Skull of Bullets, Hear Our Cry

Do you believe in ghosts?

Are they the monsters under your bed, or are they the stuff you feel peeling the hairs off your neck to stand on end? 

Or are they Samara's long, stringy hair leading the clay-mation way out of a television screen?

Or are they the silence itself at the end of time?

Ghosts, to me, are closely linked to religion. There's a physical aspect to them, but there's also a dogmatic aspect to them. Some people get swept away in the stories, in the threats that haunt them; some people taunt the legends and dare them to come out at night and do their worst. 

I like to think that I stay firmly in the middle.

I remember when I visited the Winchester Mystery House--I must have been something like thirteen or fourteen, or maybe twelve--but I was a kid, still religious and still certain that magic could be real. I was sure that I could talk to the dead, if I really listened. I believed in mystical spontaneity. If I waited long enough, if I blinked my eyes in a certain way--I could control the weather. I could make something levitate. I could hear God.

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