The late Douglas Adams has left us with a comedic, but very thoughtful, look at what being a ghost might be like. The following excerpts assume the person has died unexpectedly - the most commonly accepted source for a returning ghost.
The excerpts also demonstrate a favorite theme of mine. If there are such things as ghosts, once they accomplish their objective, they leave.
In other words, this is the story of a ghost - not of a haunting. I'm not sure there IS any such thing as a haunting.
Gordon Way lay on the ground, unclear about what to do. He was dead. There seemed little doubt about that. There was a horrific hole in his chest, but the blood that was gobbing out of it had slowed to a trickle. Otherwise there was no movement from his chest at all, or, indeed, from any other part of him. He looked up, and from side to side, and it became clear to him that whatever part of him it was that was moving, it wasn’t any part of his body. The mist rolled slowly over him, and explained nothing. At a few feet distant from him his shotgun lay smoking quietly in the grass. He continued to lie there, like someone lying awake at four o’clock in the morning, unable to put their mind to rest, but unable to find anything to do with it. He realised that he had just had something of a shock, which might account for his inability to think clearly, but didn’t account for his ability actually to think at all. In the great debate that has raged for centuries about what, if anything, happens to you after death, be it heaven, hell, purgatory or extinction, one thing has never been in doubt -- that you would at least know the answer when you were dead. Gordon Way was dead, but he simply hadn’t the slightest idea what he was meant to do about it. It wasn’t a situation he had encountered before. He sat up. The body that sat up seemed as real to him as the body that still lay slowly cooling on the ground, giving up its blood heat in wraiths of steam that mingled with the mist of the chill night air. Experimenting a bit further, he tried standing up, slowly, wonderingly and wobblingly. The ground seemed to give him support, it took his weight. But then of course he appeared to have no weight that needed to be taken. When he bent to touch the ground he could feel nothing save a kind of distant rubbery resistance like the sensation you get if you try and pick something up when your arm has gone dead. His arm had gone dead. His legs too, and his other arm, and all his torso and his head. His body was dead. He could not say why his mind was not. He stood in a kind of frozen, sleepless horror while the mist curled slowly through him. He looked back down at the him, the ghastly, astonished-looking him- thing lying still and mangled on the ground, and his flesh wanted to creep. Or rather, he wanted flesh that could creep. He wanted flesh. He wanted body. He had none. A sudden cry of horror escaped from his mouth but was nothing and went nowhere. He shook and felt nothing. Music and a pool of light seeped from his car. He walked towards it. He tried to walk sturdily, but it was a faint and feeble kind of walking, uncertain and, well, insubstantial. The ground felt frail beneath his feet. The door of the car was still open on the driver’s side, as he had left it when he had leaped out to deal with the boot lid, thinking he’d only be two seconds. That was all of two minutes ago now, when he’d been alive. When he’d been a person. When he’d thought he was going to be leaping straight back in and driving off. Two minutes and a lifetime ago. This was insane, wasn’t it? he thought suddenly. He walked around the door and bent down to peer into the external rear-view mirror. He looked exactly like himself, albeit like himself after he’d had a terrible fright, which was to be expected, but that was him, that was normal. This must be something he was imagining, some horrible kind of waking dream. He had a sudden thought and tried breathing on the rear- view mirror. Nothing. Not a single droplet formed. That would satisfy a doctor, that’s what they always did on television -- if no mist formed on the mirror, there was no breath. Perhaps, he thought anxiously to himself, perhaps it was something to do with having heated wing mirrors. Didn’t this car have heated wing mirrors? Hadn’t the salesman gone on and on about heated this, electric that, and servo-assisted the other? Maybe they were digital wing mirrors. That was it. Digital, heated, servo- assisted, computer-controlled, breath-resistant wing mirrors... He was, he realised, thinking complete nonsense. He turned slowly and gazed again in apprehension at the body lying on the ground behind him with half its chest blown away. That would certainly satisfy a doctor. The sight would be appalling enough if it was somebody else’s body, but his own... He was dead. Dead... dead... He tried to make the word toll dramatically in his mind, but it wouldn’t. He was not a film sound track, he was just dead. Peering at his body in appalled fascination, he gradually became distressed by the expression of asinine stupidity on its face. It was perfectly understandable, of course. It was just such an expression as somebody who is in the middle of being shot with his own shotgun by somebody who had been hiding in the boot of his car might be expected to wear, but he nevertheless disliked the idea that anyone might find him looking like that. He knelt down beside it in the hope of being able to rearrange his features into some semblance of dignity, or at least basic intelligence. It proved to be almost impossibly difficult. He tried to knead the skin, the sickeningly familiar skin, but somehow he couldn’t seem to get a proper grip on it, or on anything. It was like trying to model plasticine when your arm has gone to sleep, except that instead of his grip slipping off the model, it would slip through it. In this case, his hand slipped through his face. Nauseated horror and rage swept through him at his sheer bloody blasted impotence, and he was suddenly startled to find himself throttling and shaking his own dead body with a firm and furious grip. He staggered back in amazed shock. All he had managed to do was to add to the inanely stupefied look of the corpse a twisted-up mouth and a squint. And bruises flowering on its neck. He started to sob, and this time sound seemed to come, a strange howling from deep within whatever this thing he had become was. Clutching his hands to his face, he staggered backwards, retreated to his car and flung himself into the seat. The seat received him in a loose and distant kind of way, like an aunt who disapproves of the last fifteen years of your life and will therefore furnish you with a basic sherry, but refuses to catch your eye. Could he get himself to a doctor? To avoid facing the absurdity of the idea he grappled violently with the steering wheel, but his hands slipped through it. He tried to wrestle with the automatic transmission shift and ended up thumping it in rage, but not being able properly to grasp or push it. The stereo was still playing light orchestral music into the telephone, which had been lying on the passenger seat listening patiently all this time. He stared at it and realised with a growing fever of excitement that he was still connected to Susan’s telephone- answering machine. It was the type that would simply run and run until he hung up. He was still in contact with the world. He tried desperately to pick up the receiver, fumbled, let it slip, and was in the end reduced to bending himself down over its mouthpiece. ‘Susan!’ he cried into it, his voice a hoarse and distant wail on the wind. ‘Susan, help me! Help me for God’s sake. Susan, I’m dead... I’m dead... I’m dead and... I don’t know what to do...’ He broke down again, sobbing in desperation, and tried to cling to the phone like a baby clinging to its blanket for comfort. ‘Help me, Susan...’ he cried again. ‘/Beep/,’ said the phone. He looked down at it again where he was cuddling it. He had managed to push something after all. He had managed to push the button which disconnected the call. Feverishly he attempted to grapple the thing again, but it constantly slipped through his fingers and eventually lay immobile on the seat. He could not touch it. He could not push the buttons. In rage he flung it at the windscreen. It responded to that, all right. It hit the windscreen, careered straight back though him, bounced off the seat and then lay still on the transmission tunnel, impervious to all his further attempts to touch it. For several minutes still he sat there, his head nodding slowly as terror began to recede into blank desolation. A couple of cars passed by, but would have noticed nothing odd -- a car stopped by the wayside. Passing swiftly in the night their headlights would probably not have picked out the body lying in the grass behind the car. They certainly would not have noticed a ghost sitting inside it crying to himself. He didn’t know how long he sat there. He was hardly aware of time passing, only that it didn’t seem to pass quickly. There was little external stimulus to mark its passage. He didn’t feel cold. In fact he could almost not remember what cold meant or felt like, he just knew that it was something he would have expected to feel at this moment. Eventually he stirred from his pathetic huddle. He would have to do something, though he didn’t know what. Perhaps he should try and reach his cottage, though he didn’t know what he would do when he got there. He just needed something to try for. He needed to make it through the night. Pulling himself together he slipped out of the car, his foot and knee grazing easily through part of the door frame. He went to look again at his body, but it wasn’t there. As if the night hadn’t produced enough shocks already. He started, and stared at the damp depression in the grass. His body was not there.
Gordon Way drifted miserably along the dark road, or rather, tried to drift. He felt that as a ghost -- which is what he had to admit to himself he had become -- he should be able to drift. He knew little enough about ghosts, but he felt that if you were going to be one then there ought to be certain compensations for not having a physical body to lug around, and that among them ought to be the ability simply to drift. But no, it seemed he was going to have to walk every step of the way. His aim was to try and make it to his house. He didn’t know what he would do when he got there, but even ghosts have to spend the night somewhere, and he felt that being in familiar surroundings might help. Help what, he didn’t know. At least the journey gave him an objective, and he would just have to think of another one when he arrived. He trudged despondently from lamppost to lamppost, stopping at each one to look at bits of himself. He was definitely getting a bit wraithlike. At times he would fade almost to nothing, and would seem to be little more than a shadow playing in the mist, a dream of himself that could just evaporate and be gone. At other times he seemed to be almost solid and real again. Once or twice he would try leaning against a lamppost, and would fall straight through it if he wasn’t careful. At last, and with great reluctance, he actually began to turn his mind to what it was that had happened. Odd, that reluctance. He really didn’t want to think about it. Psychologists say that the mind will often try to suppress the memory of traumatic events, and this, he thought, was probably the answer. After all, if having a strange figure jump out of the boot of your own car and shoot you dead didn’t count as a traumatic experience, he’d like to know what did. He trudged on wearily. He tried to recall the figure to his mind’s eye, but it was like probing a hurting tooth, and he thought of other things. Like, was his will up-to-date? He couldn’t remember, and made a mental note to call his lawyer tomorrow, and then made another mental note that he would have to stop making mental notes like that. How would his company survive without him? He didn’t like either of the possible answers to that very much. What about his obituary? There was a thought that chilled him to his bones, wherever they’d got to. Would he be able to get hold of a copy? What would it say? They’d better give him a good write-up, the bastards. Look at what he’d done. Single-handedly saved the British software industry: huge exports, charitable contributions, research scholarships, crossing the Atlantic in a solar-powered submarine (failed, but a good try) -- all sorts of things. They’d better not go digging up that Pentagon stuff again or he’d get his lawyer on to them. He made a mental note to call him in the mor... No. Anyway, can a dead person sue for libel? Only his lawyer would know, and he was not going to be able to call him in the morning. He knew with a sense of creeping dread that of all the things he had left behind in the land of the living it was the telephone that he was going to miss the most, and then he turned his mind determinedly back to where it didn’t want to go. The figure. It seemed to him that the figure had been almost like a figure of Death itself; or was that his imagination playing tricks with him? Was he dreaming that it was a cowled figure? What would any figure, whether cowled or just casually dressed, be doing in the boot of his car? At that moment a car zipped past him on the road and disappeared off into the night, taking its oasis of light with it. He thought with longing of the warm, leather-upholstered, climate-controlled comfort of his own car abandoned on the road behind him, and then a sudden extraordinary thought struck him. Was there any way he could hitch a lift? Could anyone actually see him? How would anyone react if they could? Well, there was only one way to find out. He heard another car coming up in the distance behind him and turned to face it. The twin pools of hazy lights approached through the mist and Gordon gritted his phantom teeth and stuck his thumb out at them. The car swept by regardless. Nothing. Angrily he made an indistinct V sign at the receding red rear lights, and realised, looking straight through his own upraised arm, that he wasn’t at his most visible at the moment. Was there perhaps some effort of will he could make to render himself more visible when he wanted to? He screwed up his eyes in concentration, then realised that he would need to have his eyes open in order to judge the results. He tried again, forcing his mind as hard as he could, but the results were unsatisfactory. Though it did seem to make some kind of rudimentary, glowing difference, he couldn’t sustain it, and it faded almost immediately, however much he piled on the mental pressure. He would have to judge the timing very carefully if he was going to make his presence felt, or at least seen. Another car approached from behind, travelling fast. He turned again, stuck his thumb out, waited till the moment was right and willed himself visible. The car swerved slightly, and then carried on its way, only a little more slowly. Well, that was something. What else could he do? He would go and stand under a lamppost for a start, and he would practise. The next car he would get for sure.
Some of the less pleasant aspects of being dead were beginning to creep up on Gordon Way as he stood in front of his ‘cottage’. It was in fact a rather large house by anybody else’s standards but he had always wanted to have a cottage in the country and so when the time came for him finally to buy one and he discovered that he had rather more money available than he had ever seriously believed he might own, he bought a large old rectory and called it a cottage in spite of its seven bedrooms and its four acres of dank Cambridgeshire land. This did little to endear him to people who only had cottages, but then if Gordon Way had allowed his actions to be governed by what endeared him to people he wouldn’t have been Gordon Way. He wasn’t, of course, Gordon Way any longer. He was the ghost of Gordon Way. In his pocket he had the ghosts of Gordon Way’s keys. It was this realisation that had stopped him for a moment in his invisible tracks. The idea of walking through walls frankly revolted him. It was something he had been trying strenuously to avoid all night. He had instead been fighting to grip and grapple with every object he touched in order to render it, and thereby himself, substantial. To enter his house, his own house, by any means other than that of opening the front door and striding in in a proprietorial manner filled him with a hurtling sense of loss. He wished, as he stared at it, that the house was not such an extreme example of Victorian Gothic, and that the moonlight didn’t play so coldly on its narrow gabled windows and its forbidding turrets. He had joked, stupidly, when he bought it that it looked as if it ought to be haunted, not realising that one day it would be -- or by whom. A chill of the spirit gripped him as he made his way silently up the driveway, lined by the looming shapes of yew trees that were far older than the rectory itself. It was a disturbing thought that anybody else might be scared walking up such a driveway on such a night for fear of meeting something such as him. Behind a screen of yew trees off to his left stood the gloomy bulk of the old church, decaying now, only used in rotation with others in neighbouring villages and presided over by a vicar who was always breathless from bicycling there and dispirited by the few who were waiting for him when he arrived. Behind the steeple of the church hung the cold eye of the moon. A glimpse of movement seemed suddenly to catch his eye, as if a figure had moved in the bushes near the house, but it was, he told himself, only his imagination, overwrought by the strain of being dead. What was there here that he could possibly be afraid of? He continued onwards, around the angle of the wing of the rectory, towards the front door set deep within its gloomy porch wreathed in ivy. He was suddenly startled to realise that there was light coming from within the house. Electric light and also the dim flicker of firelight. It was a moment or two before he realised that he was, of course, expected that night, though hardly in his present form. Mrs Bennett, the elderly housekeeper, would have been in to make the bed, light the fire and leave out a light supper for him. The television, too, would be on, especially so that he could turn it off impatiently upon entering. His footsteps failed to crunch on the gravel as he approached. Though he knew that he must fail at the door, he nevertheless could not but go there first, to try if he could open it, and only then, hidden within the shadows of the porch, would he close his eyes and let himself slip ashamedly through it. He stepped up to the door and stopped. It was open. Just half an inch, but it was open. His spirit fluttered in fearful surprise. How could it be open? Mrs Bennett was always so conscientious about such things. He stood uncertainly for a moment and then with difficulty exerted himself against the door. Under the little pressure he could bring to bear on it, it swung slowly and unwillingly open, its hinges groaning in protest. He stepped through and slipped along the stone-flagged hallway. A wide staircase led up into the darkness, but the doors that led off from the hallway all stood closed. The nearest door led into the drawing room, in which the fire was burning, and from which he could hear the muted car chases of the late movie. He struggled futilely for a minute or two with its shiny brass door knob, but was forced in the end to admit a humiliating defeat, and with a sudden rage flung himself straight at the door -- and through it. The room inside was a picture of pleasant domestic warmth. He staggered violently into it, and was unable to stop himself floating on through a small occasional table set with thick sandwiches and a Thermos flask of hot coffee, through a large overstuffed armchair, into the fire, through the thick hot brickwork and into the cold dark dining room beyond. The connecting door back into the sitting room was also closed. Gordon fingered it numbly and then, submitting himself to the inevitable, braced himself, and slid back through it, calmly, gently, noticing for the first time the rich internal grain of the wood. The coziness of the room was almost too much for Gordon, and he wandered distractedly around it, unable to settle, letting the warm liveliness of the firelight play through him. Him it couldn’t warm. What, he wondered, were ghosts supposed to do all night? He sat, uneasily, and watched the television. Soon, however, the car chases drifted peacefully to a close and there was nothing left but grey snow and white noise, which he was unable to turn off. He found he’d sunk too far into the chair and confused himself with bits of it as he pushed and pulled himself up. He tried to amuse himself by standing in the middle of a table, but it did little to alleviate a mood that was sliding inexorably from despondency downwards. Perhaps he would sleep. Perhaps. He felt no tiredness or drowsiness, but just a deadly craving for oblivion. He passed back through the closed door and into the dark hallway, from which the wide heavy stairs led to the large gloomy bedrooms above. Up these, emptily, he trod. It was for nothing, he knew. If you cannot open the door to a bedroom you cannot sleep in its bed. He slid himself through the door and lifted himself on to the bed which he knew to be cold though he could not feel it. The moon seemed unable to leave him alone and shone full on him as he lay there wide-eyed and empty, unable now to remember what sleep was or how to do it. The horror of hollowness lay on him, the horror of lying ceaselessly and forever awake at four o’clock in the morning. He had nowhere to go, nothing to do when he got there, and no one he could go and wake up who wouldn’t be utterly horrified to see him. The worst moment had been when he had seen Richard on the road, Richard’s face frozen white in the windscreen. He saw again his face, and that of the pale figure next to him. That had been the thing which had shaken out of him the lingering shred of warmth at the back of his mind which said that this was just a temporary problem. It seemed terrible in the night hours, but would be all right in the morning when he could see people and sort things out. He fingered the memory of the moment in his mind and could not let it go. He had seen Richard and Richard, he knew, had seen him. It was not going to be all right. Usually when he felt this bad at night he popped downstairs to see what was in the fridge, so he went now. It would be more cheerful than this moonlit bedroom. He would hang around the kitchen going bump in the night. He slid down -- and partially through -- the banisters, wafted through the kitchen door without a second thought and then devoted all his concentration and energy for about five minutes to getting the light switch on. That gave him a real sense of achievement and he determined to celebrate with a beer. After a minute or two of repeatedly juggling and dropping a can of Fosters he gave it up. He had not the slightest conception of how he could manage to open a ring pull, and besides the stuff was all shaken up by now -- and what was he going to do with the stuff even if he did get it open? He didn’t have a body to keep it in. He hurled the can away from him and it scuttled off under a cupboard. He began to notice something about himself, which was the way in which his ability to grasp things seemed to grow and fade in a slow rhythm, as did his visibility. There was an irregularity in the rhythm, though, or perhaps it was just that sometimes the effects of it would be much more pronounced than at others. That, too, seemed to vary according to a slower rhythm. Just at that moment it seemed to him that his strength was on the increase. In a sudden fever of activity he tried to see how many things in the kitchen he could move or use or somehow get to work. He pulled open cupboards, he yanked out drawers, scattering cutlery on the floor. He got a brief whirr out of the food processor, he knocked over the electric coffee grinder without getting it to work, he turned on the gas on the cooker hob but then couldn’t light it, he savaged a loaf of bread with a carving knife. He tried stuffing lumps of bread into his mouth, but they simply fell through his mouth to the floor. A mouse appeared, but scurried from the room, its coat electric with fear. Eventually he stopped and sat at the kitchen table, emotionally exhausted but physically numb. How, he wondered, would people react to his death? Who would be most sorry to know that he had gone? For a while there would be shock, then sadness, then they would adjust, and he would be a fading memory as people got on with their own lives without him, thinking that he had gone on to wherever people go. That was a thought that filled him with the most icy dread. He had not gone. He was still here. He sat facing one cupboard that he hadn’t managed to open yet because its handle was too stiff, and that annoyed him. He grappled awkwardly with a tin of tomatoes, then went over again to the large cupboard and attacked the handle with the tin. The door flew open and his own missing bloodstained body fell horribly forward out of it. Gordon hadn’t realised up till this point that it was possible for a ghost to faint. He realised it now and did it. He was woken a couple of hours later by the sound of his gas cooker exploding.
The brass plaque on the red door in Peckender Street glittered as it reflected the yellow light of a street lamp. It glared for a moment as it reflected the violent flashing light of a passing police car sweeping by. It dimmed slightly as a pale, pale wraith slipped silently through it. It glimmered as it dimmed, because the wraith was trembling with such terrible agitation. In the dark hallway the ghost of Gordon Way paused. He needed something to lean on for support, and of course there was nothing. He tried to get a grip on himself, but there was nothing to get a grip on. He retched at the horror of what he had seen, but there was, of course, nothing in his stomach. He half stumbled, half swam up the stairs, like a drowning man trying to grapple for a grip on the water. He staggered through the wall, through the desk, through the door, and tried to compose and settle himself in front of the desk in Dirk’s office. If anyone had happened into the office a few minutes later -- a night cleaner perhaps, if Dirk Gently had ever employed one, which he didn’t on the grounds that they wished to be paid and he did not wish to pay them, or a burglar, perhaps, if there had been anything in the office worth burgling, which there wasn’t -- they would have seen the following sight and been amazed by it. The receiver of the large red telephone on the desk suddenly rocked and tumbled off its rest on to the desk top. A dialling tone started to burr. Then, one by one, seven of the large, easily pushed buttons depressed themselves, and after the very long pause which the British telephone system allows you within which to gather your thoughts and forget who it is you’re phoning, the sound of a phone ringing at the other end of the line could be heard. After a couple of rings there was a click, a whirr, and a sound as of a machine drawing breath. Then a voice started to say, ‘Hello, this is Susan. I can’t come to the phone right at the moment because I’m trying to get an E flat right, but if you’d like to leave your name...’
. . . . . . In the darkness, the red telephone receiver slipped and slid fitfully back across the desk. If anybody had been there to see it they might just have discerned a shape that moved it. It shone only very faintly, less than would the hands of a luminous watch. It seemed more as if the darkness around it was just that much darker and the ghostly shape sat within it like thickened scar tissue beneath the surface of the night. Gordon grappled one last time with the recalcitrant receiver. At length he got a final grip and slipped it up on to the top of the instrument. From there it fell back on to its rest and disconnected the call. At the same moment the ghost of Gordon Way, his last call finally completed, fell back to his own rest and vanished.