Ghosts in the Graveyard
_This was originally written for and performed at theNovember 4th edition of Tuesday Funk, the long-running reading series in Chicago's Andersonville neighborhood. It's been lightly updated here._
I spent Halloween chasing ghosts. Not kids in costumes, or jumpscares in a haunted house. I spent Halloween, much of it anyway, chasing ghosts of a different kind: careening from one ICE spotting to another.
We were always just a little late. They'd disappeared by the time my wife and I would pull up, a crowd left in their wake, angry and heartbroken. Dozens of people in the streets pointing at nothing, at ghosts, wondering what to do—what to do practically, right now, but also what to do with the welling anger inside them. Inside us.
For now we'd tamp it down and check our phones. There was already another sighting, blocks away, so we jumped back in our car, and head out. Sometimes it feels like a little parade—a Halloween parade today—of cars chasing down another ghost.
We're too late again. This time there's an empty truck, a landscaping crew, disappeared. In the truck, the keys are still in the ignition. They may have gotten snatched, but nobody knows for sure. They may be hiding.
When I was little, kids in the neighborhood would play Ghosts in the Graveyard. It was a combination of tag and hide-and-seek. One person would be the ghost, and run and hide. Everyone else would run around trying to find them. If you spotted them, you yelled _" GHOSTS IN THE GRAVEYARD!!"_ as loud as you could, and ran back to base. If you got tagged before you made it back, you became a ghost as well. You played that way, one person getting picked off, then two, then four, an exponential set of disappearances, until there was no one left.
I still remember what it was like, to be running around on a warm summer night, the fireflies thick, and realizing that the shouts and laughter of the other kids playing had dwindled to near nothing, as the recognition set in that you were alone. The last one that wasn't a ghost.
It's not long before there's another sighting, across town this time, no way we'd make it there in time. The Feds are coordinating across multiple teams of jump-out-boys, hitting spots across town nearly simultaneously. The reports in the spotter's chat get tangled: they're going east and west simultaneously; they're _here_ , then they're _there_ in a blink. Hauntings crisscrossing the town. Hours of this, back and forth, sightings, a chase, and then gone again. _Poof_.
I'm not supposed to be doing this. None of us are.
I'm supposed to be chasing ghosts of a different kind. I'm supposed to be writing a book about a guy, George Dale, who lived a hundred years ago. George was a newspaperman in Muncie, Indiana in the 1920s who chased ghosts of his own: the white sheets of the the Ku Klux Klan. Back in the '20s the Klan had emerged as a political force across the country. The Immigration Act of 1924—which introduced racist limits on immigration numbers and created the very US Border Patrol that's now running wild in our streets—was authored by the Klan. But they were especially powerful in Indiana, where the Klan controlled the governor's mansion and two-thirds of the statehouse by the mid-20s. And in Muncie, where George Dale published his newspaper the _Post-Democrat_ , the Klan controlled the mayor, the city council, the cops, and the local courts. We know this, because George published their names in his paper. And because he published their names in the paper, he paid dearly for it.
The corrupt connection of cops and judges meant that George was in and out of jail constantly, for years, on charges that were mostly trumped-up or frame jobs. When he'd decry the corruption that was haunting him in his newspaper, he'd get hauled in on libel charges. When he'd protest _those_ charges in his pages, he'd get called up for contempt. He was in and out of jail so much that it was said that other folks locked up would applaud when he'd return.
Once on a cool spring night when he was walking home with his son, George Jr, two carloads of jump-out-boys in masks leapt out at them. They drew a gun on George, who moved without thinking—some say he never thought—and wrestled the gun from his gut where it was pressed. The gun went off and someone went down. It wasn't George.
The masked bastards retreated back to their cars, dragging their wounded man. Nobody knows what happened to him. There's no record of a hospital visit for a gunshot wound that night. He just disappeared. _Poof_. George maintained he shot him dead.
It wasn't the only time George was in danger. His house was shot at and firebombed. George was beaten in the streets multiple times. Members of the Klan's women's auxiliary were given the orders to spit on him on sight. And then there was the repeated threat of spending months on one of Indiana's notorious penal farms, made doubly dangerous for George because he'd exposed corruption on those very farms in his newspaper.
He could have made it stop, so easily. He could have stopped writing, could have stopped exposing the Klan and the corruption and the way those two things were so closely interwoven as to essentially be the same. But he never did.
Even as it destroyed his life—even as he was driven into destitution from the fines and legal fees, even as he lost his house—he continued to stand up. He continued to speak out. He never stopped fighting. When George Dale died in 1936, he was at his typewriter. He'd just started writing an editorial.
The whole day was spent running from one sighting to another. A long chase west felt productive, by every account we were on course to intercept them, but they just never emerged where we thought. They'd made a turn at some point, the reports lagged, and then they were gone. _Poof_.
After that, we headed home. Our young son was about to get out of school—a school ringed by parents standing like sentries. It was Halloween and, like every parent, we wanted to try and protect our child from the evil spirits of the world for as long as we could. At least for another night.
We moved Halloween outside during the start of the pandemic, you probably did too. You remember Halloween 2020 and 2021, with candy chutes and folding tables with take-two bowls. All of us doing what we could to balance a sense of normalcy with living in a world that was haunted by the sense that it never would be again.
I wonder sometimes if what I'm chasing isn't just the masked bastards snatching our neighbors, but the ghosts of the life we lead before all this. Before the agents showed up, before the helicopters, before the tear gas, before the kidnappings. Before this latest Trump election, certainly, but before the first one too. So much has been lost. So many ghosts.
Back in those pandemic Halloweens, I started sitting out with a fire going, saying hi to parents and complimenting kids on their costumes as they went by. I've been doing it ever since and so on this day, after our kid was home safely and out trick-or-treating in the Garfield costume we'd made together, I arranged my little fire pit and chairs and was so exhausted, so bone tired from the day and from the stress and from the sound of the helicopters that never stop and from the last few weeks of living like this (this assault only started in Chicago in September, if you can wrap your head around that) and from the fact that nobody should be living like this and from—despite that fact—the _years and years_ of living like this, and I lit some firestart and I watched it all burn.
06.11.2025 15:31 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
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