In West Virginia in 1897, it is said, the spirit of a young woman appeared to her mother to tell her that she had been murdered by her husband. She became known as the Greenbrier Ghost, and she was the inspiration for my debut novel, The Red Bird Sings.
Ghosts, in their many forms, are a staple of the Gothic genre. In literature, “hauntings” are often revealed to be the work of someone who is very much alive. Think Bertha Mason wreaking havoc at Thornfield Hall while her husband, Edward Rochester, pitches woo to the governess, Jane Eyre.
My fascination and fear were intense in this little strip-lit room. Here was every Gothic cliche: cooling of my blood, goosebumps along the spine, the dilating sense of a troubled presence
Other kinds of supernatural intrusion might include the protagonist who is haunted by an aspect of the self. Take the narrator of Edgar Allan Poe’s Gothic verse The Raven, whose uninvited feathered guest answers every question with “Nevermore”, dashing his every hope of reunion with his deceased love in the afterlife. Grief overtakes reason – and, as the “ungainly fowl” settles into permanent residence, we feel the narrator’s despair.
If there are fellows for the Greenbrier Ghost in Gothic literature, however, they might more closely resemble the sea-brined apparition in Black-Eyed Women, a story by Viet Thanh Nguyen. The spirit is that of a murdered boy, killed on an overcrowded migrant ship while trying to save his sister from raiders. For his surviving sibling, his appearance triggers a chain of long-buried memories, because the Gothic spirit who was known in life is not just fearsome but also freighted with meaning. From Scrooge’s vision of Jacob Marley, in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, to Sethe’s endurance of Beloved’s “spite” and “venom”, in Toni Morrison’s novel, hauntings can symbolise stagnation in the land of the living, and the need for growth or redemption.
When a dead woman appears to her mother in West Virginia, perhaps we anticipate a Southern Gothic slant; a story of poverty and decay in an isolated, rural community, a place so steeped in transgressive thoughts and desires that the eruption of violence is inevitable. Whatever her particular flavour, our response to the Gothic ghost is ancient and primal – chill fascination followed by terror and repulsion. Since records began it has been our reflex to want rid of these unfortunate wights. The British Museum holds the earliest known picture of a ghost, etched on a Babylonian clay tablet, and even this comes with cuneiform instructions for sending troublesome spirits back to the underworld.
It is our fear of the ghostly that makes Gothic tales seductive, allowing us to experience mystery and terror at a safe distance from danger. The genre is old and powerful enough, perhaps, that it can prime us to view real-life events through a Gothic lens. Long after falling in love with a tiny corner of the west of Ireland, I discovered that it had been the scene of a woman’s murder some decades earlier. It was unimaginable that this isolated, tranquil, beautiful riverside could be marked by such tragedy. On my next visit, it had a surreal aspect. I had an uncanny feeling, especially when passing there at night, fizzing with a sense of supernatural intrusion, similar to that evoked by the hauntings in Gothic novels.
When I first encountered the Greenbrier Ghost I was alert to this urgent voice trying to break through from the hidden world of domestic homicide
I also thought it strange and singular that I had a connection with more than one place where a woman’s life has been lost to violence. As an undergraduate I had spent a summer in California, where, for a short time, I worked with a publisher based at UC Berkeley. Neither I nor my colleague from home had felt comfortable going into the assistant editor’s office. A woman had been murdered there, we were told, and I found myself too unsettled by this to ask who, by whom, when? My fascination and fear were intense in this little strip-lit room. Here was every Gothic cliche: cooling of my blood, goosebumps along the spine, the dilating sense of a troubled presence.
I soon came to realise that this coincidence was far likelier than I first supposed. Anyone who pays attention to daily headlines might identify a place on the map where a woman has been killed by a man she knows. This is because of the breathtaking frequency of fatal violence committed by the larger sex against the smaller.
When I first encountered the Greenbrier Ghost I was alert to this urgent voice trying to break through from the hidden world of domestic homicide. She is more than a figment of the American Gilded Age. In life she was a woman named Zona Heaster Shue, from the community of Meadow Bluff, West Virginia. More than 120 years after her death – and the astonishing murder trial that followed – the United Nations’ Global Study on Homicide reported that “killings carried out by intimate partners are rarely spontaneous or random, and should be examined as an extreme act on a continuum of gender-related violence that remains underreported and too often ignored”.
[ Stolen Lives: 239 violent deaths of women in Ireland from 1996 to todayOpens in new window ]
This pattern shows little sign of change. Many women live in existential dread, in terror of death or life-limiting injury at the hands of someone they know. I understand, now, that although domestic homicide may be remote from our eyes, it is neither distant nor rare. And if every generation before and after Zona Shue has embarked on the same cycle of gender-based violence, how can we say that women’s voices have weight or value?
In No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us, Rachel Louise Snyder describes the spiritual trauma affecting a family in Montana who lost a mother and her two children to domestic homicide. They had not believed in the supernatural before but began to see ghostly signs all around: broken toys reanimating, pictures of the murdered woman breaking into a smile, hearing their names whispered when alone at night. In The Red Bird Sings, when Zona Shue’s spirit allegedly returns, her mother, Mary Jane, and her best friend, Lucy Frye, are left haunted by the need for justice. The question is, to what extraordinary lengths must these women go if they are, finally, to be heard?
The Red Bird Sings, by Aoife Fitzpatrick, is published by Virago Press
If you have been affected by any of the issues raised in this article, support is available. The Women’s Aid National Freephone Helpline, at 1800-341900, operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and provides support and information to callers experiencing abuse from intimate partners; you can also get help through the organisation’s website. Support is also available from Men’s Aid, via its website or Confidential National Support Line, at 01-5543811. Women’s Aid Federation Northern Ireland offers services for both female and male victims of domestic violence, via its website, or freephone the 24-hour Domestic & Sexual Abuse Helpline on 0808-8021414
