Lost Things
Like a lot of people, I’ve always been fascinated by forgotten places and abandoned things. Reading the National Geographic article, I’m reminded of the abandoned houses near where I used to live. There were a couple between my house and Springfield, back from the road, behind the fields. There was another near my friend’s house in Donnellsville, on Route 40 (there it is again). Out by Yellow Springs there were several abandoned farmhouses, and an abandoned covered bridge, cut off from the world when the farms consolidated, and the highway left it behind.
Stories sprang up about the houses–that they were haunted; left doomed by foulplay; cursed. And I think these fantastic stories grew out of our fascination, our need to create a narrative to explain things. Our fear of death. I think that this interest comes from exactly that place, from the question “What happens when things die?” Because we’re so tied to stories, our homes and towns and ships and cars end up having their own story (how many of us bargain with our cars? Think of them as Agents with a history and animus?) But they’re different from people: when people die, they go away, and live on only in memory. Houses and shipwrecks linger. Their story doesn’t end, and whatever glory it may have had is overpowered by their new melancholy. And so we’re drawn to them, and their ghost stories.