The ghost and Mr. Beer

There’s a band called Muse that’s become pretty popular over the past several years. They’re not really my cup of tea -- too much pop, to little grit and growl -- but every time the singer opens his mouth I have to smile, because his falsetto sounds like someone’s bad impression of a prototypical ghost.

Think Casper singing over bad rock music, only alive and with a crooked upper lip. That’s Muse in a nutshell.

The thought occurred to me as a friend was showing me smartphone video he took at a recent Muse concert in Boston. This particular “musing” (zing!) caught me off guard, because with the obvious exception of Halloween, I never think about ghosts. Ever. Not even when I’m watching old movies starring actors who have been dead longer than disco pants.

Because I don’t believe in them, see. I consider ghosts to be as fictional as Huckleberry Finn and bad doughnuts. A human invention no different than Willy Wonka. A myth.

Which isn’t to say they’re not cool. They are in fact quite pleasing, in a goosebumpy, flesh-crawly kind of way. Belief in ghosts dates back to ancient times, appearing in Homer’s “Odyssey” as well as the old Hebrew Bible, so the whole concept has a very old-world feel to it; when your imagination attempts to explain what’s going bump in the night, you’re tapping into something that has a lot of collective weight and human history behind it. There are times when I sort of wish they were indeed a real phenomenon, until I remember that fiction usually portrays them as menacing creatures prone to possessions and terrorizing. Then I realize they’re jerks and turn my attention to tangible concerns, like the guy who walks through downtown Portland with the bush-like Duck Dynasty beard and the “Gone Fishin’” trucker hat. He’s a lot scarier than any ol’ ghost, trust me.

I’ll say this: I sometimes miss believing.

Flash back about 20 years or so and I wasn’t such a skeptic. One February I was staying up late at night in my friend’s basement; basement hang-outs are how a lot of ghost stories start. We were celebrating his birthday with a small coterie of fellow dweebs. I say “dweebs” because our idea of a party was playing car racing games on a Playstation and depriving ourselves of sleep to the point of drooling delirium, fueling ourselves with case upon case of the highly-caffeinated soft drink Jolt Cola. Jolt Cola is also how a lot of ghost stories start.

The later it got, the loopier we became, and the more we started swapping stories about “things we’d seen” (or heard or felt). Those types of conversations always seem goofy during the light of day, slightly embarrassing in fact, but past the witching hour anything goes. One of us could have dropped the dubious revelation that we’d played gin rummy with the ghost of Sigmund Freud, and the rest of the gang would have stared at him believingly: “Yeah, man, I can totally see that happening!” Like, whoa. Far out, dude.

Approaching three in the morning, there was a collective sense that all of our respective skins were crawling at roughly the same intensity. Adding to the chill factor was a sliding glass door to an outdoor pool area, which showed us the stillborn night at its deadest and blackest. The tales were getting taller, our eyes a little wider. “Joe” remembered hearing the ghost of his grandmother traipsing across the living room carpet one wintry night. “Logan” thought he once had a sighting in an old New Hampshire graveyard.

As typically happens in these scenarios, we eventually fancied there were muted ghost sounds issuing from within that very house. This was the point at which fatigue and caffeine conspired to make our brains thrum like little window-mounted air conditioners. A creak from the floorboards above our heads and a dozen eyes all snapped to the ceiling, our breaths in silent limbo behind our lips. A hiss from the radiator and we flinched like startled cats. A faint sound of wood settling on the basement steps and we were all up on our feet, limbs akimbo, rushing to the stairwell to peek up at the heavily-shadowed kitchen door. And for a millisecond, we all could have sworn we saw a shape: a colorless, translucent old lady in an evening gown, silently looking back at us over her shoulder before dissipating in an ethereal, tea-kettle mist.

Did I mention we’d all eaten a ton of cake, too?

Tellingly, these “sightings” always take place when our minds are at their most impressionable. There’s a story my father loves to tell about a night when he arrived home late after closing up shop at the tavern he owned. Walking in at around 2 a.m., he noticed a man in the living room with his feet propped up on the recliner, watching an infomercial on television. Dad didn’t think much of it at first; my grandfather was known to pop in unexpectedly in those days and plop himself down in front of the boob tube, so it wasn’t an altogether alarming sight. But after packing away his things, my father approached the man, only to see his form slowly disappear, vanishing like water vapor -- leaving a propped-up footrest and a flickering TV screen as the only evidence he was there.

It’s a cool story. It’s a story you want to believe. But what Dad always leaves out is that he used to pound Heinekens by the case. You’d see some ghosts too if you had a 12-rack of suds in your gut.

I remain unflinching in my disbelief, but there’s a part of me that still hopes to see an apparition, draped in chains, leaning against a basement boiler or trudging through mud-black cemetery gates. If nothing else, it’d make for one hell of a story. In the meantime, there’s always Muse.