Ghost Tour

If I didn't ring the bell and you didn't ring the bell then who's driving this bus.

I went home to Virginia last month, just to be there. I hadn’t visited since Christmas and Fall in Charlottesville possesses a beauty I’d be dumb to miss. Every vista looks like a Google image search result for “best art for doctor’s office,” like if you could take a picture of elevator music. It would be restorative, all apple crisps and polo matches and long runs on gravel roads. I’d spend the weekend as passenger princess in my mom’s Volvo with the seat heater on high. I’d sort quarters for laundry from my dad’s collection of pocket change while watching “Friday Night Lights.” I’d listen to the birds and the sound of my mom’s clogs going up and down the basement stairs until dinner time.

And Friday Night Lights for real.

But when I touched down at noon, having waited obediently to turn airplane mode off only once wheels hit tarmac and not a second sooner, those hopes were dashed. In streamed three texts from an unknown number: “contact me about ur missing passport.”

My stomach dropped. My purse sat lamely under the seat in front of me. (What would Schrodinger say about the status of the cat if someone texted him from an unknown number that the cat was dead?) I opened my bag. The cat was dead. My passport was gone.

“It’s a scam,” TSA Lost & Found told me. I’d called them, my seatbelt still fastened. People had been doing this at LaGuardia, stealing passports and holding them for ransom. I shouldn’t text them back, I should report the theft and I should freeze my credit and I should change all my passwords. My identity was at risk.

We’ve been asked “who are you” since we gained the motor skills to spell our names in Magic Marker. I learned to write “Kate,” I drew my family tree, I wrote college essays about what would make me an amazing addition to blah blah University and now, self-identification is a daily exercise. In what I like to eat and what I post on my Instagram story. in my speech patterns and what they reveal about which podcasts I like. In the guy who stopped me on the street the other day with a tiny microphone to ask me “what makes you confident?” I said “wearing a good outfit and when someone tells me I’m wearing a good outfit.” He didn’t post the video. Which in hindsight is a godsend because my outfit was really only okay.

My failed man-on-the-street interview not withstanding, I more or less like what I’ve built of myself. “This made me think of you” is this nicest thing you could say to me — an external validation of my hope that the patchwork of traits I’ve cobbled together to make Me have taken concrete form. That I exist as I think I do to someone other than myself.

But with my eyes welling up as I read the Google AI Overview for “what to do identity theft stop,” the public cultivation of “personal brand” felt very much less advisable. How hubristic to share my life to The Grid, to log my daily running route with GPS technology. Now, in the cold harsh light of losing all my savings or having my name bandied about in some nefarious crime ring, could I justify sharing my OOTDs for instant gratification? Will the “kudos” have been worth it when someone throws a bag over my head on my next jog around Prospect Park?

I’d been on a ghost tour two weeks before. My roommate Isabel works at the Merchant’s House Museum, one of the “most haunted buildings in New York” (according to whom I don’t know. I’d like to imagine there is some kind of elected board for that.) The house belonged (belongs…?!!) to the Tredwells, a wealthy Manhattan family who occupied it in life from 1835 to 1933. Eight of the Tredwells died in the house, some under violent circumstances (one fell down the stairs on her way to breakfast. Those stairs see considerable phantasmic activity.) The last surviving daughter, Gertrude, never changed a thing about the home’s decor following the death of her father. She preserved the 19th century interiors far beyond their fashion, a Mrs. Havisham sat festering in her proverbial wedding dress, stuck in the past, reticent to move on. A ghost even before death.

Isabel just looked over my shoulder at this and said “that’s the room where Gertrude died :)”

Isabel led our tour and she did an incredible job. She took on an entirely new vocal register, one an octave below the one I know and newly dripping with erudition and authority. She’d warned me before the tour that they’d been experiencing a volume of reports much higher than usual. The Tredwells had been considerably active, making themselves known to guides and guests alike. Black figures seen out of the corners of their eyes in the mother’s bedroom. A cool breeze on the back of their necks in foyer. A light switched on that Isabel swore she’d switched off. One little boy attested that he didn’t “feel so good” in Mr. Tredwell’s bedroom. That is textbook ghost shit.

I’ve never seen a ghost. I think they know I couldn’t handle it. That night at the Merchant’s House was looking to be no exception. But then in the kitchen, I heard one of the servant’s bells ring.

It turns out, reckoning with an acute crisis of identity in my hometown is just another ghost tour. My edges blur as I become my parent’s daughter again. Out of the corner of my eye I see a version of myself I thought I’d killed. The mirror in my childhood bathroom gives me body dysmorphia. We drive past UVA’s first-year dorms, the backdrop to a five-year bout of depression, and a cold chill goes up my spine. When my mom and I go for a run together and she tells me “your legs look so strong,” what I know objectively is a compliment makes me spiral downward instantly. A bell rings.

It was disappointing, unnerving to find these latent pieces of my being still undead. To look at them and to know objectively that they didn’t live with me anymore, that I’m happier than I’ve ever been and that I like myself and that my legs are strong and I’m grateful to them every time I run around. But that they lay dormant, if not with unfinished business, then maybe, like Gertrude, just too attached. I found comfort, if anything, in the belief that I don’t think the people who stole my passport would know what to make of this either.

So drama.

As Google had instructed me was my civic duty, I visited my local police precinct to file a report as soon as I got back to New York. I went straight after work, clutching a printed copy of my passport, my birth certificate, screenshots of the text messages from the deviants trying to ruin my life packed dutifully in a manila envelope. “I’m here to report a stolen passport” I told the nice policewoman. “Do you have your sealed letter from the consulate?” she asked. I did not. The Wordpress blog I scanned that afternoon had mentioned nothing about this. “Sorry, we can’t do anything for you. See, you might be trying to steal your identity.”

So the police couldn’t help me. And when I called the U.S. embassy, they had no idea what the police were talking about, either (I actually got patched through immediately to the “Ukraine Emergency Line.” The man was nice, but still unhelpful. He definitely had bigger fish to fry.) On the sunny side of this bureaucratic crossroads, though, my identity is still up for grabs. I can be the one to claim it. And when a light’s left on I’d sworn I’d switched off, I’ll say my hail marys and switch it off again. I ain’t afraid of no ghosts.

Pony Recommends:

New segment! Take these or leave them. Mostly, I just want to talk to y’all about what’s making me really happy lately in the hopes you’ll talk back.

1. Last weekend, I went to see Rose Matafeo perform her one-woman show “On and On and On” at the Bell House. Rose is the creator and star of one of my favorite rom-coms of my 20s, a TV series called “Starstruck,” and this, coupled with some really really good podcast appearances, has won her my dogged support for lyfe. Her standup didn’t disappoint at all, obviously. She’s at once easily confident and winningly self-deprecating in a way that made me feel that parasocial delusion of “no seriously if she knew me I think we’d be friends.” That is star-making stuff. She filmed the special and it will be on Netflix soon I think!

2. I’ve been talking about “East of Eden” to anyone who will listen and now that means you too! Please read it so we can talk about it. And if you only read one thing read the dedication.

3. My friend Isabelle (@picnic.knits) custom-made me this hat and now I’ve developed a sick anxious attachment to it. Like Linus and blanky. She’ll make you one too if you ask nicely! (Sorry if I’m wrong).

4. Next time you have friends over cook them this miso chicken and this cabbage. They’re both easy and delicious and they take the exact same amount of time in the oven.

5. “’Till Forever” by Labi Siffre at least five times in a row until I’m in the best mood of my life.

6. Jimmy Butler’s Architectural Digest Tour. Especially the part when he sings “Back That Azz Up.”

Love you mean it!