Ghosts

My father came to me in a dream. What am I supposed to make of that?

Photo by Aidan Roof

A few nights ago, my father came to me in a dream. He was right there in the room with me, wearing his stained painter’s pants, the ones he always wore when he was doing chores around the house. “You’re going to be all good, David,” he said. “It’s all going to be okay.” I’m uncertain to what he was referring. Still, I’ll take it. We all want to be “okay.”

I’m sure you’ve had deceased friends, family, partners who have come to you in your dreams. Your mind working overtime? Are they ghosts moving through the passageway of those who have left us?

It does not matter if you believe in the supernatural or the afterlife or whatever you want to call it, but one has to agree that there is much that is unexplainable in the natural structure and realities that we as mortals can comprehend, meaning there is likely much we do not understand and likely never will.

With this I give you “Ghosts.”

Below is an essay I wrote several years ago that was included in my memoir The Consequence of Stars. In it I wonder aloud about the afterlife, the ghosts, the spirits that may be somehow lingering. So, with Halloween approaching, and the idea of spirits, visions, apparitions all around us, I thought I would offer my experience, my ghost stories, if you will. This is a longer post than my usual, but stay with me. I think you’ll find that the story may remind you of your own experiences with the afterlife.

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“Ghosts”

My grandmother died on a Sunday morning. But in the earlier hours of that day, she had been seen walking away from my parent’s home where she had been living for almost a year. It was a slow stride through the backyards, just after sunrise, across the next-door neighbor’s lot and down over the hill, and out of sight. At least this is what my family had been told.

Nanny, as we called her, moved in with my parents, my sister, and me after a series of health issues—hardening of the arteries and nagging heart problems—all related to her love of Lucky Strikes. A cup of black coffee and a cigarette was break- fast. Her cigarette case was never far out of reach. Not until the end did her smoking appear to slow her down. She had a great deal of spunk for many years, chasing my sister and me around the kitchen table, pretending to have a booger on the end of her finger and threatening to wipe it on us. She offered me my first hot tea when I was about five years old. Defying my mother’s rules, Nanny snuck four scoops of sugar and a load of milk into the black tea. How could a kid not love it? Then there was the time she stood up to the bullies in the neighborhood. The “big kids,” as we called them, were teasing my friends and me while we played on our home’s front porch. They called us names and threw sticks and rocks. Nanny saw them from the picture window and marched outside to the porch, rolled up the sleeve of her blouse, and made a muscle. She had a pretty good one, bulging from her sinewy arms. Nanny never said a word to those bullies, just flexed her bicep. The bullies ran and never came back.

Nanny had been feeling particularly ill in the days before that Sunday. Doctors had continually warned her about the cigarettes, but, honestly, by then, there probably wasn’t much point. The damage had been done. Saturday night, as my mother later told me, Nanny went to bed early, complaining of fatigue. The next morning, my mother found her dead in her bed. Doctors say she probably died quietly in her sleep.

Walking home from Catholic Sunday school, I found my father waiting for me at the bottom of our long, steep driveway.

“Go,” he said, pointing down the street toward where my other grandmother, his mother, and great aunt lived. I asked why. “Please go to Granny’s,” he said. Dad’s eyes were red. His shoulders slumped. I did what he insisted but walked slowly to Granny’s house, uncertain of what I might find there. I picked up a stick from one of the yards and dragged it on the concrete street. I threw a pebble at a squirrel. I watched a crow on the high branch of a tree, standing proudly and cawing at the sky.

My granny and Aunt Maggie gave me sugared peaches in a bowl and sat me down in front of the television in the living room. I could hear them whispering in the kitchen, one of them sniffling every few seconds. An old black-and-white John Wayne movie was being broadcast, but I wasn’t paying much attention.

Eventually, my father came through the rear door that led to the kitchen. There were more whispers, and someone said, “Oh my.” Then silence. My eyes were still on John Wayne when my father called my name.

I don’t remember who told me Nanny was dead. It might have been my grandmother, possibly Aunt Maggie. I am nearly certain, however, that it wasn’t my father. Later in my twenties I learned how sensitive my father was, how emotional he could get, although he hid much of it. So, when I remember this, I cannot imagine my father telling me Nanny was gone.

Days later, after the wake and the funeral, my mother was gardening in the front yard when the lady who lived next door called to her from her front stoop. The woman had been to Nanny’s wake. “How are you doing, Gloria?” she asked my mother. My mother responded like most do. “I’m all right,” she said, although not really meaning it. The neighbor then asked if it would be okay to share a story about Nanny, one she said she didn’t feel comfortable revealing at the funeral.

The morning of my grandmother’s death, the neighbor had been washing dishes at her kitchen sink. Above her was a window that looked out to the backyards of the homes on the street. It was quiet and she was alone. She scrubbed a few dishes and occasionally looked out to her patio to watch the wrens eat from a feeder. In one of those glances, she spotted someone, a figure, walking across the backyards. At first, she told my mother, she wasn’t able to determine who it was, so she continued to watch. This is curious, she thought. It’s so early in the day. The figure moved with deliberate steps through one yard and past a fence and a row of pines to another yard. The figure then slowed and turned to look over her shoulder for a moment. That’s when the neighbor says she saw who it was. My Nanny. Virginia Warren was out at the first light of day, walking through the back lawns and away from our home. Why would she be out there, the neighbor wondered. She’s been ill. Is she going to the store for cigarettes? She’s not well enough to be doing this. She was right; Nanny was not well enough. She never would have attempted such a walk. The neighbor said she kept her eyes on the figure as the woman, my Nanny, walked out of sight.

“I didn’t want to tell you right away,” the neighbor told my mother. “I thought maybe I was seeing things.”

The neighbor said she finished her dishes, made some coffee, and settled in to read the Sunday newspaper, still con- templating what she had seen. In less than an hour, she saw flashing red lights in the driveway of my parent’s home. Nanny’s body was in her bed, no sign of having gone out, no sign of having left.

I’m not sure what I think of ghosts, but whenever the conversation turns to apparitions and the afterlife, I tell the story of my Nanny.

***

In the summer of 2011, I lived in Jack Kerouac’s home in Orlando, an old tin-roof cottage in the College Park neighborhood of the city. He lived there with his mother just after On the Road was published. In a tiny back room with one window that looked out to the yard to a fruitful orange tree in the rear of the house, Kerouac wrote The Dharma Bums. The New York Times interviewed him in that room. There are photos from the newspaper framed and hung on the walls. On a small wooden desk near the window, I set up my space for a three-month stay, one I had been awarded as a writer-in-residence. I worked every early morning at that desk on a manuscript, and after a couple of hours, I would make coffee and wheat pancakes, nourish myself, then return to writing for another hour or so. In midmorning, I would break before the Florida sun began to burn and walk through the neighborhood, stop for coffee at Downtown Credo, a non-profit coffee shop, and read the local papers. Sometimes I rode my bike around Lake Silver.

After a few days staying in the house and reading about the frenetic nights Kerouac spent in that back room writing, madly typing his words in the same space I had claimed for the summer, I wondered if his spirit might be hovering in the corners. At the time he’d lived there, he had taken to Zen Buddhism, mixing the teachings with his Catholicism, and had begun to mediate, although he had written that he wasn’t so good at it. His friend, the poet, Gary Snyder, had helped him understand the contemplative, inner process, but Kerouac apparently could never reach the depth of the discipline that Snyder had prescribed. Still, he tried. Did the best he could. And I too had tried. I had experimented in silent moments, trying to quiet my mind. Like Kerouac, I was merely a struggling student, a freshman with a lot to learn. But I wondered if meditation might be the way to connect with whatever ghost might be lingering in that house.

One early morning, before beginning to write, I sat on the twin bed in the room and crossed my legs. I rested my hands, palms up, on my knees, and closed my eyes. I took breath after unhurried, deliberate breath, my muscles slowly melting, tightness and stiffness gently lifting away. My difficulty with the discipline was the hard work of forgetting time, dismissing the rush of my thoughts. But for whatever reason, that morning was different. It came easier.

“Jack,” I whispered, “if you are in the room, let me know.” I took in air, let it out gradually, and did it again.

“I thank you, Jack, for this time here, this little room, and if your creative energy remains, I wonder if you might offer it to me.”

If I had been executing the process well, I would not have heard the chirp of birds outside the window or the muffled engine of a garbage truck traveling past.

“Any sign, Jack. Anything.”

I took in one deep breath, filled my lungs, and slowly puffed out the air, counting silently down from ten. I sank my body further into the mattress, attempting to make myself heavy and at the same time feather light. I felt my heart pump in my chest. It was not the thump of anxious beating but, instead, a tender rhythm.

“Jack?”

Silence took over. I remained cross-legged on the bed for another ten, maybe fifteen minutes, I suspected. For three days in a row, I added this ritual to my morning. I stopped for a few days and tried again a month later, a few more times after that, and then one last time on my final morning at the house in mid-August. Still, there was nothing, no sign, not the faintest indication that Jack was anywhere near.

***

A few years after my time in Orlando, I was offered office space in Ernest Hemingway’s birthplace home in Oak Park, Illinois outside Chicago. I was asked to help develop a literary journal for the Hemingway Foundation. Questions are frequently asked about my time at the old Victorian home. Was he really born there? Didn’t he famously hate Oak Park? What book did he write there? (None of them.) But one inquiry tops all others: Have you seen his ghost?

My workspace was in a freshly constructed writer’s room in the house’s attic, on the same floor where it’s believed Ernest played as a child. You can’t help considering him there. The photographs of Ernest as a very young boy are scattered throughout the home, and one can easily imagine his presence. But a ghost? My office door was closed when I worked there, so if a ghost were to show himself, he’d have to slip through the wall, something ghosts are said to do quite well. It would be such a good story to tell, a spirit sighting in the old house. Ernie showed up to say hello, offered some writing tips, invited me deep sea fishing, brought me a drink. But it never happened. Ernie never revealed himself in any sensory way.

Sometime in the early 1980s, I discovered an old typewriter in an antique shop in Zelienople, a small town in Western Pennsylvania, not far from where I grew up. I snatched it up because it was, I believed, the same make and model of a typewriter Hemingway used at his homes in Key West and Cuba. He was known for writing standing up and frequently, if not always, in longhand. But he did type, mainly when drafting his stories, and in Key West the word is, he used a Corona portable. There’s some debate about the exact model and whether the typewriter on display in his museum-home in Key West was truly his or a copy.

In my home on a small side table in the basement office sits the portable Corona I found years ago. One night, some months after beginning work at the Hemingway house, I had a dream. I have many dreams, or I should say I remember many of my dreams. Some are more than odd. I call them my “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” dreams, including the Plastacine porters. I’ve dreamed of pigs dressed as Nazis, a knife fight with a fish, and my most euphoric, the ability to wave my hands and create magnificent gardens. This dream, however, was about my typewriter. Someone was snapping at the keys. Tap, tick, whack. The writer was manic, attacking the letters. I could hear the clack, clack, clack in my dream or the semi-sleep I may have been in. It was a fleeting dream, the kind you experience in the misty space between REM and awakening, but still, I was certain the sounds were real.

Mr. Hemingway?

There was no other context to the dream. No narrative that made sense. No second act, just the typing.

Ernie?

No ghost at the Hemingway birthplace home, but maybe there was one at mine. But why? If one believes in such things, why would the spirit of Hemingway show up at my home and not his?

Hemingway’s ghost has been seen in Key West, coming out of Sloppy Joe’s bar, and more legendary sightings have been documented at his house there. He walks outside on the balcony, and neighbors say they sometimes see the figure of Papa looking out a second-floor window. And they’ve heard the typewriter. Tap, click, whack. Clack, clack, clack.

Maybe this is simply silly talk meant for tourists. Or maybe it isn’t. Hemingway owned the Key West house from 1931 to 1961, although he didn’t live there for all thirty years. In 1939, he divorced his wife, Pauline, and went to live in Cuba. Still, Key West was a good place for him. His children were raised in the home and many of his novels were written there. Maybe that’s why apparitions appear in Key West and not at the birthplace house. It’s a simple thing, really. Ghosts hang out where they feel most at home. For Hemingway it was the house on Whitehead Street. For Kerouac it wasn’t the home in Orlando. For Jack, home was on the road.

Why, then, was there night typing at my home? It’s just a dream, David. Only a dream. But after reading about so many stories of those who have experienced unexplained sounds in their homes, noises that appear in dreams, I began to turn my thinking upside down. Why couldn’t it be real?

There have been hundreds of stories of spirit visitors seen at the bedsides of dying persons. Deathbed visits were rarely mentioned in scientific literature until the late 1920s. Sir William Barrett, a professor of physics at the Royal College of Science in Dublin, became interested when his wife, a doctor, came home one evening and told him about a woman patient who died the day after giving birth. Just before she died, the woman sat up in bed and insisted her father had come to visit and to take her away. This sparked Barrett’s research, and in 1926 he published Deathbed Visions, documenting dozens of cases, and in each one, the person dying saw someone who had died before them. The visit was usually short, five minutes at best, and it didn’t matter if the dying person was religious or believed at all in the afterlife. Many might explain this away. The patients were delirious in their illnesses, they were using strong medications, they might be old and suffering delusions, or they wished for the visit so strongly that they simply believed their wish.

In the days before my mother passed away in a nursing home, dementia tearing at her brain, she insisted my father, who had died some six years before, had come to visit her in her room. I never disputed the visits. It was her reality, and she deserved that. But still, there was the dementia, so some could easily point to her deteriorating condition to explain the visions.

Those who study paranormal activity believe there are at least two types of ghosts, the intelligent and the residual. The intelligent spirit is the one who will interact with you, call your name, move an object, throw something. Might they also type? The residuals are those whose energy remains in the place most familiar to them—a home, a favorite bar, an artist’s studio. Hemingway in Key West? Paranormal scientists say these ghosts are usually confused or cannot acknowledge, for whatever reason, that they have passed on.

There is no hard evidence that totally refutes these stories, just as there is nothing that completely proves them, either.

But does it matter? Proof is overrated. Faith and spirit have their place, don’t they, the place of ghosts? What is certain is that if one believes spirits are real, in whatever way that manifests, or that energy is forever, in whatever form it sparks, then it would make sense to believe in the Hemingway sightings in Key West, typewriters clacking in the dark, or a grandmother taking one last walk from her home to a new home with the angels.

My Nanny was buried with a carton of Lucky Strikes. I hope she’s smoking slowly. Eternity is a long time.

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David W. Berner is the author of several books of award-winning fiction and memoir. His latest, Daylight Saving Time is available now. His novella, American Moon will be published by Regal House Publishing in 2026.