The hitchhiker

LITTLE ROCK — I love a mystery. Give me something out of order in the standard scheme of things and I’m hooked.

Admittedly, literature and popular fiction nicely salted with film classics have been spoilers for mystery in real life. Books send me to the movies and movies send me to the bookstores. I’m one of the few people I know who are never disappointed when the one isn’t true to the other. The plot’s the thing, and two plots turning on the same hook are twice as nice. The Deborah Kerr film “The Innocents” is hardly anything like the Henry James novella “The Turn of the Screw,” on which the former was based, but both can be eminently satisfying to the mystery fan.

Ghost stories have long been a favorite. Thank my cousin Sharon, who was regaling us little kids with Freddie-like tales years before Hollywood created him. She used to scare the bejabbers out of us with her atmospheric additions, breathless crescendos and dramatic pauses.

She was a far better storyteller than Hollywood, too. Years after she told us in vivid detail the plot of “House on Haunted Hill,” I finally saw the original. William Castle would be right up there with Alfred Hitchcock if she’d been hisscreenwriter. The movie wasn’t nearly as chilling as her recounting of it.

Most of Sharon’s stories were typical Fifties stuff: the couple whose car ran out of gas on a dark country road near a cemetery; the escaped lunatic who couldn’t rest until all his body parts were reunited; the distressed young hitchhiker by the bridge who kept trying to get home and the hapless motorists who kept trying to help her out.

I loved the hitchhiker, which, as it turns out, is pretty standard in folklore throughout the world. Something about a link with the past that won’t be broken is captivating, although I prefer the hitchhiking ghost to, say, “The Monkey’s Paw.” As enigmatic and intriguing as can be the journey, the denouement can be repulsive, even horrifying, especially if you summon the ghost instead of letting it summon you.All things considered, “Fe fi fo fum” is a lot more tantalizing than “Gotcha!”

Of course, a good ghost story can getcha, too, even variations on the hitchhiker’s tale. You know the sort, e.g., get too close to a lovely vision and behold a crone.

I keep coming back to the hitchhiker because lately I’ve glimpsed a few. Trouble is, every time I slow down, they disappear. No, I haven’t gone off the deep end. This is not some paranormal tangent or even thetheme of my next book, although you never know where a journey will lead. It’s really just life glimpsing other life across the ages and being frustrated in attempts to locate the bridge across the gap. But searching, always searching. It has to be there somewhere.

Just about everybody pursues time. Young people want it to pass. Old people want it back. It’s not the time I’ve spent that I long to hold, but the time that passed before I had any at all. Since there are few remaining who actually know anything of that time, I pursue ghosts, the remnants of people who are gone and all but forgotten except for the passing reference in a historical society’s periodical or the odd notation in a 19th century land transaction.

And, of course, the gotchas, the bits and pieces of stories about hard times and hard people in what Hollywood paints as the romantic American frontier, but which was really only wilderness until it could be pummeled into hardscrabble by brute force and stubbornness.

These ghosts were stern stuff, indeed, when flesh and blood. They left civilization to forge new ones, felling trees and clearing scrub through cholera and yellow fever and flu epidemics while having babies at the rate of one or two a year for the 20-25 years it took for their new roots to take hold.

They all had names and faces, some of which are actually known to me now, but what of them, their hopes, their dreams? Who were they really, day in and day out, through the highs and lows and routine in-betweens?

Their cemeteries, at least those that can be found, are full of heartbreak-young lives that never matured to walk or talk, young women who died giving birth to them, young husbands who lie alone in a corner because life goes on and so does the mating ritual. Some of the markers are eroded or broken,others are barely marked at all. You’d think they’d have left more of themselves behind.

Maybe they did. No, I’m sure they did. All I have to do is find that bridge.

Associate Editor Meredith Oakley is editor of the Voices page. The original version of today’s column appeared on Feb. 7, 2005.