The Woman Who Befriended Ghosts

There was once a peculiar woman named Hildy. She had a high laughing voice and dark brown skin, and she could see ghosts. She wasn’t frightened by them at all. Her twin sister drowned when they were children, and when Hildy was growing up, her sister’s ghost was her closest friend. They did everything together: ran through the poppy fields that surrounded their house, played stick-a-whack on the village green, and stayed up late telling each other scary stories about living people. The ghost of Hildy’s sister even came to school with her. She would entertain Hildy by making rude faces at the teacher that no one else could see, and help her on examinations by looking at other students’ answers and whispering them into Hildy’s ear. (She could have shouted them and no one but Hildy would have heard, but it seemed prudent to whisper, just in case.)

On Hildy’s eighteenth birthday, her sister got called away on ghost business.

“When will you be back?” Hildy asked, distraught. They hadn’t been apart a single day since her sister died.

“Not for years,” replied her sister. “I’ll miss you terribly.”

“Not more than I’ll miss you,” Hildy said miserably.

Hildy’s sister hugged her, ghostly tears standing in her eyes. “Try to make some friends,” she said, then vanished.

Hildy tried to take her sister’s advice, but she had never had a living friend. She accepted an invitation to a party but couldn’t bring herself to speak to anyone. Her father arranged a tea for Hildy with the daughter of a coworker, but Hildy was stiff and awkward, and the only thing she could think of to say was, “Have you ever played stick-a-whack?”

“That’s a game for children,” the woman replied, then made an excuse to leave early.

Hildy found she preferred the company of ghosts to living people, and so she decided to make some ghost friends. The trouble was how to do it. Even though Hildy could see ghosts, they were not easy to talk to. Ghosts, you see, are a bit like cats—they’re never around when you want them, and rarely come when called.10

Hildy went to a cemetery. She stood around waiting for hours, but no ghosts came to talk to her. They watched Hildy from across the grass, standoffish and suspicious. She thought perhaps they’d been dead too long and had learned not to trust living people. Hoping the recently deceased would be easier to befriend, she started going to funerals. Because people she knew didn’t die very often, she had to go to strangers’ funerals. When the mourners would ask why she was there, Hildy would lie and say she was a distant relative, then ask whether the deceased had been a nice person, and had they enjoyed running in fields or playing stick-a-whack? The mourners thought she was strange (which, to be fair, she was), and the ghosts, sensing their relatives’ disapproval, gave Hildy the cold shoulder.