A single mom moves into a new apartment with her young son, only to find out it’s inhabited by a poltergeist. At first she’s spooked, but comes to realize that the poltergeist is helping to raise her son.
I’d watch it.
It’s like ‘The Others’, except that everyone just kind of… gets used to seeing each other. There are two families sharing one house, and okay, one family is a bit dead, but they’re all figuring things out as they go and it’s super handy to have a spare parent or two around.
*
“Mom, I’m home!”
“She’s out shopping, go do your homework.”
“Aunt Ingrid, they didn’t even HAVE homework when you were alive, why are you BUGGING me – “
“When I was alive we churned butter instead of our mother going to the store to buy it, do you want to learn how to churn butter?”
“Fine, okay, homework it is.”
*
“David, don’t walk through the walls.”
“Opening the door is too hard.”
“Then walk through the DOOR like your sister. Respect the conventions at least.”
“Fiiiiiinnne…”
*
“Mom, what are you doing?”
“Fixing the fence.”
“Uncle Roger, are you possessing my mom?”
“We tried just having me tell her how to do it, but it was taking too long and she got frustrated.”
“It’s WEIRD, though.”
“Do you want to do this?”
“No, I – “
“Too late. Come and learn how to fix this. You’re the man of the house now.”
“NOBODY SAYS THAT ANY MORE, UNCLE ROGER.”
*
“Did you have a fight with David?”
“No.”
“Then why are you both making that face?”
“There’s no FACE.”
“That’s what he said.”
“We didn’t have a FIGHT, okay…”
“Aunt Ingrid is worried, she says he’s been moping all morning. He’s barely visible half the time.”
“Look, we didn’t have a fight, I just asked him how he died and then it got weird.”
“STEVE YOU DO NOT ASK PEOPLE HOW THEY DIED THAT IS SO RUDE.”
“Mom, it came up, okay, it wasn’t just out of nowhere!”
“YOU APOLOGIZE RIGHT NOW.”
*
“Steve! David! Isobel! Who broke this vase?”
“Meteor did it.”
“It was not the dog! Which one of you was throwing things in the house?”
“No, really, Mom, it was Meteor.”
“And how did the dog get up on the mantlepiece?”
“Uh…”
“ISOBEL WERE YOU LEVITATING THE DOG AGAIN?”
*
“This is completely inaccurate.”
“Roger…”
“I mean, look at those clothes. I’ve never seen *anyone* dressed like that.”
“They weren’t very careful about accurate costuming in these old movies.”
“I read ALL the Sherlock Holmes stories when they were first published and I ASSURE you he was a GENTLEMAN, not like – “
“Roger, will you just let us watch the moving pictures in peace?”
“But they’re WRONG.”
“We don’t care. Shush.”
*Roger mutters about bossy women and levitates popcorn*
*
“Steve, what happened to your face?”
“I got into a fight.”
“I would surmise from your bruises that you lost.”
“I always lose.”
“Oh, we can’t have that! Come, I will teach you the manly art of fisticuffs.”
“ROGER NO.”
*
“Aunt Ingrid, can you teach me how to make pie?”
“Of course I can… why? I know boys do a lot of things now that girls used to, I understand that, but why pie?”
“I like pie.”
“I can make you a pie if you just want to eat pie.”
“… Ava likes pie too.”
“That girl who lives down the street?”
“Yeah…”
“Then I’ll help you make the pie. What kind?”
“She likes cherry.”
This is beautiful. I love it!
When I was young enough that I was still babysitting, the toddler I was looking after loved Blues Clues and a soother he was supposed to be giving up.
His parents kept it in a childproofed cabinet when it wasn’t allowed in bed, but somehow it was in his bed each morning.
He asked me for it one night as I put him to bed. I told him it wasn’t allowed at night, those were the rules. He pouted and huffed and finally said, “I like my other babysitter better. She always gets when I ask.”
“What babysitter? I’m your only one,” i reminded him.
“The lady from the walls,” he said then rolled over and pouted some more and eventually I rubbed his back enough that he dropped off.
I won’t say that the air got cold or I felt like I was being watched. But I mean. I lived in one of the purportedly most haunted towns in Ontario. I’ve seen the ghost in the Theatre from the stage, and spotted the one in the Museum as I drove by one night. I say “excuse me” when I’m in That Room in each house or building.
I brought it up to the parents when they got back, the mother huffed like her son and rolled her eyes.
“Why do you think we’re moving?” She asked me. “Its hard to reinforce the rules when youre being undermined by a ghost.”
i’m watching this documentary about halloween and there’s a part where they’re explaining that ghost stories got really popular around the civil war no one could really deal with how many people went off and died and
the narrator just said
“the first ghost stories were really about coming home”
fuck
#but wow let me tell you about how the american civil war changed the whole culture of grief and death #because before that people died at home mostly #where their family saw them die and held their body and had proof they were really dead and it was a process #but during the war people left and never came home their bodies never came back there was no proof #people died in new horrific ways on the battlefield literally vaporized by cannonballs or lost in swamps and eaten by wild animals #and there were NO BODIES to send home #and people simply couldn’t grasp that their son or father or husband was really gone #there are stories about people spending months searching for their loved ones #convinced they couldn’t be dead if there were no body they were simply lost or hurt and they needed to be saved and brought home #embalming also really started during the civil war as a way for bodies to be brought home as intact as possible #wow i just wowowow the culture of death and grief and stuff during this time period is fascinating and sad #history (via souryellows)
#quietly reblogs own tags #also the civil war was when dog tags and national cemetaries became a thing #and during the war there was n real system in place to notify families of the deaths #like they’d find out maybe from letters from soldiers who were there when their loved one died nd stuff #but there was no real system #and battlefield ambulances were basically invented because so many people died on the battlefield when they could have been saved if they co #…could have been moved frm the battlefield to a hospital #like there was this one really inlfuential dude whose son died that way and he became dedicated to getting an ambulance system in place
I’m not doing this in the correct tag-style, but.
IIRC, the Civil War also played a huge part in forming the modern American conception of heaven as this nice, domestic place where you’re reunited with your loved ones. People (particularly mothers) responded to the trauma of brother-killing-brother by imagining an afterlife in which families would once again be happy together.
(also not doing this in the correct tag-style, because I wanna KNOW— )What documentary is this? Or is there more than one? Any books on the subject? THIS IS FASCINATING.
cool (ghost) story, bro.
reblogging because, as a us history phd student, i want to say YAY for how much of this is totally on point. i also want to rec the book where a lot of this is covered very, very well, which is Drew Gilpin Faust’s “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War.”
a lot of books on the Civil War are deadly dull because they’re about battles and shit, but as a transformative moment in mindset and ideology, it becomes *fascinating*
the other book I’d even more highly rec is David W. Blight’s “Race and Reunion,” which is about how the “(white) brother against (white) brother” image of the war was invented and how throwing African Americans to the merciless viciousness of post-Reconstruction racist whites was part of constructing this “oh everybody was white men and everybody was noble let’s celebrate them all” approach to Civil War remembrance
very good stuff
Thank you! This looks like exactly the sort of reading I’m after! *adds to wish list*
Also, look for David Blights recordings of his Yale lecture series on The Civil War. 21 hours of class lectures, and its FASCINATING. He barely touches on the battles other than to use them as timestamps as to what was going on. Most of it focuses on what the mindset of everyone was going into the war, and what happened on the way out. It’s an amazing series that will change your entire perception of the war – how it happened, and how it wasn’t going to be possible to avoid it, because of the inherent evil of slavery and how it was destroying damn near *everyone* except rich white people.
i’m so upset
I just realized that the reason ghosts say Boo! is because it’s a latin verb
they’re literally saying ‘I alarm/I am alarming/I do alarm!!
I can’t
present active boō, present infinitive boāre, perfect active boāvī, supine boātum
Recte!
if it comes from the latin word, they’re actually saying “I’M YELLING!” which is even cuter
do they speak latin because it’s a dead language