The Ghosts of New England

"And you can go down by the water to see her footprints in the sand–every night she walks the beaches of Cheyenne."  -Garth Brooks from the song,  The Beaches of Cheyenne.

"What we do in life echoes in eternity." -Maximus Decimus Buridius, in Gladiator.

I got back 10 days ago from a trip to New England.  Because my denomination started on the East Coast in Rhode Island, we have lots of old churches there, and the history of those buildings is something I wanted to take in.  Luckily enough for me, my board of directors agreed, and decided to send me out there to visit the churches.  The trip was excellent.  I learned a lot of thing and understand the history I’d read in books much better now.  That is one of the unique proclivities about history–it always happens in a time and in a place.  There are lots of disciplines and areas of study that can be done in a room with nothing around.  History is often purported to be one of those types of sciences.  But it’s not.  History is lived out by people in a place at a given time.  They were people with homes and families and beliefs and opinions.  Never trust a historian who reads history without first giving a picture of who the people who took part in it were.

That said, my trip was spectacular.  I got to visit the first SDB meeting house in North America (and all the New World) in Rhode Island, and then trace the steps of the brave men and women who moved their families out into the frontier…first to western Rhode Island, and then onward to Connecticut and New York state.  Given the time of year when I visited (autumn), I was afraid the weather might be tempermental, but I was blessed with spectacular weather.

But that’s not what this entry is about.  I have a theory…something I’ve been working on for a long time.  It’s vaguely mystical, and that’s the only reason I doubt it, but I feel that there is something to it, and so I’d like to run it by you folks for your opinion.

I don’t know if any of you have ever been into a pawn shop, but it has always seemed to me that there is something just not right about them.  I couldn’t figure out what.  I got the same feeling when I walked into the house of an older person who had recently passed away.  I got a heavy dose of it when I took this new job as Historian and on my first day received books from a recently deceased Pastor.  The things those people had owned….had something strange about them.

When I went to New England, I had 400 years of history slap me full across the face.  The houses and the buildings and the businesses occupy places that other people have occupied, and they drive on roads other people have driven on.  It will sound funny when I say this, but it’s almost like the history of the place still hangs in the air there–as though any minute, a ghost from hundreds of years ago will walk up to you, wave, and then vanish instantly.  I’m not suggesting that there are real mystical beings that haunt New England, understand me well.  But there is something about it….

Maybe it’s my own knowledge that other people have been there that are now gone, and my knowledge that they are gone (and have been that way for a long time) that makes me delude myself into thinking something else is going on.  But I don’t think so.  Let me give you my theory.

I think that places and buildings and things like possessions (journals and diaries and letters) come with a sort of soulprint on them that marks them as having come from someone else–a sort of signal to everyone who comes across them later that they once belonged to someone else.  I know that probably sounds strangely like a ghost story, and I admit there are some similarities, but it is the only way I can describe what I positively feel about things like old journals and letters.  Everything that is old is marked with everyone who has ever possessed it.  The print is deeper depending on how long the person had it and how cherished it was to them.  (Take for example a book…some books just feel different than others…there is a history on them or something besides the stories they tell in the words printed on them.)

Before you spurn my theory, consider how it might play out.  It explains how some people love antiques and some people can’t stand them.  (Perhaps some people are more comfortable with the idea of death than others, for example.)  It would explain the polarized reviews of museums and the study of archeaology.  It would explain a lot of things. 

What do you all think?  Am I crazy?  Is there possibly something to this?  Thoughts and opinions are welcome.