Giving Up the Ghosts

Last year I began a ghost tour business and three month into it I learned that two people were murdered, stabbed to death, in the same alley where I routinely brought my customers. The same nights in the same place I'd been a few hours earlier a seventeen year old boy and a grown man both died alone in pools of their own blood, murdered over drug disputes on separate nights by the same drug dealer.

He was in custody, and neither I nor my customers were ever really at risk given our numbers, demographics, and the time we were there. So, I separated myself from this reality- this reality of drug addiction and homelessness in my hometown leading to murder victims who didn't even make the news. I compartmentalized it all and moved on finishing up the season.

This morning I spent two hours taking apart this business that took a year to build. I sold/gifted my ghost tour business to the people I recruited at the end of last season for a licensing fee and a few free passes. Purely profit-minded people will think I'm crazy. It was a lucrative business with minimal overhead, but it was also too much for me right now.

I began the ghost tour company to help my hometown, and I accomplished that. I enjoyed sharing the rich history I had studied as a college student and museum employee decades ago. I delivered on the goal to give customers a delightfully frightful experience. However, ghost tours were never my dream, just a good idea that seemed like the right thing at a time when I was reinventing my life. The ghost tours were not my cure from the burnout caused by my abusive former employer and former friends, instead the tours were just a distraction from the very real pain of betrayal that sent me packing from traditional work.

Two months ago, I considered giving up ghost tours entirely, not remain as a silent partner, not remain attached. I waffled for a little while but by the end of April I knew I was done. I felt it in my bones all spring, and now I understand it more deeply.

Letting go of this business was not just about of other commitments and the impending loss of a loved one whose pancreatic cancer is nonnegotiable. All of those things are true, but more present is reality is that the same homelessness and drug epidemics that took lives of strangers on my tour route have led my niece, another homeless drug user, to take an innocent life at the age of twenty-two. The man she murdered was as invisible as the newly added ghosts on my tour, and so is she to the world at large, but not to me.

I see these ghosts, ghosts of lives that could have gone differently, should have continued. Ghosts of the potential, now dead, of a beloved niece.

Let me be clear, there is nothing wrong with the ghost tours - they are great. I did a good job creating meaningful content and a fun experience and an even better job finding my successors who love the business.

This is personal, and I simply can't continue giving tours on the pavement that was bloodstained with another mother's child, a child the same age as my own daughter. I can't keep entertaining people knowing another child I adored will be justly yes, but still sadly spending most of the rest of her young life in prison.

Sometimes the scariest stories happen during waking ours in our real lives. Sometimes we have to give up the ghosts to welcome the in the light.