{"id":114520,"date":"2017-08-25T11:00:10","date_gmt":"2017-08-25T15:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=114520"},"modified":"2017-08-30T12:20:37","modified_gmt":"2017-08-30T16:20:37","slug":"harry-a-ghost-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/08\/25\/harry-a-ghost-story\/","title":{"rendered":"Harry: A Ghost Story"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/08\/wheelchair.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-114525\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/08\/wheelchair.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"891\" height=\"530\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/08\/wheelchair.jpg 891w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/08\/wheelchair-300x178.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/08\/wheelchair-768x457.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>\u201cYour father,\u201d says my husband. \u201cYour father might be the least-likely-to-see-a-ghost person I\u2019ve ever met.\u201d This is true. By his own admission, Papa doesn\u2019t do whimsy.<\/p>\n<p>He likes lots of people, but he is most comfortable around people like himself\u2014which is to say, irreligious Jews, ideally from the New York metro area, from progressive backgrounds, who have become more politically conservative with age. If they love baseball, American history, and the films of Fran\u00e7ois Truffaut, so much the better. When I was a little girl and asked him if he believed in God, he taught me the term <em>agnostic<\/em>, but now that I think about it, I\u2019d say a better description of his relationship to the divine is <em>never given it much thought<\/em>.\u00a0<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>When I asked him, probably around the same period, whether he\u2019d ever seen a ghost, he said no. But then he told me that his ex-girlfriend Linda Alpen had once been playing with a Ouija board with her friends and contacted a spirit who said he was called Belial. They all treated it like a joke, but then as the answers became progressively more sinister\u2014predictions of death, et cetera\u2014they were frightened. \u201cAnd afterward,\u201d said Papa, \u201cthey looked up <em>Belial<\/em>\u00a0and discovered it was a name\u00a0for the Devil.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>I knew all about Linda Alpen, of course. My dad has always maintained a policy of radical honesty on all such matters. She was the woman he\u2019d dated just prior to my mom, and was, apparently, very crummy and self-absorbed\u2014although with an undeniable self-confident sex appeal (she was a dancer). The one time he ever encountered her, after their breakup, was on the street. I was there, too. I was very little\u2014two or three\u2014and being unusually bratty: doing that thing little kids do where they break away and run really fast, and then after their parents are terrified, stop short just at the curb without running into traffic. So I\u2019d done that, and my dad caught up with me and was yelling, \u201cNEVER do that!\u201d or whatever, and then to compound my insolence I refused to hold his hand when we did, in fact, cross the street. Which is when he spied Linda Alpen watching the proceedings from across the way with an expression of sardonic distaste. I have always felt very guilty about my own role in this story.<\/p>\n<p>To this day, if you were to ask him my dad would still say that he has never seen a ghost. But on other occasions, he will tell you about the time we went to the hospital to see my newborn cousin, and there in the elevator was a woman in a wheelchair who, he swears, was his mother. His mother when she was very sick, dying; in a wheelchair. He says he was paralyzed by shock. The woman smiled at him and was wheeled out at the next floor.<\/p>\n<p>And later, shortly after my grandfather died, and my parents were watching TV at his summer house, they are quite sure it was he who came from beyond the grave to turn the channel from Fox News, as if to say, \u201cNot on my watch.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><em>Sadie Stein is an advisory editor of\u00a0<\/em>The Paris Review.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cYour father,\u201d says my husband. \u201cYour father might be the least-likely-to-see-a-ghost-person I\u2019ve ever met.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":178,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29681],"tags":[30289,29665,6696,25200,8826,7481,124,24253],"class_list":["post-114520","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tales-of-the-unexpected","tag-devil","tag-ghost-story","tag-ghosts","tag-haunted","tag-hauntings","tag-mothers","tag-new-york","tag-ouija-board"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Harry: A Ghost Story<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Though not one for whimsy, Sadie Stein\u2019s skeptic father may have seen a ghost or two in his time.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link 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