In a recent conversation about New Orleans with Cabbage (a person, not the cruciferous veg. That shouldn't be a necessary explanation, but like... just in case), she mentioned that she would love to do a ghost tour, and I was like....ooooh, don't talk to me about that, I will ruin your fun times. She said, "ok, I won't talk to you about that, then!" and so for reasons, I of course sent her my blog about the Pharmacy Museum in Nola to highlight how my research ruins at least one New Orleans ghost story.
I was talking to my wifey about this and I mentioned how I do not at all discount that the pharmacy might actually be haunted as fuck, but if it is, it isn't for the shitty reasons that all of the ghost tours talk about, it's because like...sometimes shit is haunted. Or it feels haunted? Or we collectively agree that something is haunted? Sometimes haunted is just a fuckin' vibe, and like...I fuck with that aesthetic.
I have never quite figured out if I believe in ghosts. I have had a lifetime of experiences that I do not understand how to qualify, I have had my husband present for some of them, Amber has been present for one, actually most of my experiences I have no been alone for, which is nice, but also means there's a possibility that what we're dealing with is not so much a haunting, or a ghostie, but rather a group delusion. And let me tell you, I have a history with those. The ghostly kind, specifically.
I have discussed my core friend group in elementary school before: Janice, Daveda, and Tanesha. The besties. But we also had offshoot groups. Janice and Taneesha had their own groups, and Daveda and I had our own group. In our little subsquad was our friend Kim. I am so close to remembering her last name...I think her name was Kimberly Hill? I can remember my other friends...just gonna go ahead and put their childhood names on blast to prove that my brain is a steel trap of useless shit: Janice Nieves, Tanesha Smith, Daveda Maharaj. I decided to look them all up...which is wild, considering we were friends in elementary school and surely they would all be very hard to find...but I found Janice, I found Daveda, and I found so many results for Tanesha Smith that it is impossible for me to say I found her. But two out of three isn't bad!
The more i think about it, the more positive I am that yes, her name WAS Kim Hill, so I tried to find her, as well. And similarly to Tanesha, I had no luck at all. But fuck, apparently neither do other people named Kim Hill who were born in between 1983 and 1985. Lots of those bitches are just straight up fucking dead now. Is she one of them? I have no idea. What sucks is like...Kim had a very recognizable face, because she was born without cartilege in her nose. When those fuckin' dumb ass narcs running DARE came into our classroom to talk to us about how dangerous drugs are, one of the side effects of cocaine they were discussing was degeneration of the nasal passages. A boy in our class named Joey shouted out, "I guess Kim is a cocaine addict!" and almost everybody in the class laughed while Kim sat in her seat crying next to Daveda and myself, who both yelled at Joey to shut up (it is worth noting that NOBODY got in trouble for that. Joey was just...allowed to say that shit to someone in class, and everybody else was allowed to laugh about it. Fuck Mrs. Nathanson, and fuck those cop pieces of shit) and then just kind of like...rubbed Kim's hands flaccidly in some half baked attempt to console her. Is it possible Kim got plastic surgery? Sure. She was made fun of endlessly by our classmates, and I honestly think this is why my friend group was made up of the people it was made up of: all of us were social outcasts for one reason or another.
And I think one of those reasons was we were all fuckin' creepy as hell. Well, we weren't so much creepy as we were always talking about hauntings and shit like that. Weirdos, I think, is the legal term. Though I think we would have been solidly in the zeitgeist now. I bet we would have been MAJOR horoscope girlies.
I wish I wish I WISH I knew how this haunting mass hallucination shit started, but my memory is entirely wasted away, I just know that Kim, Daveda, and myself all started telling a group story about being collectively haunted by a ghost named Sue.
Girl, Sue got AROUND when it came to haunting us, and I never really appreciated how like...Sue, as a ghost, was omnipresent. Sue would hit us all up, on the same night, around the same time, and damn if I don't admire a coordinated effort. Sue was out on those Coconut Grove streets busting myths and stereotypes about ghosts being trapped in one space, except she wasn't. We all made her up. I think? I know I made her up. As I write about this, I think that Kim was the person who initially started talking about being haunted by a ghost named Sue, and I am almost almost ALMOST positive that I, being the fucking diva and hog of the limelight that I am, refused to play second fiddle to a fucking ghost, and I started saying she was haunting me, too, and I think Daveda probably got tired of being left out of story time. So like...maybe poor Kim was leegit being haunted by a dead girl and I was like, OH YEAH ME TOO, SAME GHOST.
I knew I was full of shit, but like, I started to drink my own Ghost Girl Sue Kool Aid and I was seeing signs everywhere. I would come to school armed with stories about how the hair in my bathtub spelled S-U-E, a sure message from this travelling spirit. Honestly, this was the bulk of my encounters with Sue. Just fuckin' hairy remnants left in my bathtub. And honestly, sometimes it was just an S, and if I had to venture a guess, the S hairs was around when I started to think OH MY GOD, I AM BEING HAUNTED BY SUE! In reality, I was just losing a shitload of hair all the time and I think loose strands just naturally want to form S shapes all over the place. Or maybe I'm STILL being haunted by Sue. And so are you. And so are we. Sue is everywhere, we are hers. Or theirs. I don't know Sue. Kim would come to recess ready to talk about hearing Sue whisper her name....and I mean, Sue was whispering SUE, not KIM. Sue was about as amateur hour for a ghost as you get. All she did was whisper her own name, and spell out her own name is fuckin' hair. Kim and Daveda grabbed on to the SUE in hair thing, too. I think Kim was the one of us who saw the word SUE spelled in hair behind her toilet. I don't think that the genius behind that whopper was me, though I wish it had been. One of us also stole some shit straight out of Poltergeist, because there was a ghost at recess story time hour recounting of Sue's ghostly presence coming through the static of a television, though I think...I THINK...all she did was whisper, "Suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuueeeeeeeeeeeeeeee" through the static.
And this shit scared the Bee Jesus (praise bee) out of me. I bought the stories Kim and Daveda told, I bought into my own bullshit, and I was deliciously scared when we had Sue conversations. And I just want to make it clear that this was around the same time that Kim, Daveda, and I had a project together, we decided to make papier mache, and I fucking ate half the flour mash we used as paste. So like. I was not operating with a full deck of cards.
I don't know how or why we stopped talking about Sue. I wonder if the three of us, Kim with her real haunting, Daveda going in full bore on whatever Kim and I said, me with a belly full of flour paste, ever thought to have a seance? Did we clear our own ghost? Did we end our good fun? Was Kim legitimately being haunted and Daveda and I were low key mocking her without knowing it? Maybe that's why I can't fucking find Kim. Sue devoured her. Slowly, and over time, with strands of hair that spelled out her name. Somewhere Kim is dead under a pile of S shaped hairs. I didn't find an obit with THAT cause of death, but surely it's out there?
I wonder if this is why I am so eager to debunk the ghost stories of others? Perhaps I know my gullibility mixed with my toxic trait of one-upmanship and diva desires will have me going, wait what? You say there's loads of beheaded people moaning and wailing in Leap Castle? NO FUCKING WAY, those same ghosts are hanging out at my house! Look, one spelled its name in hair!
If you're anything like me, and you love to debunk ghost stories, there's this middling book called Ghostland that might provide you more joy than it provided me.
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