Church Ghosts | 1 July 2021
I never saw bats in this belfry, but I knew for certain there were ghosts in these pews. For me at least. It had been nearly 45 years since I last set foot in this church. As the heavy doors swung closed behind me, the chill up my spine made it feel like it was all yesterday. I feared that as I walked further in, the ghosts would appear one by one.
DD Response
I remember mama and daddy holding hands as the preacher waned prolific about the need to repent and be saved. I remember hearing daddy sing those Baptist hymns so off key I would cringe. He didn’t care, but I did. And I remember coming home to what mama called the Baptist Bar. It’s where they stored their liquor, and it had louvered doors that would close if the preacher came to visit.
I remember the ghosts of my past mortification -my baptism, where the water made my garment translucent. At thirteen what was being exposed underneath carried more weight than what was presumably being washed clean. I remember sneaking up to the balcony bathroom to smoke cigarettes and flirting with the cute boy in my Sunday School class. The words and pretense of the congregation did not play out as virtues in my home. This building represents the very definition of hypocrisy.
Grandmother left her faith letters in a trunk. As the family historian, my home became the repository for all things “collectible.” One letter struck me more than the others. She wrote to her cousin about getting married. “If you ever have the smallest little spat, don’t say a word. Just pray, pray pray.” The ghosts of this building haunt me today. They tell me "Just smile and shut up."
BNR Response
My family left the mining town when I was eight years old, a full two years before the whole town was officially considered ghost in 1942. The people and buildings I remember haven’t made it to the historical society or the tourist brochure: the empty saloons on opposing street corners with the swinging doors leading right out onto the dirt thoroughfare, the triple story general store with balconies stretching end-to-end on every floor, the wide-open spaces full of tumbleweeds and prickly brush, and our home.
On the other hand, this church has been widely photographed and is a mainstay in many ghost town exhibitions and artefacts largely due to the archetypal simplicity of its construction as well as how well it has passively been preserved. In fact, iconic images of this space have been so widely shared and adopted that they are often wrongly attributed to coming from Tombstone rather than my birthplace of Bodie, California.
My time spent in this church was not what people might think of when reflecting on religious spaces: finding hidden silver nuggets under floorboards, sneaking sips of whisky from forgotten bottles stowed in the narthex, rowdy made-up dances in the social hall, yanking up my skirt so the boys could see my knickers, my first kiss in the bone yard. When we were kids we used to enter the church and climb up to the bell tower after dark, that is until Susie Johnson fell to her death that night in August when we were four.
What started out like a typical Western adolescence for my grandparents here; riding mustangs, helping raise and slaughter the hens and hogs, canning food in the summer to ready for the winter, ten months a year in the one-room schoolhouse with all kids from two to twelve; took a tandem downward turn with the negative trajectory of the town’s silver and gold yield.
Once people started shifting out of town it became a rat race to the top of the sinking ship. People jockeyed for positions as they were rarely and suddenly left vacant: Sheriff, banker, madame. People looted abandoned storefronts and stole wagons and horses. The town became unfriendly, breeding suspicion and deceit. The spiral down started long before I was born, so my education in the classroom, on the land, and in the house continued uninterrupted. Even mama and daddy were raised after the bottom fell out, and they relied on pappy and mee-maw to tell of the change in the town when they were first married in the 1880’s.
We escaped late, the last few stragglers to leave an already unwanted city. When you grow up in a place like that, constantly unearthing the interrupted moments of all those lives, the bookmarks people thought they’d come right back to, those ghosts never leave you be. The thing about a ghost town is that it isn’t just the spaces that are left behind. Seeing as it was plumb too expensive to pack all that up and wagon out of town all the way to Mono Lake, or, better yet, Yosemite, what’s left behind are not just the pieces and parts of folk’s lives but the remnants of a people. Everyone’s seen photos of the hardware store left in a dash, stocked ready for the Friday payday rush; the bar with the billiard balls still on the felt; dishes left dirty on the washboard. The town stopped living mid-breath.