Pluto Times, Plutonian Lives: We Are the Ghost Hunters and We Are the Ghosts

There are people who fill the role of Keeper of the Lore for their families. They inherit the family heirlooms, collect the old stories, and wander through cemeteries and old dusty records offices looking for ghosts.

The role of Keeper of the Lore is an odd one. You would think that a Keeper of the Lore would be especially close to their living family members, but I find, often, the opposite is true. The poet Ilya Kaminsky says in his poem “Author’s Prayer” that to speak for the dead means that a person must “leave the animal of [their] body.” I suspect that there is something about a connection with the dead that forces a person to face the family’s shadow, loosening the bonds of connection with living family members.

I am a Keeper of the Lore. When I was young, I sat at the kitchen table while my father cooked pasta sauce from scratch, listening with rapt attention as he told the old family story about railroad missionaries and renegade priests that lead to my family helping to found a Baptist church in their Italian neighborhood. I have carried heavy, antique furniture with me as I’ve moved over thousands of miles, cramming it the tiniest apartments. (I once had a bedroom that had once been a coat closet.) And I have flown across the country in search of a 17th century burial ground with no information but GPS coordinates.

Years ago, I found myself living in New Hampshire near where one side of my mother’s family had lived for over three hundred years. I was in my early-20s. Aside from driving down to Boston or going to the mall, there wasn’t much to do on the weekend, so I made it a game to see how many of my ancestors’ graves I could visit.

I discovered early on that finding my mothers more than a few generations back was an impossible chore, but I found most of the men in that line. Only the adventurers eluded me: the original immigrant, who came to New England in the 1630s and his many times great-grandson who caught gold fever and went west with the 49ers and never came home from California.

When life took me to California a few years later, I picked up the quest and went looking for my 49er ancestor’s grave in Gold Country. I never found him. Most of the 49ers died alone, apparently, and were buried in unmarked graves.

I did, however, find a ghost. In the oldest cemetery in town, there was a story about a woman in a red dress who had been buried with the wrong name on her tombstone. According to the lore, she appears to visitors and says her name, pleading with them to set the record straight.

Ghost Stories are Practice for Pluto Times

Over the last few years, Pluto has been square my Mercury/midheaven, and IC. I have always been a plutonian person with Pluto in Scorpio in the 4th house square the moon and AC, but I am becoming conscious of my plutonian nature in a way that never I have before.

Pluto is the lord of the dead and buried treasure. I have been musing on ghost stories and the reasons we go looking for the dead.

The trope of the ghost with unfinished business is so common, it’s practically a cliche: the fragment of the deceased who clings to a haunted house or burial ground, repeating the same words and gestures, waiting for someone to uncover their traumatic story and bring them closure, allowing them to move on.

Why do we tell cliche stories like this? Surely, if we have heard one ghost story, we’ve heard them all, haven’t we? And yet, we tell them over and over again.

Lately, I have come to realize that we tell ghost stories for the same reasons that ghosts tell their stories, and being a Keeper of the Lore is not (just?) an act of service to my ancestors. My soul is a burial ground. The work I do for the dead is practice for the real work of finding and releasing the ghosts of myself.

Pluto's Work is Healing Our Inner Hauntings

We are all ghosts, in a way. We all have stories we repeat to anyone who will listen. We tell them a little differently every time, refining our stories until even the most clumsy talker can rattle off those stories with as much charm as a traveling salesman. We tell our stories with the desperation of ghosts looking for someone to save us, as if we think that if we can only tell the story in the right way, to the right person, we will convince them to free us from the haunted place where we are trapped in our minds.

And yet, there are no ghost hunters looking for us. Not yet. Maybe, someday a Keeper of the Lore will uncover the truth and tell our stories, but it might be too late for us, then. We don’t really know what happens to the dead. Are ghosts departed souls trapped in Bardo, or are they free-floating trauma disconnected from a source? We don’t know if the Keepers of the Lore bring peace to the dead or just themselves.

As long as we are alive, we are the only ones who can save ourselves, and ghost stories are fictions trying to teach us how. We are the ghosts, and we are the ghost hunters. We are the Keeper of the Lore that binds us, and we are the saviors who can uncover the truth, end the loop of repetitive stories, and free ourselves to move on… If only we keep digging and look for the dead.