On a quiet evening in Shanghai, China, the 7-year-old me was alone in the dimly lit shikumen, a unique townhouse architecture blending Chinese and Western elements that had been a silent witness to my family's history for generations. With its screeching floorboards and antique furnishings, this tenement house held mysteries that had always intrigued me. 

As I sat in the living room, the flickering light of a lamp casting shadows on the walls, a weird vibe washed over me — a feeling of being watched, of unseen eyes peering out from elsewhere. The air felt heavy and possessed by a supernatural presence. I brushed it off as my imagination running wild and decided it was time to hit the hay. Climbing the wooden staircase, a faint melody caught my ear — a soft, scary tune, barely there but definitely there. The music seemed to float down from the upper floors, calling me to follow. I got curious and followed the sound to the attic, where I found my great-grandparent's antique piano tucked away in a shadowy corner, covered in a thick layer of dust and cobwebs. 

As my fingers trembled, I brushed away the thick layer of dust coating the piano keys, sending up a cloud of dirt that made me cough. Sitting down on the worn, creaky bench, I ran my hands over the yellowed ivory, feeling the vibration in each key that told of countless hours of playing. Yet, as if under a powerful magic spell, my fingers began to move subconsciously, gliding across the keys with a mind of their own as I morphed into Beethoven.

The melody that emerged was hauntingly beautiful, a bittersweet sensation that flowed from me effortlessly as if it had been waiting to be released. Each note was infused with a pang of deep, aching sadness, like the piano itself was mourning something lost. The music swelled and ebbed, and each sound made me feel like I was missing something, a profound sense of longing and nostalgia that I couldn't quite place. The strain filled the empty, shadowy attic, sounding like a song no one remembers, a forgotten relic of the departed.

Lost in the music, I didn't see the figure in the doorway until it was too late—a glowing, lucid form, watching me with interest and gloom. Otherworldly as he looked, his face etched with the lines of a lifetime's stories, each wrinkle a chapter in his tale. His eyes were deep pools of wisdom and sorrow, reflecting joy and pain. Surprised, I stopped playing, the final notes lingering in the air like a whisper, a last breath escaping into the silence. 

The spectral figure smiled faintly before disappearing into the shadows. I sat there alone on the bench, surrounded by the ghost of my great-grandparent, feeling like I had experienced something amazing—a moment from a bygone era brought to life through music, a connection between the living and the non-living realms. The air still hummed with the magical melody, as if the house itself were exhaling a long-held breath.

Then, the mystic man smiled faintly and disappeared, leaving me alone in the silent house. Sitting there in the quiet, I felt like I had experienced something amazing—a moment from the past brought to life through music, a connection between the living and the non-living realms. Even though I'll never know who the strange pianist was or the story behind the music, one thing's for sure—the memory of that strange moment has stuck with me until now, showing how long-ago spirits can reach out to the present in unexpected ways. 

Toni Morrison's haunting novel Beloved, which follows the story of Sethe, a former slave haunted by the shadow of her dead infant daughter, explores themes of re-memory and the lingering presence of the past that are differently evoked in my personal encounter with that spectre in Shanghai. In the opening lines of the book, Morrison establishes the setting of the Bluestone Road’s house: “124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years, each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter were its own victims. The grandmother was dead, and the sons had run away by the time they were thirteen years old — as soon as merely looking in a mirror shattered it; as soon as two tiny hand prints appeared in the cake” (1). 

It’s not coincidental that 124 includes Howard, Buglar, and Denver, who are Sethe’s first, second, and fourth kids, excluding 3, her third child, Beloved, the dead baby whose throat was slit. “A baby’s venom,” an oxymoron that compares an infant’s innocence with the poison’s evil, shows that infanticide warns the living family of what has been lost and what could’ve been if she had lived. Within the larger context, the sixty million and more who were lost to the transatlantic slave trade and the Middle Passage culminated in the beloved’s soul because the disenfranchised believed the New World to be the land of the dead and the Atlantic Ocean to be the passage into hell, resulting in the absence of a full American history since they were stripped of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness when they ventured into the gothic frontier of America. The use of the words “spite” and “victims” shows that the collective consciousness of the enslaved became that missing and dislodged piece in the puzzle of America’s identity that slipped into the present through the cracks of time and progress. 

Beloved is a daunting poltergeist because her long-dead body deeply clings to the earth but her heart has whittled away long ago, left to rust in vengeance and blankness. Unbound from the constraints of linear time and space, Beloved embodies the past, present and future narratives of African Americans that were lost to the century of oppression and enslavement under bondage. Her haunting presence in the present day serves as a reminder to Sethe of the freedom she could have attained after the Civil War. Hence, it involved shattering the mirror and leaving death imprints to break her mother out of the state of denial. 

The portrayal of this unnerving escalation from a subtle to an overt phantom continues, as the first line of Part II details the cursed house becoming more spooky, “124 was loud. Stamp Paid could hear it even from the road” (199). Instead of having a subtle and less intensive presence, Beloved started to wreak havoc and induce fear to a level that even scared Stamp out because, before the hauntings, he could walk through the house without being hesitant and uncomfortable as he didn’t feel the need to knock. However, as of right now, the uncontainable duppy materialises and even spooks him out when he walks in front of 124, as she becomes tangible flesh, just like how my ancestral visitor from seven years ago somewhat transformed into this embodied state. 

Unlike my family's revenant, Beloved is everyone’s apparition. She ghosted as Paul D’s catalyst in realizing the powerlessness of men in servitude and deconstructing the hunter and father stereotypes. Ghosting Denver, she started the healing process that brought her out of the secret room so that identity benchmarks could be formed in her teenage years, as she decided to go to college in the end. As to us readers, her shadowy presence forces us to face an America that’s the land of the unfree, where American dreams are squashed into pieces due to its Original Sin and Depravity. 

To further depict that she’s a ghost of our national identity in the plot’s climax, Morrison employs visceral imagery to illustrate the Beloved’s corporeal form in the final moments before being exiled: 

“The devil-child was clever, they thought. And beautiful. It had taken the shape of a pregnant woman, naked and smiling in the heat of the afternoon sun. Thunder black and glistening, she stood on long, straight legs, her belly big and tight. Vines of hair twisted all over her head. Jesus. Her smile was dazzling” (308). 

Seemingly manipulative and evil, this “devil child” alludes to Medusa, the serpent-headed Gorgon from Greek mythology whose gaze turns onlookers to stone. Like the legendary beauty of Medusa, Beloved appears outwardly beautiful and alluring with “long straight legs” and a “big and tight belly,” smiling “dazzlingly” to attract but doom those who dared to look at her. However, such a seductive form is at odds with her more sinister and petrifying ghost form, with “vines of hair over her head” symbolizing Medusa's snakes. Just as ghosts often manifest in contradictory ways, first luring in their victims before revealing their true monstrous nature, so too does Beloved embody this duality. Thus, this juxtaposition of her inner and outer ego epitomizes the contradictory legacies of slavery. On the one hand, her serpentine features are demonic and sinful, like how overseers and slave masters dehumanizingly treated the enslaved because her “naked” and “pregnant” form shows violated fertility and the horrors of black females being raped by the whites. On the other hand, “glistening” and “thunder black” indicate the Southern downplay of the peculiar institution through Historical Revisionism, which still happens today in politics and misguided teachings, making her a ghost of the status quo. 

Just as my forefather’s soul manifested through that haunting piano melody, beckoning me to connect with my ancestral heritage, Beloved incarnated and insisted Sethe confront the “impossible choice” she made at Sweet Home. These supernatural visitations, whether through music or physical manifestation, shatter the boundaries between the living and non-living realms, the present and the past. Their spirits force a reckoning with that which has been repressed — inherited memories. We cannot outrun that long shadow. 

The attic's uncanny melody still reverberates, an ethereal whisper calling us back to reckon with those haunting refrains of the past. As I climb those creaking stairs once more as a young adult, I feel the weight of that ghostly figure watching, reminding me that the ghosts of our ancestors remain — insistent, eternal, demanding to be remembered.