This year, I had the privilege of contributing a story to Jon Solomon’s 25-Hour Holiday Marathon on WPRB. I think I was somewhat inspired by Goldblade’s “City of Christmas Ghosts,” which I first heard on the marathon a few years ago. Enjoy!

The town of Monmouth Junction is in Middlesex County and the town of Ocean is in Monmouth County, but all the ghosts you used to be able to find in either place have moved on to greener pastures. To find a ghost on Christmas night you’re going to have to look elsewhere. A dear old friend of mine said, They’re tearing the mall down; think that means we’ll get a ghost of the mall and ghosts of Christmas decorations all to peruse by our lonesome? And I said, no, that’s not how it works. But I appreciated the sentiment.

So how does it work? I never really understood the underlying process, which I’d come to regret between then and now. I knew the gestures, the offerings, the overall intent you were supposed to use when calling forth a ghost on Christmas night. But I think in some ways I was closer to a counting horse than a scientist called up one night for the Nobel Prize.

There’s a little downtown a few towns from my hometown, and that’s where I found most of the ghosts would congregate come Christmas. I’d usually have a couple of bags of offerings, spaced out so I could spend an hour more near that alleyway and by the distance learning office and the shuttered tobacco shop. If the offerings were good you’d get the ghosts in an aspect pleasing to the eye, and if the offerings were lacking, well, let’s just say you didn’t. Let’s say you’d come back with smoke staining your shirt and lines in your flesh and an affliction in your inner ear that lasted for days. 

A couple of years ago I had the ritual the best I ever got it. It wasn’t too cold that night, something I’m finding more and more these days. The offerings I’d brought with me were absolutely top-notch, something I’d leapt at and splurged on and didn’t regret. I got the gestures right and my mind was clear with the intent. And that was when the Christmas ghost showed up; a guy who was maybe a stranger and maybe a substitute teacher I knew from middle school. He looked like a scholar, though; he had a sort of beatific look on his face.

The ghosts never spoke — or at least I’d never heard their speech, and no one I knew had ever heard their speech. But this one was trying to tell me something. Gestures in the air, his lips spelling out words I couldn’t recognize. Did ghosts speak in a new language, I wondered that night. After it was over I sat back in my car, the engine running so I didn’t have silence all around me, and I tried to recall all that I’d seen and all I could make out from what he was trying to say. 

It was a ritual, is what I’m trying to say. We all have our rituals at this time of year; this one’s mine. Even if it means trying to understand an unspoken language; even if it means trying to hear words no voice ever uttered.