks, a good night’s sleep, or a venting session with friends. But some of those hauntings have clung to my skin like cobwebs in the dark. They’ve set up shop in the corners of my vision so I never feel fully settled. Those memories and feelings that I’ve tried to run from, or been chased by, have stalked down the path of my life with me even when I’m seeking the light that marks the end.

For years, after the implosion of my marriage and the trauma of the divorce that followed, I felt haunted. The ghosts of the life I’d always wanted, and had a small taste of, took up residence in every part of my newly single life. I barely slept and woke up frequently from nightmares and sleep paralysis. Hunger rumbled in my belly because I barely ate. I was only existing, a hollowed-out version of myself.

Heartbreak became that haunted house from my childhood. I’d thought the building that night looked so small until I was inside and the rooms and halls seemed never-ending. My broken heart was the same. I thought I could just pick myself up and everything would be fine. It wasn’t. In the corners of my days were the shadows of what could be. Wispy memories of what had actually been mingling with what I so desperately wanted to be true. My mind drifted back to cruel words and what I could have said or done to combat them.

I couldn’t escape from the idea there was something wrong with me. Had I been a better person and partner my spouse would have remained faithful and stayed. The haunting was ever-present—sometimes slowly encroaching and other times moving with lightning speed to take me down. I let my fear spiral and soon I was jumping at my own shadow in the light and the dark.

I was haunted by being a failure. I’d always been a good girl, the smart one full of potential. But by the time I’d earned my degrees and settled into a career, the ghost of impostor syndrome slipped from the ether and materialized at will. I was always waiting for a light switch to be flipped and to be exposed as a fraud. I was just as haunted by the possible relief that would provide—what haunted me couldn’t exist in the brightness of reality, right? There I was stuck between the fear of continuing to exist in the darkness of waiting for someone to prove I was coasting by on luck and the fear of seeing who I really was in the full light.

Over 30 years after that first night at the haunted house, I traveled to Universal Studios in Orlando for their annual Halloween Horror Nights season with a friend. She loves all things spooky and I was interested in the scare house built around Jordan Peele’s film Us. We spent the day lounging in the hotel pool and Jacuzzi and shopping. When the sun fell below the horizon, we joined the crowds walking through roaming zombies and foggy pathways and listened to screams in the distance. The closer we got to the line for the house, the more my nerves picked up. My body coiled and shook until before I knew it, we were at the front of the line waiting to be waved in.

In the dark again, I was no longer left behind. This time I was leading the way with my friend and a group of others at my back. I slinked in the haze around me, peeking around the first corner cautiously before an actor dressed as one of the characters stepped quickly out of the corner of my eye. I startled and knocked my own glasses off my face. I froze. I stood there, what little vision I had left made even worse by the blur of being without my glasses, with no idea what to do. But from behind me my friend made the choice for me. She opened her arms wide, just like the ghost on the haunted house sign way back when, and yelled for everyone to stop. The actor, the other patrons, the world seemed to do just that. She yelled again that no one had better move before I found my glasses. The lights didn’t come up, but I knelt down and felt around in the dark until my hands came across them. And then we continued on.

The actors kept popping up, the rooms still stayed dark, but the fear had waned just a bit. Maybe because a couple of things were true this time. Of course, I was older and I could fully lean into the idea I couldn’t, and wouldn’t, be hurt. What was more important, though? All those years later I’d learned that I didn’t have to let the fear linger. I didn’t have to carry it with me so even after I was away from the perceived danger it ghosted through my life. I’d learned to do this with heartbreak and disappointment and shame and all the other heavy things I’d gathered since childhood. All of it was important but none of it was permanent. I could feel what I needed to in the moment, and even a little while after, but at some point I had to give up the ghost. I had to let go and move on.

I’d come to understand, too, that I wasn’t alone. Back at the first house I’d begged not to be left behind and was disappointed that I had been. But we were children and this was now. The present meant that I’d cultivated relationships with people who understood fear and hauntings more than I did and could provide me with the support to move through those feelings. Like that friend shouting into the dark who stopped the world until I was ready to move again. Giving up the ghosts of my fears and failures hasn’t been easy. Just as I’d stumbled through the dark as a child and an adult, it’s been lots of trusting that I’m moving forward and that sooner than later there will be some light or an ending in sight.

That hometown haunted house doesn’t exist anymore. The building that held it is no longer standing. I can’t even remember the house’s name. There’s just a faint memory of the sign incandescent with bulb lights, a white ghost in the top right corner with its arms spread open wide.

But I do remember this. That night, after the four of us had tumbled out of the darkness and out of the doors, the figure that stalked us, that seemed so close to touching me, stood against the glass waving a rubber knife. It menaced us from the other side as a final scare and an invitation to try again. As a kid that didn’t happen. But now? With years of hauntings and survival under my belt? I think I would have gone through a second time knowing that everything on the other side of that door was only as scary as I allowed it to be.

Athena Dixon is the author of essay collections The Incredible Shrinking Woman and The Loneliness Files and her work appears in publications such as Harper’s Bazaar, Shenandoah, Grub Street, Narratively, and Lit Hub among others. She is a Consulting Editor for Fourth Genre and the Nonfiction/Hybrid Editor for Split/Lip Press.