Writing Real-Life Ghost Stories

Tools of the 'write-around' for reporting stories about those we cannot interview.

With Halloween and Day of the Dead upon us, my classes have spent the last few weeks talking about reporting on ghosts.

Students recently finished the reported book, “No Visible Bruises,” by Rachel Louise Snyder, and they are reading “Liliana’s Invincible Summer,” by Cristina Rivera Garza, which won a Pulitzer Prize earlier this year. 

Just as my undergraduates were working their way through these texts, The Atlantic dropped “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books,” quoting professors who argued: “Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.” 

I do not teach at the “elite” colleges named in the article. At my school, 49 percent of students who earned bachelor’s degrees this year were first-generation college students. But most of my undergrads sure did read the hell out of Snyder and Garza’s books, offering literary critiques, analysis, and discussion that I have a hard time envisioning artificial intelligence ever replicating. 

Of course we are spoiled reading narrative nonfiction, with subject matter that feels immediate and important, and writing that borrows from the literary techniques of fiction—even though the details included are fact-checkable. 

In “Liliana’s Invincible Summer,” students debated who the narrator of the book might be, settling upon a conclusion they came up with themselves: Garza is the author, but her dead sister, Liliana, is co-author, haunting the prose, as if also writing it herself.

How did Garza pull this off as nonfiction? Archives. But not official government or legal records. That trail went cold. Specifically, Garza discovered a box of her sister’s letters and journals. She also conducted interviews of her friends. She employed memory reconstruction, on herself and others. She used some speculative language. She quoted from the songs, poems, and literature her sister loved. She revisited the locations of her sister’s past, turning the place into a character.

With that, of course, I asked students to write their own ghost story. A haunting, which I told them could involve a person, place, or thing.

This assignment raises the question: How have different nonfiction writers and journalists tackled true ghost stories?

AI can’t replicate my class, but it did make this.

Consider the write-around.

Writing about a ghost—whether a dead person, or someone distant or unreachable, or someone famous or high profile who, perhaps, rejects your interview requests—can require calling upon the tools of the write-around. This, first, involves interviews of other people in this individual’s vicinity or social circles.

For any profile, constructing a portrait of a subject through others’ impressions can offer more nuance and dimension than direct access alone. But there are other approaches that also go into writing around a subject. Or writing about a ghost.

Here are some additional tools of the write-around.

Digital trails.

Garza’s book about her sister includes letters and journals, but today the digital trails of people—social media, blogs, videos, texts, photos, phone recordings—can also offer telling details for portraits.

When I wrote “The Lurker,” for The Verge, about an individual who was stalking academics (particularly Asian Americans professors), one of the victims turned over thousands of social media posts (archived daily over years), which offered a glimpse into the mind of a person who was scarily obsessed.

Contextualization.

We often think of reporting as questioning the events of the story, as well as the people in it. But in writing about a person who can no longer speak for themselves there is also the task of interrogating the societal structures surrounding their life.

When reporter Al Letson traced the life and death of Billey Joe Johnson, a high school football star, for Reveal’s serial audio investigation, “Mississippi Goddam: The Ballad of Billey Joe,” he uncovered documents, including a grand jury report, police investigative files, an autopsy report, and other sources, along conducting with interviews of family and friends, to contextualize Billey Joe’s life and death in the South’s violent history of policing and race.

“I’m not asking the Johnsons or anybody else to relive the worst thing that ever happened to them for your listening pleasure,” Letson told his audience. “I’m not interested in commodifying Black death. I am interested in looking at the system and understanding it so that change may be implemented.”

And in a starkly different kind of reported piece, “Stories About My Brother,” journalist Prachi Gupta wrote of the death of her brother, using write-around techniques like interviews and recollections, as well as contextualizing his life and death within the wider social conditions of white supremacy, gender discrimination, and masculinity.

Reflections of the writer.

Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah is a master of the write-around, as well as the reported essay, which involves weaving facts, scenes, research, and personal observations. 

She profiles Dave Chappelle, and while reporting in his hometown, Ghansah runs into the comedian, who has turned down her interview requests. She decides not to pester him, which becomes its own statement on his life, by the writer herself. Ghansah also writes about James Baldwin, who compels her to think about her grandfather’s generation and “black refugees.” She asks: “What makes us want to run away?” And in her piece on Dylann Roof, she concludes: “I know exactly who Dylann Roof is. I know that he is hatred.” She is not afraid to use powerful declarative sentences.

Songs, lyrics, poetry, literature & art.

What can we learn about a person by studying the art they practice, engage with, or admire? What do the themes they gravitated toward in literature or music reveal about their inner selves?

Years ago, I came across the research of psychologist William Todd Schulz, who edited Oxford's “Handbook of Psychobiography,” detailing what he calls “the psychobiographical method.” This process begins with a driving question, like: “Why did John Lennon write “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds?” After merging analysis of lyrics with other biographical insights into a person’s life, a psychobiographer relies on their own subjective lens to come up with an answer.

In Schulz’s field, this approach relies upon “inference and interpretation” to study figures like Sylvia Plath, Truman Capote, or Bob Dylan. This involves looking for themes, patterns, or recurrences in their work, arriving not at an ultimate truth, but instead, going beyond the facts of life to look for the subtext.

Ghansah’s writing mentioned above exemplifies one nonfiction writer’s approach to her own kind of psychobiography. So does this book, which I read over the summer, “My Autobiography of Carson McCullers,” by Jenn Shapland. An examination of “identity, queerness, memory, obsession, and love,” it asks: “How do you tell the real story of someone misremembered—an icon and idol—alongside your own?”

In “Liliana’s Invincible Summer,” as a window into her sister’s mind and thoughts, Garza considers the lyrics of the break-up songs that her sister listened to in the days before her murder, the movies she watched in her final months (“Mississippi Burning,” “Dark Eyes,” “The Accused”), as well as the poetry and literature she quoted in her journals and notebooks, one of which becomes the opening epigraph of the book, also echoed in its title:

“In the midst of winter I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.”

—Albert Camus

Speculation.

The language of “perhaps,” “what if,” “imagine,” “maybe,” “could have,” can add richness to lost moments, to the lives of people who cannot be quoted today, or whose stories have not been preserved. Take “Into the Wild,” when Jon Krakauer goes on his own journey into the woods to consider how his dead subject, Chris McCandless, may have thought or felt.

In this interview, I mentioned the use of speculation in other nonfiction works like “Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments,” by Saidiya Hartman, who imagines how her historical subjects may have reacted, spoke or experienced life at a time when the systems they lived within did not keep meaningful records on them, or even consider them to be multidimensional humans in the first place.

I also refer to journalist Johanna Adorjan’s “An Exclusive Love,” in which she reconstructs her grandparents’ suicides in vivid scenes by stepping out of reported “facts” and using “I imagine.”

Later this week….

I will continue the theme of writing about ghosts, with a follow-up post that will go live on Halloween. It will delve deeper into reporting the stories that haunt us—how to think about a true story, when the ghost is an event, a place, a memory, ancestors, or your life.

It will also offer a few tips from my storytelling friends, This American Life Producer Miki Meek, and the lovely writer, filmmaker, and teacher

Kerra Bolton

, as well as other essential resources.

Thanks to all who have supported and subscribed to The Reported Essay. I enjoy sharing lessons I’ve collected over the last two decades with all of you, as I simultaneously share them with my students. I have more planned. Stay tuned.

*Also, if you have any examples of write-arounds (besides Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” which I know is the one most frequently associated with this approach), please do drop them in the comments section for all of us to read and enjoy.