survived by Kent Russel

I volunteered to write a story on the haunted places in Gainesville because I believe in ghosts. There was no pretense either journalistic or specter-elucidative. I just wanted an excuse to try and scare myself.)

The best way to distill the anticlimax and metaphysical despair of my very much unofficial ghost tour of Gainesville is like this: (I volunteered to write a story on the haunted places in Gainesville because I believe in ghosts. There was no pretense either journalistic or specter-elucidative. I just wanted an excuse to try and scare myself.)
Bodies of water are terrifying. ( Except, I guess, sand-bottom lakes and the Caribbean) They’re terrifying because you’re wholly inside some nether-realm with which you’re unfamiliar and through which you can’t see shit.

Often you come into contact with things unknown and unknowable—some slight brush against your foot or sensation of water displacement and the brain’s reptilian hinter-quarter gooses your body erect so fast that the skin gets pulled away from your eyeballs and maybe you pee a little bit. You’re freaking out too much to rationally asses What the Baby Christ was that?! In your mind’s eye it was some broken-toothed leviathan raised from the depths to saw you off at the hips and leave your dead torso weltering like a buoy.

None of this happens if you wear goggles or a mask or something. (Children recognize this; adults do not.)

When you look down and see submerged tree limbs and variegated, Death’s-clammy-caress-type flora as you swim past, the chances of having fear suffocate your brain are pretty slim. Instead, you float prone on the surface, keen to this previously unappreciated biotic mélange below. It’s disappointing that what would have previously dilated your sphincter is actually a school of baitfish, so you just look and look and strain your eyes looking for that subaqueous horror, because you know it’s got to be down there.

I wanted very badly to see a ghost. I visited many purportedly haunted places ( When I say “purportedly,” it means that the Internet said it. The sites, www.shadowlands.net and www.floridaghost.com, are basically rumor-aggregators, and if there’s a better way to search for ghosts, do it yourself.) and took lots of notes in which I tried to be funny about nothing happening.

I arranged for a ghost-hunting troupe to accompany me to the third floor of Norman Hall; they never could make it, and I found the legendary elevator decommissioned. (If you’ve never heard the story, (and what kind of friendless hermit are you that you haven’t heard the story?), it goes: There were an indeterminate number of children riding in the elevator when Norman was still P.K. Younge; the elevator gave out and crashed and killed all the kids inside, and now they haunt the third floor. The College of Education is very adamant about there being neither recorded evidence nor even recollected hearsay about this. )

Beatty Towers aren’t haunted. (Except with assholes.) The only nebulous entity roaming the halls is the smell of 10 floors’ worth of backed-up trash because somebody tried to stuff taco-shell pizza boxes down the garbage chute.

The Sweetwater Branch Inn is haunted, its owner told me. I just had to be sure and explain that only like three of the rooms are haunted, and you can visit them if you’re into that sort of thing, but the rest of the complex is very charming and Victorian and decidedly unhaunted. I laid in one of their fulsomely over-pillowed beds and for about an hour and fruitlessly opened all corporeal channels for ghost-talk.

Apparently the Wal-Mart on 13th Street is haunted, but if you stand around straining for the supernatural, the manager who’s vacuuming will inch his bagless ever closer because you look like you’ve got cold armed-robbing feet. That Steak-N-Shake where they killed those people probably was haunted, once, but they tore it down. I heard Crisper’s was haunted, but that’s goddamn ridiculous.

In short, I went to places where people said ghosts were, and I looked until I saw that cold spots were next to the AC vent, or the sound of distant laughter was terrestrial laughter being refracted off a wall in the parking lot and through an open window, or the shadow on the other side of the door was the maid using the back staircase.

I don’t want to go ghost hunting ever again. I’ve never been less scared in my life.