Chasing (and Embracing) Ghosts
I have always harbored an affinity for the things which go bump in the night, because as someone who's trans, I have so often been that thing which goes bump.
I recently had the pleasure of watching Hulu's original series Living for the Dead. Produced and narrated by Kristen Stewart, the best way that I can describe the show is Ghost Adventures meets Queer Eye. The quirky series follows five paranormal investigators on a lively road trip featuring haunted locations across the country. Notably, all five investigators are openly queer, the central conceit of the show which distinguishes Living for the Dead from other contemporary ghost hunting shows.
Students of the occult who are LGBTQ, you say? Sign me up!
I'll return to that aspect of Living for the Dead shortly, but another element of the series which immediately impressed me was the skillsets represented among the team. Most ghost hunting shows emphasize the technological approaches to the craft, and to be sure, Living for the Dead does feature Alex, curious and sweet, with her rhinestone studded EMF meters, REM pods and other electronic ghost hunting equipment, as well as the irrepressible Roz, who serves as the team researcher. But the show also features Logan, a charismatic and gifted psychic medium, Ken, an insightful Tarot reader who is also a medium, and Juju, a serene and spiritually connected Witch.
The inclusion of those softer, more spiritually oriented approaches to interacting with ghosts and other paranormal phenomena informs the tone of the series in really positive ways. The ghostly encounters which the team experiences and documents are fundamentally personal encounters with those spiritual entities, and not simply the dispassionate - if intriguing - scientific experiments featured on other ghost hunting programs. The influence of the Queer Eye producers is evident in the decision to feature the living who inhabit those same haunted spaces under the light of day, as the team endeavors to create positive life changes for the quick and the dead alike.
It's that fundamental respect for the ghosts as individuals, complete with their own stories and motivations, along with the show's consistent efforts to establish positive and genuinely uplifting spaces which the living and the dead can share peacefully, that really endeared the series to me.
I really do believe that the inclusion of the occult, comparatively subjective modes of interacting with the spirit world pushes the series decisively in the direction of healing both the quick and the dead. Conversely, I feel that the queer identities of the five team members - far from being a novel but ultimately tangential element in the lively genre of ghost hunting - are likewise completely crucial for informing how Alex, Roz, Logan, Ken, and Juju all interact with the spirit world. And I say that because - as a practicing Witch myself - I am deeply cognizant of how my own identity as a lesbian trans woman shapes my own exchanges with the spirit world.
Perhaps these two aspects of my personality - my queerness and my witchiness - might seem barely adjacent, much less the sort of integrated elements which might mutually inform each other. But I have always harbored an affinity for the things which go bump in the night, because - as someone who desperately attempted to conceal her trans identity, even and especially from myself - I have so often been that thing which goes bump. Throughout my childhood, I always knew in my heart of hearts that - as someone assigned male at birth, but nevertheless intuitively aware of her own nascent womanhood - I would always secretly be the monster, for my family, for my community, for my church.
A funny thing happens, however, when you live for so long as the blasphemous thing in the shadows. Inevitably, you begin to understand that not everything which lives in the shadows of our society is really monstrous at heart, because after all these long years, I finally understand that I was never really the monster, not really. I was just that young woman, struggling desperately to understand and express my womanhood in prejudiced communities which stubbornly refused to entertain even the possibility of my actual gender identity.
In the estimation of many people today - influenced by an overwrought and often transparently manufactured transphobia - I am still the monster. But I have learned compassion for the other things which go bump in the night, because in spite of everything which I confront in my daily life - perhaps because of everything which I endure - I feel a responsibility to extend a measure of that grace which many would deny me, towards those who are likewise reviled and rejected by the world.
That benevolent impulse extends into my practice of Witchcraft, as well. Perhaps that's why I have always counted the Good People of Dusk as close friends and allies, as much as those of Dawn, and likewise with ghostly apparitions and the like. The things which live in the shadows, the spirits which endure beyond the Veil, these are fellow wayfaring strangers to be understood, not monsters to be shunned.
Perhaps in the future, the broader world will welcome people like me. But in the meantime, I can only exercise the same grace which I want to see across our shared world, embracing both the living whom others shun, and those departed whom the quick meet with dread.