Giving Up the Ghost (30 page)

I was in that disoriented not-sure-if-you’re-still-dreaming-or-not state as I looked around the room, completely unsure of what was or wasn’t really there.

“I’m going to close my eyes,” I said into the hopefully empty darkness. “And if there is a ghost here, I will see it when I open them again.”

I closed my eyes tight, then quickly opened them.

Motionless darkness. Nothing.

I needed to get out of the house. I needed to go for a walk.

It was the first Little Girl dream I’d had in a long time. I hadn’t even thought about Her for months.

The house where I lived was just two blocks from the main strip in Kent—if a guitar store, four bars, a deli, and a butcher shop constituted a main strip. It was just before 1
A.M.
, so I figured there was a fair chance that at least a few of my friends would be stumbling from one dive bar to another.

As I headed around the corner onto Franklin Avenue, I saw a group of four or five people walking toward me.

One of them was Cassandra.

As her friends waited in a drunken state of impatience, Cassandra and I exchanged hugs and phone numbers. We were both a bit in shock to see each other. How weird, we both commented. How strange it is that we’d both be randomly walking down the street and run into each other, especially
when she didn’t even live here. I was just going for a walk, I said. At one
A.M.?
, she asked, chuckling. Yes, at one
A.M
. We both laughed, while her friends looked more annoyed. They wanted to go to the bars, not stand around and watch us be blown away by our strange coincidental meeting.

A few days later I called Cassandra. I hadn’t given any more thought to our chance meeting, or its timing, or even the Little Girl dream that preceded it. It just seemed like an unexpected but still kind of normal set of occurrences. Whenever I tell anyone this story, that series of events is what I always feel I have to explain. No Little Girl dreams for more than a year—then suddenly, I have one. Then in the middle of that night I decide to dress and go for a walk. Then I run into an old friend who just happens to be in town barhopping, and we make plans to talk. Frankly, if I was listening to someone else tell this story, I’d find it hard to believe that things lined up so neatly. But they did. While it is hard to think that they might be connected, it is even harder to think that they aren’t.

When I called, Cassandra and I spent about thirty minutes talking about her life at college, her new boyfriend, and odds and ends of family news. I told her about life in Kent and my budding music career.

“When was the last time I saw you?” I asked.

“I think it was when Laura and I came to see your band,” she answered. I had actually been avoiding mentioning Laura during the call. I didn’t want Cassandra to think I was pumping her for information, nor was I sure I really wanted to hear whatever she had to say about Laura.

Then Cassandra was quiet for a moment.

“I wanted to ask you something before we hang up,” she said.

“Okay.”

“I wanted to ask you how you are doing with this Laura stuff,” she said.

Pause
.

“What Laura stuff?”

Pause
.

“The situation with Laura,” she stammered.

“What situation with Laura?” I asked.

“Oh my God,” she said. “You don’t know?”

Pause
.

“Don’t know what?”

“Oh my, you don’t know, do you?” she said. “Why didn’t someone tell you?”

Cassandra became very flustered, half thinking out loud what to do, half trying to avoid saying anything at all. She refused to explain further, her voiced filled with increasing panic.

“What situation?” I yelled at her.

“I can’t tell you,” she said. “Not like this, not over the phone.”

“Listen,” I said. “If you don’t tell me now, I’m going to get in the car and drive to your fucking front door and make you tell me to my fucking face. What is going on?!”

I could hear Cassandra exhale into the phone.

Fewer things are messier than learning about a tragic death after everyone else. They’ve just started to recover from their grief. They are able to talk about the deceased without losing composure. In short, they are moving on. Then you show up. You are back at square one. You are in shock. You are a blubbering souvenir of the pain and loss they are struggling to climb above.

Old friends who were normally reticent to talk to me in the first place were even more so now. A few phone calls were returned, a few details confirmed, a few new tidbits added to the mix. Most people I got hold of were willing to discuss things they’d heard. Almost no one wanted to talk about how they felt.

I’d managed to piece together some things.

Laura had attended Baruch as she’d planned, but it hadn’t gone well. She didn’t like the school, she didn’t like the students, she didn’t like the roach-infested rat hole they’d given her to call home. She eventually transferred to Hunter College and also took a few classes at Columbia before taking a semester off. Eventually, she decided to leave New York and return to Canton.

She’d gotten a job as a waitress and started taking classes at Kent Stark. In the four months that she’d lived in Canton, she’d let most of her friends know she had moved back, except one. Me.

One spring afternoon she rode her bike to the drugstore. As she was leaving, she crossed the intersection of Twenty-fifth Street and Fulton Avenue. She was wearing headphones and listening to her Walkman. She rode her bike into a through lane, was hit by a car and knocked down into the road. She died almost instantly of a head injury.

Laura died on a Thursday and was buried on a Saturday. None of my friends seemed to know or remember exactly where she was buried. Eventually, I figured out that it was the Evergreen Memorial Gardens, very close to where the Putt-O-Links had been. I’d heard that there was no marker to go by, so I asked the caretaker for some help locating her. After following his instructions, I came to a neat box of turned earth cut into the grass. I sat down in front of it. I said I was so sorry.
I was sorry for what happened. I was sorry for being such an ass. I just kept repeating it over and over again.

“Say, ah … that isn’t your friend,” the caretaker eventually called out. “She’s one row back and a few spots to the left.”

I looked over. There was another neatly cut rectangle of dirt.

I moved over to Laura’s grave.

“I really don’t feel like starting over,” I said. “I’m sure you heard everything I told the other dead person.”

After staring at the dirt silently for a moment, I broke out crying.

There was no marker. No flowers. Nothing. It would be a few years before a headstone was placed there. I visited a few times and kept wondering why nothing was there. Part of me questioned whether this was perhaps a big mistake. Maybe Laura wasn’t dead at all. Maybe this was someone else they confused with Laura. I kept waiting for her to show up and explain how it had all been a big misunderstanding.

I’d like to tell you there’s more to this part of the story, but there really isn’t. It, like all death, was a sudden, harsh ending. There was no final climax, no big lesson or moral—it just ended there.

The only thing I clearly remember feeling was that I knew, even then, that I had come to another turning point in my life. I realized that I could use this as a reasonable excuse to do just about anything I wanted: completely freak out, be inspired to greatness, start taking drugs, live as a hermit in the back woods of Oregon—you name it, I had the perfect rationale.

Several years later, my friend Barry died. He passed away on his couch in an apartment in Columbus, Ohio. Several months earlier, for no apparent reason, Barry had abruptly walked out of his job and slowly started to cut himself off from his friends.
And then one day I got a call, and he was dead. He’d just died—no obvious cause. While we’d theorized that it may have been drugs or AIDS, no one quite knew for sure. The only sure thing was that Barry, for some reason, had decided to stop living, then went and sat in his apartment until he got what he wished for. I was sad to lose Barry, of course, but then—and many times since—I’ve thought about how close I came to ending up the same way myself. One of those times was standing there in Evergreen Memorial Gardens.

In the moments that I wasn’t overwhelmed with grief at Laura’s death, I felt confusion and anger. Why had she never let me know she’d moved back to Canton? She was living there for months with me less than forty minutes away and never made an effort to let me know. I was mad because I missed her, but also because I’d worked so hard to build a life that would, someday, be worth her approval. Now that day was never going to come. Not only would we never get a chance to completely reconcile, but she would never see what happened to me. That I turned out okay after all.

Over the years, this has always been the part of this story I’ve struggled with most—wanting to understand why she never did anything—not a card, not a phone call, not a word passed through a friend. Was it out of anger? Out of spite? Was she embarrassed? Did she think I’d tell her that I knew all along that things wouldn’t work out in New York the way she thought? Was she waiting for something to happen or fall into place first? Even now I’m dumbstruck thinking about how much cleaner both our lives would have been with just one evening spent winding through the back roads surrounding Canton.

I stood staring at the loose, turned dirt above her grave. The person I’d wanted so much to be close to, and had missed
so terribly over the previous two years, was right there. She’d always be right there. There was only a few feet of dirt separating us.

For some reason, I took a step forward so that I could stand on top of the dirt of her grave. I don’t know why, but it felt like I’d be closer to her if I was right there over her. Almost as soon as I’d placed both my feet on top of the turned soil, I started to sink. It felt like quicksand. It seemed in an instant I was in past my ankles. I scrambled, falling on my back in the soft grass. I hastily brushed myself off and headed for my car, leaving two fresh shoe prints at the foot of Laura’s grave.

Mansfield Reformatory is bigger than I had imagined.

In fact, it’s fucking huge. It is more than a quarter million square feet, divided into two main wings, each containing cell blocks six stories high. Prisons like Mansfield were designed to dehumanize and humble their residents with imposing scale and grandness. Mansfield’s size, plus its towering Romanesque façade, makes it a pretty stunning place. You’ve probably seen Mansfield Reformatory before, as it’s regularly used as a movie set.
The Shawshank Redemption
was filmed here, as were parts of
Air Force One
and
Tango & Cash
, as well as music videos for everyone from Lil Wayne to Marilyn Manson.

I’ve known about Mansfield for most of my life, though I’ve never been here before. It’s about an hour west of Canton. Far enough away that curiosity about the place, as intense as it was, still wasn’t enough to get me to venture over here.

Mansfield, also known as the Ohio State Reformatory, was Ohio’s primary prison from the 1890s until the 1970s, when it was slowly put out of use. More than two hundred people died here—from execution, murder, and suicide—while it was a functioning correctional facility. It was such a terrible, inhumane place that calls for its closure started as early as 1930.
Since the last prisoner was moved out in 1990, the place has been pretty much abandoned. Today Mansfield is something between a historic ruin and an EPA Superfund site in the making. Lead paint peels off every surface that isn’t corroded; walls and ceilings are falling apart or completely missing; and asbestos and plaster dust are everywhere. Then there’s the broken rusty metal, missing guardrails, exposed wiring, doors off their hinges, loose stairs, and so on.

I’m walking through the deserted prison in the bright light of a sunny afternoon. Seeing it by day, I just can’t imagine that you could take in all the grandness of the place exploring alone in the pitch blackness with a three-watt flashlight. But that’s exactly what I intend to do in a few hours.

What makes Mansfield truly notorious is its reputation for the paranormal. The place is rumored to be filled to its sizeable brim with very serious bad mojo. Unlike other haunted sites, where people feel cold breezes or light touches, or see a floating head or something, Mansfield hosts interactions with the dead that are on a different level. The living are grabbed, punched, shoved, and pushed. Things are thrown and slammed.

A bald, muscular, and mildly intimidating man, Scott Sukel, is showing me around. In something between bureaucratic malfeasance and sheer stupidity, they actually allow people to come in here. Since 1995, a preservation group has maintained the site and conducts tours.

“Yeah, the worst thing I’ve ever experienced here was about two years ago,” Scott says. “I was taking a few people through the administration building and I got punched in the left kidney, which left a bruise for three days. I was standing here and everything was pretty quiet and normal, then I got this ‘Oh, shit’ feeling—you know, like something bad is going to happen—then
bam
. I ended up on my knees on the floor.
That’s when I realized that I needed to stop being a tour guide and start trying to figure out how to get these people out of here safely, without them panicking.”

That incident happened during one of Scott’s ghost hunts in the prison. Even crazier than letting people inside Mansfield Reformatory during the day is that several times a year Scott and his crew escort people into the building at night. Everyone meets on the front steps at 8
P.M
. Then all have to sign one of the most complete and comprehensive liability waivers you’ll ever see in your life. Then Scott’s crew gives folks a quick orientation tour to help get everyone adjusted. Then they turn off the lights. Then it slowly gets dark. Then the group is free to roam the entire prison structure, almost completely unrestricted, until dawn.