This is my legacy. I’ve become a part of this city’s living history. When I die, I’ll still be here—immortalized on this wall—forever.
I am here.
Do you want to get haunted?
I’ll hear it whispered now and again when I walk down Grace Street, passing by faceless strangers, their hoodies pulled over their heads so they look like grim reapers.
“Psst,” the dealers all sigh and murmur. “Wanna get haunted?”
What is a ghost? Is it a shadow of our past clinging to our present? I believe it’s our addictions. The habits we form that end up consuming us if we allow them to take over.
You’re here because you’re haunted. This circle of foldout chairs is our campfire. This is where we share our ghost stories. Think of it as Apparitions Anonymous.
I’ll go first:
Hi. My name is Erin and I am haunted. Here’s my ghost story: I’m living proof that you can survive Ghost.
Living proof. That never sounds quite right, does it? The life I had before I started using is long gone. I’m not that person anymore. She is dead, for sure, so—when I say survive, I can’t help but hear the hollowness in my own words.
I barely escaped my dependency on Ghost. The undertow, the supernatural pull of it, nearly killed me. Even now, I still find myself wanting to get haunted. I created a black hole within myself and I hurt the people who loved me the most. I lost everything. Everything that could’ve defined me is gone, good as ghosted.
I did more than just pull back the veil and peer through to the other side. I fell in: all the way to rock bottom. I should be dead. For a brief moment, I actually was.
I’ve seen what’s on the other side. It’s gray and cold and endless. An ocean of ash.
There is no light at the end of the tunnel. No angels singing. No pearly gates. There is only this life. Once it’s gone, our only hope for the afterlife is that our memories remain in the hearts of those still living. Those are the vessels we inhabit. I don’t know if you can find comfort in that, but that’s all I hold on to. That’s the only truth there is, like Peggy Lee sang, so let’s keep dancing.
My parting gift from my parents was access to the family lawyer. My father did this to keep his name out of the papers, but still. You want to talk about lawsuits? Imagine being the drug-addled subject of a massive arson trial. I’ll forever be known as the addict who set a housing development on fire. Manslaughter was a miracle. Most of my charges were reduced as long as I agreed to enter a treatment program. White privilege in action.
Rehab saved my life. It allowed me to heal. I gave up Ghost. I made a choice: I want to live. That right there—that simple sentence—is the first step. Life can begin with those four words. But you have to believe.
Now I help others who are haunted. I started Richmond Revenants Recovery—RRR—a few months back. I wanted to reclaim revenant: someone who returns from the dead. If that’s not spot-on for a person with addiction crawling out from the sinkhole of their haunting, I don’t know what is.
As a recovering addict of Ghost myself, I feel like I can be a counselor to others who are just beginning the process of pulling free from their phantoms. We meet in church basements throughout the city: consecrated soil for people with substance use disorder. I pull out the foldout chairs and set them up in a circle, just like the ring we’re sitting in now. This is our hallowed ground. We’re safe here.
I start our meetings off by speaking about my own path to recovery. How I’m still on it. How I relapsed. How I came this close to haunting that house forever. I could’ve easily been just another phantom wandering its halls, drifting through its rooms, staring out its windows.
I’ve met so many wonderful people these last few months. People who lost so much. It’s our task—my goal—to help these people rediscover something worth living for again. That takes time. I say, let it. As long as it takes.
We need to find a better way to live with our ghosts. Ignoring them gets you nowhere. After I cleaned myself up, I realized the best way—the only way, really—to keep living is to acknowledge the past. I have to try, at least. It’s the only way to coexist now.
So I look. I acknowledge their pain the only way I can: I let them know they are seen. That they are not forgotten. I don’t turn away anymore. I look at them head-on. In their eyes.
Ghost won’t let us look away anymore. We have to learn to live with them. Our dead.
Ghost stories spread. They pass from one person to the next—Hey, you heard about this new drug? Hey, you know where I can score some Ghost? Hey, you know where I can get haunted?—until everybody’s heard of it. This is something new and old all at once: a strung-out séance, a planchette in a pill. The media has caught on now, reporting harrowing tales of drug-addicted teens putting together “bake sales.” This isn’t stopping. There have already been reports of a dozen strange overdoses across the country—and those numbers are only climbing.
If anything, Ghost is just beginning.
I’m here to tell you—all of you—that you can beat this addiction. I’m living proof. I chose life. You can, too. All you have to say is four simple words: I want to live.
Being here is another step to getting your life back on track. There’s more work to be done, believe me, tons more…but you’ve already made the hardest decision of all.
You chose life over death.
Now let’s get living.
* * *
—
The housing market is finally crawling out from its slump. Shady Acres had to be completely rebuilt from the ground up. Thirty people died that day. Some of those people were my friends.
The story I told the police, and eventually the barrage of lawyers, was a watered-down version of what actually happened. No Ghost. Just some junkies getting in over their head, how their brains were so fried they didn’t even realize the house they were squatting in was on fire. Apparently that’s an easier pill for these insurance companies to swallow. The initial developers sold the property to a new group of investors: a clean slate. The developers razed most of the properties in the development, tearing down the burnt skeletons to build new, sturdy houses.
I only return to Hopewell when I’m at my lowest. Sometimes I won’t even realize I’m doing it until I’m turning onto the interstate. I’ll find myself driving around the housing development—just to see. Any trace of what had happened here a year ago is long gone now.
They don’t even call the neighborhood Shady Acres anymore, can you believe that? It’s called Greenfield now. Like changing the name is all it takes to wipe its history clear. You can take the tombstones away, but that doesn’t mean the graves aren’t still buried below.
I thought about changing my name at one point, too, but I know I’ll never be able to run away from who I am. I’ll always be Erin Hill, just as Greenfield will always be Shady Acres to me. It’s what takes root in the ground that I really worry about. The skin is just skin. But what about the roots that reach down deep, grabbing hold of the earth, lingering out of sight? Sometimes that shit grows back. Any person with addiction will tell you: the urge never truly goes away. It’s always there, biding its time when you’re at your weakest. Then it whispers into your ear—
You wanna get haunted?
I show up for Moving Day, which is the day all the new home-owners will move into Greenfield. Completely cornball. You have to see it to believe it.
I park my car further off from the development and walk the rest of the way. Green and white balloons are tethered to the main gate. They whip frantically about whenever a breeze blows through. Each mailbox has its own balloon, too. There’s a welcoming committee, hired helpers wearing green T-shirts going door-to-door with freshly baked brownies to give folks a feeling of entering a cozy, quaint neighborhood full of friends and family.