The Dover Ghosts: A Fable of Diversity

Dover, Ohio was a small town settled by migrants from New England, who built a Congregational church and raised corn.  Later there was an infusion of German Catholics, who erected a church of their faith and brewed beer.  After that there was electrification and other improvements, but little actual change.  The inhabitants were doctrinaire in their religions and suspicious of outsiders until they were afflicted with a plague of foreign ghosts. 

The first was a Russian mathematician named Alexi Kachenkov, who attracted immediate attention by his foreignness, his eighteenth century attire, and the fact that he was never found anywhere but the library.  No one actually saw him vanish or appear, but neither did they see him enter or leave.  

He seemed harmless enough, filling pages of foolscap with strange numbers and symbols, but he made the townsfolk nervous. High school students, who found the library a quiet place to do their homework, reverted to their dining room tables instead. 

This was during the height of the Cold War, and Helen Schultz the head librarian was not about to let some character who might very well be a Communist spy describe in code the details of Dover’s defenses. She marched up to the specter and demanded his business. 

Kachenkov looked up from his work, regarded her with a slightly puzzled expression as though he were as confused about the situation as she, and speaking in heavily accented English, told her his name.  Miss Schultz wrote it down.  She had a number of other questions, but Kachenkov’s confusion deepened, and he supplied little if any satisfying information.  

At the librarian’s insistence Kachenkov was interviewed by Howard Wells, the Chief of Police.  Wells could find no irregularities in the Russian’s activities.  It’s was true he couldn’t produce a library card, but since he never withdrew or even read any books, this hardly seemed a crime.  He was never found lingering after closing time, kept to himself, and was very neat.  Some of the later visitors from the Other Side were not so well behaved.

*****

By the mid seventies there were about thirty ghosts in Dover.  The actual count was difficult to confirm as some folks refused to admit they were harboring spirits of the dead and others boasted of colorful houseguests with little or no supporting evidence.  Some households were home to gauzy phantasms, which people glimpsed out of the corner of their eyes.  Others were haunted by ghosts of the Kachenkov variety, which appeared as substantial as anyone else. 

Such a specter was Pierre Martin who occupied a room at the Sunnyside Boarding House.  The proprietor, Maud Drew tried to evict him as he paid no rent and no border would live in the room with him there.  Maud summarily ordered him to pay or get out, but as he spoke only French, her words had no effect.  Her attempts to lay hold of him and rush him down the stairs revealed that his body wasn’t as solid as it looked.

Maud’s teenage daughter Angela saw Pierre as a romantic figure and imagined all sorts of adventures surrounding his life and death.  In her first year of high school, she signed up for French I.  “La plume de my tante est sur la table,” she declared to him after the first week.  Pierre’s usually gloomy demeanor brightened, and he responded with a stream of French she couldn’t understand. 

The full force of the sexual revolution had not descended upon the hamlet of Dover, and while Angela was enchanted with the shade, whom she imagined had been a Parisian boulevardier, her homespun methods of seduction went unnoticed by Pierre, who in fact had toiled through an undistinguished career as waiter in Arles.

Angela went on to French II and joined the French club, but communication remained poor.  By the time she had finished French III, she began to realize that the ghost’s utterances didn’t make much sense in any language.

Upon graduating from high school, Angela left the boarding house never to return.  She majored in foreign languages at the University of Chicago, spent her junior year in Paris, improved her methods of seduction, and ended up marrying an American expatriate from Waco. 

*****

Poor communication skills were a common characteristic of the Dover ghosts.  In 1979 a Chinese mandarin took up residence in a wooden bathhouse on the shore of Lake Andrews on the outskirts of town.  He was resplendent in silken robes, but silent.  Day and night he paced back and fourth along the length of the shabby building passing through the wall which separated the men’s section from the women’s. 

Mrs. Meitner, who discovered her one-piece bathing suit had grown tight over the winter, was grumpily hauling it on when she saw the mandarin heading in her direction. She lambasted him loudly and ordered him back to the men’s dressing room, but he gave no sign of having heard or seen her. 

The more modest women bathers at Lake Andrew’s beach waited for the ghost to head for the other side and then hurried through their change before he returned, but even if they missed their timing, it was plain he wasn’t ogling them.  By the summer’s end they gave him no more consideration than they would a post. 

In the early days of the Dover haunting some suggested making money from paranormal tourism, but Doverites were a shy, insular people who didn’t relish having strangers coming to gawk.  Many considered the ghosts as a sort of infestation like mice or bedbugs and felt embarrassed as though people might think it stemmed from some sort of laxness on their part.

Theories abounded, but answers were few.  There was a puzzling lack of American ghosts, who some thought would be more easily understood both in language and nature.  It was believed that the dead were uninterested in sex until the arrival of an amorous Hungarian who liked to chase girls in the park calling our endearments in his native tongue.  He could be avoided by staying out of the area after dark, and some young women claimed he couldn’t run very fast.  What he would do if he caught one was never reported by any reliable source. 

Most of the spirits were male, but there was the Balinese dancing girl who moved with classic grace between the booths of Dave’s Diner, and a gypsy woman who told impossible fortunes in back of the fire station. At fairly regular intervals students claimed to have seen a kangaroo in the high school gym, but the stories of his antics were outlandish and not widely believed. 

*****

By the nineties the ghosts came to be ignored by the townsfolk.  Their number had stabilized at about fifty, not counting athletic marsupials and other dubious phenomena, and without anything new to talk about, people passed them by the way they would sparrows and pigeons. 

Another phenomenon was affecting the Dover area.  Immigrants of a more usual nature were moving in, and encountering resistance and prejudice.  The Yuns were a Cambodian family who settled in the neighboring town of Kingsford.  Little Susie Yun entered the fifth grade where she was teased unmercifully and given the nickname, Yum Yum.  The adult Yuns were subject to more serious hostility and moved to Dover. 

The Yuns weren’t worried about the ghosts; they considered them to be spirits attached to the land, which were well known in their country and easily appeased with modest  offerings on little shrines.  The Dover citizenry were certainly not afraid of Asians, being familiar with the bathhouse mandarin, the Balinese dancer, and a Japanese peasant who seemed to be trying to raise rice in Mrs. Cooper’s goldfish pond. 

Being ignored was preferable to hostile stares, and the Yuns settled in.  In school the children noticed that Susie could answer questions asked by the teacher and was way ahead of the class in math. Mary Shultz, the grandniece of the librarian who accosted Alexi Kachenkov, offered Susie half of her Snickers bar and later invited her to a Girl Scout meeting at her home.  It turned out Susie was a whiz at jumping rope and was willing to answer questions about herself.  She seemed interested in the other girls as well.  It wasn’t long before Susie Yun acquired a green uniform and joined the troop.  She was a new kind of foreigner, and one who was easy to like. 

Susie’s parents were welcomed as well. Word spread among immigrant circles that Dover was a good place to live, and more foreigners arrived. They were different from the native born Doverites, but they hardly seemed weird. The Egyptian pharaoh in the basement of the Town Hall glowed with a greenish aura, but the immigrants sparkled with human characteristics that were recognized and appreciated.  

Unlike the ghosts, the immigrants competed for jobs, but they spent money, and the town prospered and grew.  Dover wasn’t exactly an Eden of cultural harmony; the new and old residents had their difficulties, but compared to Kingsford and other nearby communities they did very well indeed. 

The Dover ghosts didn’t fade into nothingness, nor did thy pack up and move away.  The living and the dead paid little notice to one another as though neither contingent really believed the other existed.