Spiritually Significant
“This is the kind of thing that gets the devil out of you,” Lawson said while I sniffled. I hoped so. It had been more than a week of oppressive sickness, and I was bobbing like a dumpling in soup in the middle of Nowhere, Idaho. The natural pools were fed by hot springs, and after the long drive we all went to soak in them. The mountains bounced the remainder of the day’s light back onto us, and I oscillated from the hot pool to the cold one, hoping it would shock my system into healing.
Kate and Lawson were preoccupied with trying to hide a bottle of tequila from the people flitting in and out of the main building while I looked up at it, trying to figure out what it reminded me of. Eventually, I remembered. Back in the summer of 2020, when I worked at a chicken farm in rural North Carolina, there had been an abandoned schoolhouse about a mile up the road where I would camp out and entertain myself. I would walk around the empty used-to-be gymnasium and try to decode the pencil graffiti on the underside of dilapidated desks. I would write in my journal on the front steps and make daisy chains in the side yard. I was aware of the fact that the building was somewhat spiritually occupied, but it felt thematically correct — I was fine to hang out with the ghosts of children, being nineteen and spending most of that year feeling like a ghost of a child myself.
That night, we stayed in the apartment unit a few blocks up from the main building
“So, I asked him about bedbugs, and he said ‘why would you ask me about bedbugs?’ Seems kind of kooky,” Kate had said, jostling the key in the door of the inn. “Some of the reviews said things about bedbugs. But I guess not in this unit.”
Even though I had offloaded about half of my huge suitcase at my parent’s house in North Carolina, it remained heavy (especially ridiculous given my proclivity to wearing the same pair of sweatpants for days and going commando in my long skirts). I hauled it to the top of the stairs and set it down on the creaking wood floor.
“Just so everyone is aware,” I said, turning to address the group still climbing the stairs, “this place is definitely haunted.”
“I don’t think so,” Kate said, planting their hands on their hips. “I wouldn’t say haunted.”
“Fine,” I said, peering down the dark hallway, “spiritually significant.”
I understand the hesitation with the word “haunted.” I myself prefer not to use it where it doesn’t apply but sometimes do anyway for efficiency and clarity’s sake. I am a person most familiar with ghosts or spirits or entities from the other side, having been haunted (the word definitely applies here) for a full calendar year as a child and being relatively in tune with alternative frequencies since. It’s rare that I get truly spooked, but I will often remark that we’re in the territory of other entities — much to the eyeroll of those around me.
“I believed you about that place in Detroit,” Jacob says when he reaches the top of the stairs. I feel warm about this for a moment, as Jacob is one of my more skeptical friends, but then I recall the energy in the Detroit house as being undeniably hostile and consider that most people, regardless of spiritual inclination, would feel the same.
One of the reasons I usually find the word “haunted” to be a misdirection is the imposition it implies — to say that an entity is “haunting” a place often conjures an image of an invasive energy, pressing down upon the people who have more of a right to be there. This is really not the case in most spiritually significant locations.
It is usually the humans who are haunting the spirits; the spirits live here all the time, and yet cannot rid themselves of us, the flesh-and-blood beings who are constantly barging in and insisting they have made the space unwelcome. There is a great difference between a place that is energetically heavy but accepting of your presence and a space that wants you to get the fuck out as soon as possible. Most people who describe “scary ghost encounters” are actually experiencing the consequence of treating the former like the latter, and the spirits are deciding to have fun with you.
Nowhere, Idaho did not want us to get the fuck out, which was good news. The same was not true for the Detroit rowhouse we stayed in the last time we were on tour. That night, I lied awake for hours Googling property deeds and trying to figure out how to make my peace with the energy before going to bed vulnerable. I couldn’t find anything conclusive and dreamed about mirrors.
Last night in Idaho I laid in bed watching a documentary about the Donner party and in that thin space between consciousness and unconsciousness, I heard several loud knocks from different parts of the house. Then I went to sleep for eleven hours and woke up feeling incredibly refreshed.
“Did Kate tell you about the place being haunted?” Addy asked me in the morning, while I cleaved through an inch of scrambled eggs with my takeout fork.
“No, Kate thinks it’s not haunted. I’m the one who said it was haunted.”
“Well, Kate was telling us that this place used to be a sanitorium. They used to, like, operate in the rooms,” Addy continued. “It was on ghost hunters or something.”
I was still gloating when Kate returned from the springs that morning.
“Okay, so, I did totally see a specter in the room last night,” they said, coming in from the springs. “And then I looked up more reviews about this place. Half of them are like, great place, loved my experience. And the other half are like, yeah, it’s totally fine except for Martha.”
As it turns out, I slept sounder than anyone last night.
martha wanted tickets to the boise show
👁️