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"Starlight, Star Bright, we hope to see a ghost tonight!"
We were kids back in Iowa and we'd shout that phrase like an anthem when the summery dusk had swept through the neighborhood. I'm sure that some neighbors, the older early-to-bed-early-to-rise folks, were often startled out of a peaceful slumber when the late evening crackled with our twilight call to arms.
"Starlight, star bright" was actually nothing more than a game of tag in the dark. But it went a step farther. It gave character and definition to the child who was "it." He (or she -- we were not a misogynous neighborhood) was not just "it," but played the role of a menacing ghost who lurked among shadows in a bushy thicket or behind Mrs. Orsborn's white-washed garage.
When the children came roaming, hoping to see a ghost, "it" would pop out and run down whichever players he could catch and tag them. I'm not sure what the end result of all this nonsense was.
There probably was none because as I recall, the game was always left unfinished after mothers and fathers on doorsteps throughout the neighborhood, with hands cupped around their mouths, hollered out the names of their respective children, serving notice that the hour was late and it was time to come home.
"Jimmy! YooHoo! It's getting late, son!"....."Nancy dear! Time to come in!"...."Ann! Your milk and cookies are ready!"...."Wendel! Hope you get home before the serial killer comes out!"
Darn, and just as the elderly neighbors were once again settling in for the night. Those folks just couldn't buy a decent night's sleep in the summer.
Ghosts, or the notion of ghosts, entered in to a lot of our youthful games and adventures. On Saturday afternoons, we went to the movies to see the latest ghost or monster film and reveled in being terrified out of our wits. And when we camped in the backyard, no sleep-out was complete without exchanging spooky tales and bits of ghostly lore. We loved being scared!
I'm a somewhat spiritual person and I've never discounted the possibility of visits from another dimension. Some of this may be rooted in my Irish Catholic upbringing where stories of visions and sightings of long-dead saints walking the earth were commonly discussed.
However, it was actually my dad's side of the family, the English Protestant side, that made some pretty marvelous claims on the subject of spiritualism.
The most popular story was that of my Grandma Potter's sister, Aunt Fan. Fan had the uncanny ability to look into the bottom of a teacup and foretell the future by studying the tea leaves.
It is Potter family legend that one morning Aunt Fan sat in the kitchen of my grandparents' farmhouse and told my grandmother that she saw a man, blind and bloody, coming in to her life. Not long after that, Grandpa made his way to the house after a morning of blowing up tree stumps with blasting caps. I don't know if that was his job or if he just enjoyed blowing things up with blasting caps.
Now, apparently one of the charges appeared to be a dud so Grandpa approached the stump and it promptly exploded in his face. When he stumbled into the kitchen, his face was bathed in blood and his eyes were filled with dirt and tree stump shrapnel.
Coincidence? You decide. All I know is that Aunt Fan was a decent God-fearing woman who obviously had psychic powers of some sort. Or it could have been hallucinations from drinking too much tea.
Fact or fantasy, stories like these made childhood fun. It was a part of growing up.
Even when I was in high school, we delighted in ghostly legends, real and imagined. There was a house over in Fullerton, Nebraska (where we moved to in 1964) that could have been the model for any haunted house movie, as old and ramshackle as it was with weeds growing up around it. It sat away from the road, back in the trees, on the very edge of town.
An old man and his spinster daughter lived there, so they say. Although we never saw the gentleman (or the daughter, for that matter), we dubbed him "Candleman" because it was said that if you stood along the lonely road in the dark and watched long enough, you would see the flame of a candle flickering about the inside of the house, floating from window to window.
Apparently, the guy was not a supernatural being, he just had no electricity. And on many dark, moonless nights we wandered down that road and kept vigil. We never did see the candle or the man (or the daughter, for that matter), but it made for a great story.
I'm not sure what it was in our psyches that found spooks and spirits to be so attractive, but the supernatural world certainly seemed to be an inherent part of our culture growing up. Nowadays kids seem to opt for the cheap thrills of graphic horror movies or video games, the slash and gore stuff, that requires only Hollywood's special effects rather than the viewer's imagination.
Or maybe it's just that kids today take no pleasure in classical old-fashioned scares because they're daily being been exposed to the reality checks of our modern age -- of nuclear and chemical threat, outbreaks of strange diseases, and terrorism in our own backyard.
Perhaps back in my day it was just plain fun to let ourselves be scared of things that go bump in the night because we knew that those bumpy night things, along with ghouls and ghosts and goblins were made up and weren't really to be feared.
Sadly, the world these days has become a terrifying place and contrary to what Franklin Roosevelt once told Americans, there is plenty to fear besides fear itself.
I often wonder what Aunt Fan would have to tell us about our future if she were alive today and read our tea leaves. Maybe late on some summery night, when the moon is hidden in the shadows of the universe and a warm whispery breeze murmurs like a lost soul, I'll ask her.
I'll let you know what she says.
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