It appears that I do believe in ghosts. Walking about my old college campus this weekend I stumbled across a number of very familiar apparitions. No recollection could be as vivid as these specters seem to be. It seems that I see them with greater clarity on each visit to this haunted place.

Here you can see one such spirit captured plainly on film, standing to my left as I sit on the worn front steps of the infamous 22 Boyer Street house. He is the boy in bell bottom pants.Twenty-two Boyer was an authentic "House of the Rising Sun" back in 1978 when I was first lured inside as a lad. Amazon women, casually attired, pranced about in this dark and smoky labyrinth, swaying to tribal rhythms and reciting the dark wisdom of Nietzsche and Freud. These sirens appeared to thrive on a steady diet of cheap wine, cigarettes, and the still-beating hearts of young men.

At yet another old haunt on campus I encountered our young spirit again. He was an older and much wiser version, residing in perpetuity at the night watchman's post of Anderson Hall. The story has it that he had been working there late one winter night in '79 when a grey, but graceful old alumni passed through that very doorway. Fifty years before, the man explained, he had lived in the same dorm and had graduated Whitman to attend Harvard Medical School. Now a long retired doc, he was taking one last look at the old dorm where he had lived more than half a century before; the place where his grand story had begun.

At that very moment, I'm told, our young man became acutely aware that he was at the origin of the very same journey, with all of its joy and travails yet to unfold. He knew that this road would take him to the same moment fifty years hence. He realized, spellbound, that he was seeing himself as an old man. He was seeing himself at that time years distant when he would know that nostalgic longing to return to the wonderful state of beginning. The vertiginous sensation of being at both extreme points in a life in the same moment was so compelling that the moment was indelibly fixed in time for him, and him in the moment. As such, I've found this particular ghost to be a very dependable sight on my rare excursions back to the old school. It occurs to me that he knew, even then, that I would return to visit him.

This relationship between us may go on for years until the prophesy is fulfilled late one winter night when I, grey as a ghost myself, return for the last time. Sitting in his place will be another young man, flesh and blood, to take up the cross of obsession with beginning and ends.

ACROCINUS