The longer I watched the US sitcom, the more the propaganda got to me. Maybe ghosts just want someone to listen to them?
The ghost in my house is called Henry.
I only found this out after naming my cat Henry, at which point one of my kids said, “Oh, like the ghost”, as though this was knowledge we all shared.
“Like the what?” I went, ordering sage sticks on the internet.
“It’s OK,” they said. “He’s a friendly ghost.”
Friendly ghosts are fake, obviously. I’ve read enough Stephen King books to understand that a ghost is only ever a malevolent force luring people to their deaths or perpetually re-enacting the horrifying circumstances of their own untimely demise. As an 80s kid, I know to be terrified of pottery wheel ghosts, ghosts trapped in paintings, baseball ghosts hiding in cornfields and Devon Sawa. Also, like every other kid born before the www, I spent my childhood scaring myself on purpose with “101 true ghost stories” books and then sleeping with the lights on.
Ghosts are restless, angry and set on revenge. They’re mean. Henry’s hobbies include breaking all the doorknobs in our house and locking us variously in and out of the toilet. Sometimes he leaves a cold patch of air outside my bedroom door.
I have never, ever wondered if Henry is doing OK.
Then I started watching the TV show Ghosts. I had watched all of Sex Lives of College Girls, which was scary in a different way (the writing, the pacing) and needed something new. I chose this show against my better judgment, still in therapy from the Titanic scene in Ghostbusters 2. I went with the US version, but the premise and plot are almost identical in the other countries’ versions (which will soon include Australia). A woman inherits an old house, hits her head and can suddenly interact with the ghosts who live there (“live” is how they describe existing as dead people in the house. Sickos.)
Like Henry, Ghosts the TV show perpetuates the friendly ghost lie. These spectres have variously been struck by lightning, eaten by a bear and murdered in cold blood, but they coexist in a mansion with the relaxed whimsy of a sitcom cast.
It was tense TV, waiting to find out when the ghosts would turn on their landlord and have her flung from a balcony. But it never came. The ghosts bantered. They reminisced. They told stories and hosted events. Sometimes, they fell in love.
Ghosts is a comedy, but it’s jammed full of interactions between living and dead: a dad who finds a way to hug his now-adult daughter; a young son discovering his parents really were proud of him; a Revolutionary War veteran who learns history does remember him after all.
The longer I watched, the more the propaganda got to me. These weren’t just friendly ghosts – they were people with families and dreams, trapped like teenagers in an endless battle to be understood. In spite of myself, I cried. Suddenly, I was grateful for the chance to tell someone what I needed, even if they were my adult children who are not interested unless I’m giving them money.
In the hallway, there was loud bang on the wall. Henry. Maybe he wasn’t a mean ghost. Maybe he was just waiting for someone to listen.
As a crazy person, I’ve often spoken to people who weren’t there. Mostly they were strangers on the internet but sometimes they were figments of my imagination. But there seemed something hyperreal about having a chat with someone who’s never tweeted, or watched a Blake Lively deep dive, or met an incel. Henry the ghost is from a time when real things happened instead of the chaos of collective delusion in which we now live.
“Hi,” I said to the air. No reply. “I’ve been watching this TV show.” My house was built in the 1940s; maybe Henry didn’t know what a TV was. “I thought you might like to hang out.” I put down my phone. I made room on the couch (in Ghosts, they can sit on chairs and washing machines). I asked about his family, and what he had done for work, and if he was planning to lock me in the bathroom until I died.
He was polite (silent). Eventually, satisfied that I had been sufficiently kind to the wandering ghost in my hallway, I went back to distracting myself from responsibility.
Obviously I know Ghosts is not a documentary. I still think ghosts are probably mean, and Henry has never done anything to make me think he’s not kind of a prick who wants me to leave. The doorknobs are worse than they’ve ever been. I have to literally kick the toilet door in now, which is not easy in an emergency.
But I hope that now, if eternity is getting him down, Henry knows where he can find me (on the couch, watching TV ghosts marry one another in the afterlife).
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