Questions and Ghost Stories

Hauntings   ghosts  to feel the presence of that which is no longer there   what if that which is no longer there has never been there   at least not in our lifetime    the children of the coalfields are haunted by a past they were not born into   they were not born into a decline   or a death   they were born into a haunting

Think of James   think of ‘the strange and sinister embroidered on the very type of the normal and the easy”    so not a literal haunting perhaps but the strange   the strange   that which is difficult to understand or explain    history   history is strange   history cannot easily be explained to our young people   the sinister   not so much that something might happen  but that something has happened   something violent   something frightening   it seeps into the stones maybe   into people’s clothes    becomes embroidered into that very type of normal and the easy    sinister of course   in heraldic terms   also means the left hand side   or towards the left   politics   politics of the left    former coalfield constituencies nearly all vote Labour    something which continues which is not fully understood   haunted by the sinister   by the political leanings of the left

Think of James    think of Turn of the Screw   no   first think of Geoff Bright   at an event   think of a mother who was involved in the strike telling her story   now think of a son   my age  maybe younger  talking of the strike as though he lived it   but he didn’t    in popular culture hauntings and horror generally affect the young  because nothing scares us more than loss of innocence   think of James again now    think of Turn of the Screw  of a Governess who comes in (the academic)  of a story of something that might have happened   a story that has clearly somehow affected the children the Governess is meant to look after   think of something which disrupted the social fabric of the house    haunting the kids    think of the Governess (the academic) unsure of what this is   think of the end of Turn of the Screw   think of young Miles trying to see the ghost   think of the Governess shielding him  think of Miles dead at the end   think of the ghost gone     is it better to live and be haunted  or to die and not look at the ghosts  to confront or hide   to shield or show    maybe these are some questions for this project

Andrew McMillan