I visited Mission San Juan Capistrano on a junior high school field trip. It was a long time ago and I remember little about the day except the feeling of the place, the particular quality of the air inside the walls, and the sense that the stones had absorbed something over two centuries that had not finished being absorbed.
I was twelve or thirteen. I did not have language for what I felt. I tipped my hat to the dead and kept walking.
Years later I worked near the Huntington Library in San Marino and used to walk the grounds on my lunch hour. A plaque stood between two of the gardens for William Hertrich, the head gardener, the man who shaped that place into what it became. Every time I walked past it I had the impression he was still there. Sitting. Watching. I tipped my hat to him too, the way you do for somebody who has been somewhere long enough to have earned it.
This novel began with those two impressions and the question they share. What keeps someone in a place after they have every reason to leave it.
I do not know the answer. Cal Rourke thinks he does, and the difference between his certainty and my uncertainty is what the book is about.
What does Cal Rourke do?
He corrects errors. He would object to being called a ghost hunter.
His working theory is that every haunting is organised around one thing the dead believe about the world that is not true. Not a grievance and not unfinished business in the usual sense. A specific factual error about the external world, held by somebody who has no way left to check it.
Find the false belief, correct it, and the room empties and stays empty. No chasing, no rattling of chains, no equipment.
One of them had been wrong for a hundred and forty years.
The book on this: Ghost Healer is a novel about a man who finds the false belief holding a presence in a room and corrects it, and the therapist whose questions are harder than the hauntings.
Why is the false belief never about the person themselves?
Because that is the rule Cal has arrived at, and it is the most interesting thing about his theory.
It is never guilt, never regret, and never a wrong idea somebody holds about their own life. It is always about the world. What happened to a place, what became of somebody else, whether a thing they set in motion ever arrived.
That constraint is doing real work in the book. It means the correction is always information instead of absolution, and it means Cal never has to forgive anybody or persuade them of anything about themselves.
It also means his method has nothing at all to say about him.
Who is Destiny MacGee?
A therapist in Savannah who does not believe in any of this and will not pretend she does.
She is curious about Cal, which is a different thing from believing him, and the book is careful about the distinction. She is not a skeptic waiting to be converted and she is not a believer in disguise.
Her questions are harder than the hauntings, because the hauntings are about other people and her questions are about him. A man whose entire method depends on locating somebody else’s false belief is being asked, patiently and professionally, what he believes that is not true.
He does not have a good answer. That is the novel.
How is the novel structured?
As Cal’s account, cut through with the therapy sessions where Destiny keeps interrupting it.
He tells a case. She stops him and asks a question about him. He answers badly. She writes it down and reads it back with a particular flatness, and he says that is not quite right, and she says keep trying.
That exchange happens over and over and it is the engine of the book. A man who can describe a haunting precisely cannot describe what changed in himself, and the sessions exist to make him keep failing at it in front of somebody.
Asked what changed after the mission, he says the way a room feels when he walks in. Asked to describe that, he talks for two minutes using words like weight and pressure and texture, and none of them are right.
Does Cal Rourke’s method work?
He does not know, and he says so.
Six states in five months, a dozen cases. Three wrong to some meaningful degree, nine roughly right, and one he could not crack at all. Then the qualification that matters more than the numbers. He was not sure the ones he counted as right had gone right.
He was not always able to tell, from inside a situation, whether what he had done had done anything.
A practitioner keeping honest records of his own uncertain results is a considerably more interesting narrator than one with a method that works. It also means Destiny’s questions land, because he has no armour of demonstrated success to hide behind.
What do the cases look like?
Ordinary places on ordinary days, which is deliberate.
A farmhouse in the low country on a Tuesday in October, where the presence was communicative from the first hour and wanted him to understand one specific fact. A double shotgun house in the Tremé in November, when the tourists have thinned out after Halloween and New Orleans becomes more itself. A house on a street of similar houses in the older part of Savannah, three storeys with a porch kept in better condition than the rest of it, as though somebody had given up on the building and could not give up on the porch.
No storms. No abandoned asylums. Rural Georgia on a weekday, and a rug somebody spent a winter making, reduced to strips of cloth around the edge of a bare floor.
A haunting that runs on a factual error has no reason to prefer a dramatic setting, and putting them in unremarkable houses keeps the attention on the error, not the atmosphere.
What is difficult in Ghost Healer?
The history the hauntings sit on top of.
The book carries a content warning for colonial violence, forced labor, the deaths of enslaved people, and intense supernatural experience. A ghost story set across two centuries of American ground has to decide whether it is going to look at what happened on that ground.
A haunting built on a false belief about the world requires the world to have been a certain way. The errors the dead are holding are errors about real things.
Softening that would have made a more comfortable novel and a dishonest one.
Who is Ghost Healer for?
Readers of Kevin Wilson’s Nothing to See Here and Paul Tremblay.
That is supernatural fiction that treats the impossible thing as a practical problem somebody has to handle on a Tuesday, and gets its unease from the people and not from the phenomenon.
If you want jump scares this is not it. If you want to watch a competent man apply a working method until it reaches the one case it was never built for, it is.
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