Extinction-Level Event

 Humans are weird when it comes to thinking about the end of all things. Almost all of our mythologies have built-in warnings about eschatological scenarios in which all the bad is purged and the good starts again. This may reference actual cycles in the earth's history that our species understands unconsciously. Science has given us some evidence that, when compiled into a timeline of the earth’s total age, suggests that there have been several cataclysmic moments that have wiped the planet clean like a teacher erasing her whiteboard.

We ought to be aware of our frailty and how quickly and unexpectedly life can end. Even so, like reckless teenagers, we pretend that death won't happen to us to justify continuing behaviors that perpetuate disastrous consequences. We hear all the time about horrible car accidents caused by distracted driving, yet we continue to operate vehicles while looking at our phones. We keep smoking, knowing that it causes cancer and other pulmonary diseases; we ingest ungodly amounts of fat and carbohydrates knowing it causes obesity and diabetes and we pour gallons of soda, beer and liquor down our throats, aware that it can cause anything from liver disease to mental decline and death. None of these considerations are enough to keep us from putting ourselves and everyone else in danger. We obviously have the same response to planetary destruction.

This tendency in our species may come as a marker of our cosmic inheritance. The universe, too, is living dangerously; cyclopean creations and monstrous destructions are occurring at every moment. Our poor planet lives on a knife edge of stability in an infinite sea of malevolent antipathy and indifference to life. At any moment, this precariously balanced little orb could be snuffed out, either from within or from some outer threat that we have no way to anticipate or counteract. If you imagine a goldfish bowl propped on a rickety platform at the end of a particularly busy shooting range, you will catch my meaning. 

To extend the illustration, it may be doubly arresting to note that the bowl is overcrowded, food is scarce, grudges and battles occur between individuals, pollution is rising, oxygen in the water is rapidly depleting and some are attempting to seize 'total power and control'. A handful of the goldfish believes that the Great Goldfish is coming to save them and that the survivors of the coming cataclysm will be the 'pure and chosen few'. This reflects the extent of self-awareness in our purblind species.

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Our planet is quite young in the cosmic scheme of things. Even so, it has already experienced six extinction-level events. The likelihood of a nightmare ending for Earth is far more statistically probable than any long-term utopian future. Just ask the goldfish. With that in mind, though, it may help to add context to this idea of mass extinction by understanding what came before meager homo sapiens arrived on the scene. Our planet is far older than the six thousand years popularly agreed upon by the people who build replicas of Noah’s Ark theme parks in Kentucky and believe that dinosaurs lived at the same time as humans and that a flood wiped out all life.

The first devastation of the earth, the Ordovician extinction, occurred about 440 million years ago. At this point in the earth's long history, most life dwelled in the oceans. Massive fluctuations in oxygen levels, sea-level decline and global cooling devastated about 85-90% of all living things during this initial cataclysm, though it occurred over a geologically long time frame possibly as a result of tectonic plate movement.

The Late Devonian Extinction happened about 370 million years ago (only 70 million years after the Ordovician). For 25 million years or so, the earth became uninhabitable to the life that had survived and thrived from the previous cataclysms. Temperature fluctuations and the widespread death of plant life that helped to regulate the oxygen content in the atmosphere are possibly to blame. One or perhaps several ice ages had also occurred in the lead-up to the Devonian, creating a truly hostile environment for all but the hardiest life forms.

Next was the Permian-Triassic extinction. This buffet of killer delights has been nicknamed The Great Dying. Life on the planet—upwards of 95%—was casually destroyed, scouring the planet mostly clean. Scientific speculation suggests what may have happened to cause this brutal destruction. About 250 million years ago, climate change, mass expulsion of greenhouse gasses from the seafloor from tectonic shifts, the resulting volcanic activity or perhaps a massive chunk of space debris caused a forbidding series of cascading devastations, all of which caused mass extinction on an unprecedented scale.

The Triassic-Jurassic extinction followed. This event happened so long ago (200 million years) that no one is quite sure what happened. It is possible that a combination of massive ecological and geological coincidences worked together to create an eons-long nightmare scenario that we cannot fathom.

As if these weren't enough, next comes the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction. This is the most well-known cataclysm because it is the event that killed off most early forms of mammalian life and all the pterosaurs and non-flying dinosaurs. This extinction has often been represented humorously (though morbidly) as a pair of tyrannosaurs watching a falling star and asking each other about lunch plans for Thursday. This extinction happened only 60 million years ago but was likely precipitated by a series of atmospheric and chthonic events that were permanently punctuated by the impact of a big space rock smashing into the crust and causing a millennia-long nuclear winter. 

If you're counting (and I hope you have been) you're wondering why there are only five mentioned, when I said that there have been 6 total mass extinctions. We are currently in the last one, called The Holocene Extinction. The term mass-extinction event promotes a mental image of things coming to an abrupt and explosive end. Actually, many of the events described took hundreds of thousands of years or more to reach the fullness of their destruction. Certainly, a comet or asteroid striking the surface can add speed to the circumstances, but generally, these events are agonizingly slow to a human understanding of time.

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Our current extinction has been going on nicely for about 10,000 years. Most of the creatures that have perished in that time have died off due to environmental changes that cause habitat loss. Significant destruction of rainforests, rising sea temperatures, loss of species, geological catastrophes and sudden shifts in oxygen content in the water and the atmosphere have all played a part. Most terrifyingly, though, one species has aided in the Holocene Extinction more than any other. 

Since humans have been on the scene and started building civilization (around 3300 BCE), the people living in those civilizations have needed to eat and have access to other amenities. For about one thousand of the last 10,000 years, humans have been actively destroying habitats, overhunting and fishing, polluting ecosystems and trashing populations of everything from clams and mussels to whales and tuna. On land, our systematic deforestation has killed off species that we're not even sure about other than that they're gone. Each year anywhere from 10 to 100 species go extinct forever. That's a horrifying reality.

In the Carolinas, an indigenous parakeet's plumage (Conuropsis carolinensis) was so popular for women's hats that they were hunted to extinction in just under 80 years. Perhaps ironically, it is now believed that these bright green birds were already on the way out, possibly just from the expansive growth in human, equine and livestock populations and the introduction of cats (though, it is now thought that the parakeets were poisonous and that the cats may have gotten their comeuppance). That's just one example. Humans have helped to speed up the current extinction by upending existing balances in our search for oil, lithium, titanium, iron, cadmium, copper, tin, aluminum, arsenic, silver mercury, nickel, lead, coal and natural gas and our endless need for makeup, cotton, metal, gasoline, bullets, bread, meat, cheese, tobacco and grain alcohol, smartphones and computers, cars, airplanes, rockets and a means to transport them all over our planet.

Humans are a warlike species and our continuing need to acquire other people's land and justify genocide in the name of political affiliation can also be what sends us over the precipice into our own extinction. The final crunch for us may be the equivalent of all the goldfish swimming to one side of the bowl and tipping it over. That doesn't mean there aren't cosmic bullets out there headed this way at devastating speed, but by the time they hit, humanity, and all life may already be gone.

Eye-opening as this ought to be, though, humans still justify destroying our planet as if we hope to speed up the oncoming destruction. This somewhat suicidal pursuit of detrimental goals seems antithetical to long-term survival. It may be that, like the millions of other species that have come and gone, we are destined to be dug up in another 50 million years by some other sentient beings that evolved and rose to prominence long after our goldfish bowl tipped over into oblivion. This plummet has already begun and nothing, not even the end of carbon-based fuel addiction or everyone becoming vegan, or total human equality and unity can stop it. Those things cannot hurt—they will help to slow the eventual destruction—but it will take a planet-wide understanding of the mortality of our species to get us to stop trying to rock that goldfish bowl to the edge of the abyss of extinction. 

Because I was nearly hit by a driver looking at her phone on the way to work, today, that doesn’t seem likely.

A Bite of Irony

In recent years, scientists and activists have tried to change the terminology of contact with a shark from “attack” to “encounter”. Some organizations still use the term “attack” to capture the brutality and horror of a run-in with a shark, however, sharks rarely attack in the actual sense of that word, as I hope will be seen and, in an attempt to further the understanding, I try to use the term “encounter” or “bite” as much as possible in the following essay. A polar bear or yellowjacket might attack you, but sharks are almost always just looking to see if you’re a seal, sea lion or whale. 

A few weeks ago, a short video popped up in my social media feed that made the word—feed—feel a little too on the nose. The video was from the perspective of someone standing a few yards from the surf at the beach. This familiar vantage is something almost anyone who has spent hours in the sand “down the shore” will recognize. 

It was a cloudy day, the surf was generally calm and perhaps twenty or thirty people of all ages waded, played, splashed, and otherwise enjoyed the ocean. In the foreground, there is something that catches the eye of the viewer immediately, forcing the other events to become background noise. Protruding from the water feet from the beach is a glossy, curved black blade, perhaps a foot in length, scything through the water.

At one point, a sharp-looking second shape appears just behind the first, sloshing and churning the water. The shape moves left to right very quickly, and the person on the camera (or phone) follows the movement with the acuity of a cinematographer. The viewer’s brain has already logged this situation into the panic computer deep in the cerebral cortex. My toes curled, my heart rate leaped up, my eyes dilated, I could feel the adrenaline coursing through my veins and I was nowhere near this event now immortalized on the Web. As I watched, one word echoed through my brain.

Shark.

At first, the people in the water seem nonplussed by the appearance of the predatory fish. Then, brains kick in. You can almost hear it happen. Those on the beach begin screaming, someone curses, there are consistent shrieks, a woman in a bathing cap is frantically waving for her family in the water to come to shore and as the big fish swims off to the right, between bathers and dry sand, a general panic takes over in the water before the video ends.

This nightmare scenario (where I assume no one was hurt—this time, at least) has become as familiar to us as breathing. Ever since people started swimming recreationally in the ocean, we have put ourselves blindly into the heart of a prehistoric superpredator's smorgasbord. This is the dangerous equivalent of playing in the tall grass where Bengal tigers hunt. We wouldn’t do it knowingly. Swimming in the ocean is an immense danger at all times and there is plenty of evidence of this and yet we keep right on doing it.

The shark encounter was forever immortalized by Stephen Spielberg's blockbuster cinematic version of Peter Benchley's book, Jaws. The movie did a number on the human psyche, but it also increased punitive hunting of sharks worldwide and has been the source of modern shark vilification which has led to decimated shark populations in every ocean. The Great White Shark portrayed in the film isn’t the only fish to suffer this wrathful and deadly retribution.

Spielberg and Benchley did not intend to vilify sharks, but a movie about a giant killer marine predator can have that effect on humanity. There have always been stories of shark attacks. The book and movie echoed a now immortal tale of shark attacks that occurred in New Jersey in 1916, which was probably a bull shark, known for their brutal encounters with people. Jaws featured a Great White Shark, a particularly big species that rarely attacks humans. There are sharks as big as the one in the movie, but they rarely, if ever, behave the way the shark in the movie did. A shark minding its own business does not a hit movie make. In the meantime, three sequels and countless offshoots and variations on this theme have solidified the shark attack mindset in the general public's collective consciousness. The irony is that we still go into the ocean regularly.

Modernity, with all of its audiovisual convenience, has helped us to be a little more aware of these oceanic dangers. Awareness doesn't necessarily equal caution. Drone footage consistently reveals sharks near swimmers at the beach, raising imminent safety concerns. One bit of footage taken in 2018 of a tiger shark gliding north, just a few meters off the coast of North Carolina, was enough to make me pause when the water lapped against my knees and rethink my dip later that year. Calm waters near our family vacation spot made floating in neck-deep water seem like a good idea. My brother was out there bobbing with the gentle waves. Okay, I thought, as I mentally prepared for a real-life scene out of a shark horror film, keep watching him and surveying the water. He was fine, but I was not easy in my mind until he came out of the water.

The last time I was out that far, I broke my boogie board in half in rough surf at Carolina Beach. Micki and I and our middle son were enjoying the ample hydraulic propulsion provided by the rolling waves and alternately ditching or getting flipped ass over teakettle by the tidal breakers. After my foam board was halved, I decided that I was done and went back to our chairs for a bit. Later, Ethan and I tossed a football back and forth in knee-deep surf. In one of those moments that imprint on the memory with perfect clarity for the rest of one’s life, I took a step back to hurl a long throw at Eth and stepped on something large, sandpapery, muscular and wriggling. Snapping my head around, I saw with unforgettable terror something grey-black flash away into the shallows. I leaped out of the water. I didn’t go back in that day. Later that week, though, I did.

Human behavior defies reason, sometimes. In June of 2019, seventeen-year-old Paige Winters was bitten off the coast of North Carolina while standing in waist-deep water. The “very large shark” bit her left leg and took two fingers. She was rescued quickly by her father and survived the attack thanks to his quick thinking, but she had to have the leg amputated at the thigh. This unprovoked bite (the word ‘unprovoked’ here assumes that sharks, like hornets or grizzlies, respond to invasions of territory) nearly cost her her life. Sharks are curious and will tentatively bite at something to see if it is food. Even this nibble can be deadly because of the shark’s multiple rows of large, serrated teeth which saw into flesh and bone like soft cheese. 

According to the poorly named International Shark Attack File (ISAF), since 1935, when an unsuspecting swimmer was having a cool dip near Brown’s Inlet and was bitten and killed by a bull shark, there have been 77 ‘unprovoked’ shark encounters in The Old North State. I’m not sure how many provoked attacks there were, nor am I able to imagine anyone provoking a shark intentionally. Regardless, in the nearly ninety years since records have been kept, North Carolina has proven to be a fairly unlikely place to encounter a shark. Florida retains the title of the shark bite capital of the nation, and averages about 19 bites per year. Volusia County, on the eastern coast of the state, has had 351 shark encounters since 1926, making it the one place where going into the ocean could be quite bad for you. Most of these encounters (or bites) are non-fatal, and occur predominantly to ‘surface recreationists’. The ISAF website doesn’t define this activity, but it is far more common than having a run-in while entering or exiting the water, swimming, wading or diving.

As a resident of North Carolina who, with my family, regularly vacations at the lovely beaches of our state, I feel no better about the odds of wading in and meeting a big toothy fish being higher in Florida. I never intend to go to Florida and sharks are just the last reason on the list of reasons why that state is a no-go zone for me. This fact notwithstanding, the raw annual probability of being attacked at my state’s beaches is about 85.56%, but that number is determined by several factors, such as the frequency of going into the water, the location of my dunk and my behavior while in the drink. Surfing and swimming in shark-prone areas will obviously affect the odds.  Even a basic understanding of statistics will show that all things considered, the more one goes in for a dip, the more likely one will encounter a sleek and bitey denizen of the deep. 

For all that, people come from all over to enjoy the beaches of North Carolina every week from April to October. Even in the off-season, crowds of people who are specifically there to swim line the sand. The beaches are lovely, the weather (if a little hot) is ideal and the views of the sea and sky are spectacular. We love going to the beach and we like going into the water (just up to the knees) to cool off when the intense heat begins to dry us out. During our most recent family vacation, our sons—all avid fishermen—consistently pulled up sand sharks, whether they were angling from the surf or off the local pier. While we were on the pier, a man who was king fishing at the very end of the rickety wooden structure caught a shark that was at least 5 feet long. It eventually broke the line and zoomed away at a speed that made it clear that, no matter how much you practice, not even an Olympic swimmer could get away from a shark coming in for a snack. It swam toward the shore, which was crowded with bathers. On several occasions from our high vantage over the water, we could see dark shapes moving in and out of the shadows, perhaps interested in all the bait fish.

All of this ought to keep people out of the water, at least in a way that will draw the attention of a shark. They’re out there, even if we cannot see them. They come in to see if the surf has their normal prey. They cannot see well, so they tentatively bite whatever they encounter. All of that has been proven without a shadow of a doubt and the frequency of East Coast encounters and bites is, if nothing else, rising. It seems like every summer news of an encounter with a shark reaches our ears before the summer beach season even really gets going. We’re skipping a family beach week, this year—not because of sharks—but next year when all the kids come home we will drive down to the ocean for a week for fishing and sunning, and all of us will be susceptible to encountering a shark when we’re in the water. For that reason, any swimming I do will be in the pool at the condo and not in the ocean.

Poe Boy

Since I was a pre-teen, I have owned a massive copy of the entire collected works of Edgar Allen Poe. During that portion of my life, I read gregariously but often came back to Poe, drawn by his dark, Gothic, sometimes melodramatic, grotesque prose and his delightfully gloomy poetry. The classic American Gothic writer, on par with Nathaniel Hawthorne for his dark imagery and at a level of compositional genius with Shakespeare and Milton, Poe has defined an entire genre of literary art and by extension, artists. Stephen King, H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Richard Matheson, Ray Bradbury, Jules Verne, HG Welles, and countless others have been influenced and inspired by Poes's sheer mastery of wit, language, and emotional gravity. We may perhaps even call him the master of Gothic literature.

A few years ago, feeling nostalgic, I downloaded the entire Poe collection as an audiobook from my favorite listening platform. I returned it when it proved to be intolerable to listen to. Disappointed, I searched around for other collections as complete as that one had been but found nothing except smaller compilations of his most popular and well-known stories.

Recently the same platform released a second and professionally recorded complete collection, read by two narrators. These fellows know how to read—most especially—Poe. They also have some skills in French and Latin, both of which figure prominently in his best work. Poe was a well-known Francophile.

He also read gregariously, spoke several languages and was assuredly a genius. I have immensely enjoyed reading (listening to) Poe again in this format. It takes a careful ear. I have had to pay close attention. He is always a challenge. 

For an able reader in my early teens, some of his writing was inaccessible. I still find some of it to be so, now. Because of its intensely narrow provenance, Poe's work can feel cumbersome. He wrote for Baltimore and Philadelphia and Richmond newspapers and periodicals and because he was endowed with prodigious acumen for using words, for allegory or comic allusions and satire that was nevertheless oppressively close to the historical moment, much of it will not make sense unless one has spent their entire life studying the swelteringly narrow confines of Poe’s early industry. An annotated collection would have to be fifty thick volumes. To a light reader, some of it is just opaque; composed in a time and with language that is arcane to us, at least from our modern vantage. 

Most of us think of Poe as a pitiable and intemperate writer, down at heel, staggering, begging for money, speaking to himself or holding imaginary conversations; looking for all the world like a hobo or vagrant in ill-fitting black clothing, trying to be taken seriously and getting an endless series of rejection letters. We think this for a reason. In actuality, he attempted to live by writing alone and sometimes fell afoul of a publishing world that didn’t pay well or at all. Also, around this time, more magazines were established than ever before. Few ever made it far, but Poe submitted his work to any publishers and editors he could. Since these publications were notoriously bad with cash, he was often not paid on time, if at all. This contributed to his somewhat vexing living situation early on. For all that, he maintained a breathtaking level of production, sending stories, articles and columns out daily.

He landed work at a magazine in Richmond but was fired for being drunk. He was eventually rehired, and lasted a while, but then moved to Philadelphia. Near this time, his novel, The Life of A. Gordon Pym of Nantucket was widely admired and received excellent criticism. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness is a direct nod to this work. Poe worked and wrote and managed to survive fairly well (and married his 13-year-old cousin in the meantime) in Philly, at least for a while. 

He was considered an unflinching literary and social critic and his words directed at other literary figures of the time gained him much attention and respect. He published his weirder tales but often to mixed reception. Most of his darker stories were considered too bleak for the period and Gothic literature had yet to capture the American literary imagination.

Later, Poe nearly got a position working in the cabinet of President John Tyler. He considered himself a member of the Whig Party and was friends with Tyler’s sons. His alcoholism by this time had become quite unmanageable and Poe missed his meetings, claiming to be sick. Tyler wanted nothing to do with a drunk in his administration and Poe was never contacted again. Around this time, too, Virginia, Poe’s wife, contracted tuberculosis and he began to drink more heavily. He also became more acerbic in his literary criticism. He poked and prodded other writers of the time with his poison quill and may have alienated himself in the process. Despite the modern image, Poe became quite popular for his poem, The Raven, which was printed almost universally and made him a prominent name and sensation. He was paid only $9 for it.

Any lover of Poe will be familiar with his popular works, which even in his lifetime, were beginning to capture the national imagination. That he only garnered popularity and fame posthumously is a myth, at least partly. Much of his darker stories and mysteries didn’t gain larger appeal until after his death, when, and perhaps because he died, they drew on a national fascination with all things Edgar Allen Poe. 

In the complete works volume, some of the stories and poems are just bizarre or grotesque, and some seem to have no real bearing on anything that we understand today without the benefit of much context and history. It is nevertheless a worthy hobby to sit down and work through his writing. He serves as a wonderful example to emulate, if not his words or style, but certainly his breadth of understanding and his mastery of several lexicons. He can create imagery both rich and fantastic, and his tales are always fables with great moral lessons built in.

His influence cannot be overstated. We know, for example, that The Murders in the Rue Morgue, the Purloined Letter, and The Mystery of Marie Roget are the foundation upon which mystery and detective novels gained prominence in the later half of the 1800s. Poe's diminutive French detective C. Auguste Dupin is a direct literary precursor to Sherlock Holmes and Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle acknowledged this emphatically. The story Ligeia is considered to be one of the first science fiction tales, as the woman described by the narrator resembles what we now think of as an extraterrestrial. The Black Cat, the Tell-Tale Heart, Descent into the Maelstrom, MS. Found in a Bottle, The Gold Bug, and my favorite, The Cask of Amontillado, are brilliant fiction that not only capture the imagination but have become the literary gold standard for terror, madness, hauntings, revenge, guilt, adventure and the frailty of the human spirit.

The largest contributing factor to the mysterious persona of Edgar Poe was his bizarre demise. In October of 1849, Poe was found in a back lane in Baltimore in horrible condition and someone else's clothing. He was brought to a hospital and treated but died a short time later. 

No medical records survive and his death has remained one of the great mysteries of American literary history. General speculation suggests that Poe died from the consequences of his out-of-control drinking, but there is no evidence to support this. He certainly did have a serious drinking problem. 

His death was widely reported and Americans were shocked and appalled. At this time, there was a popular and awful precedent for “cooping”. This was a form of election fraud in which political candidates hired thugs to capture members of the public and force them to vote multiple times for the same candidate. The victims of cooping were often promised cash for drinks to lure them into inebriation. They were given other clothes (sometimes those of a recently deceased person) and disguises and forced to vote again and again. This theory goes a long way to filling holes in the mystery of Poe’s death, but even this isn't certain.

Our modern feeling about Poe being a poor and shiftless madman comes from his arch-enemy Rufus Wilmot Griswold who wrote an obituary for Poe under a pseudonym and which lampooned Poe and libeled him. The obituary was widely published and became the predominant, though false, view of Poe’s lifestyle and tendencies. Far from being a madman, though, and never being a destitute vagabond, Poe accomplished professional deeds that have echoed through history. Hamlet was correct, though, when he told Polonius, referring to playwrights who were often also performing literary criticism, “After your death, you were better to have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live.” Poe’s life and works are known to us and beloved even despite Griswold’s heartless attempt to destroy a good man’s name. Ironically, almost no one has ever heard of Rufus Wilmot Griswold, which seems a fitting vengeance.

It is fruitless to wonder whether Poe would have been so tragically addicted to alcohol, had lived in a later period when the disease was better understood. Likewise, it is foolhardy to wonder if, had he lived today, he would have been far more famous and well-loved before his death rather than after. We cannot and we ought not to play such games. Poe’s life is what it is. One of his biographers, Arthur Hobson Quinn’s 1941 book, has gone to great lengths to disentangle the myth from the man. Many such writers have worked tirelessly to rework Poe and remove him from the shadows of legend. I’m not sure it does much good. The mystery of Poe’s death lends to his air of intense genius and tragedy, which in turn enhances the power and poignancy of his collected works. Perhaps we ought to let Poe be and rather than try to decipherr the man, enjoy the many tales he wrote.

[Author's Note]

My readers will notice that, of all the writers mentioned who loved and admired and were inspired by Poe, Mark Twain is not mentioned among them. It is a point definitely settled in Twain's own words in a letter to W.D. Howells, where he wrote,

“Howells,

I have to write a line, lazy as I am, to say how your Poe article delighted me; and to say that I am in agreement with substantially all you say about his literature. To me his prose is unreadable—like Jane Austin’s.” 

This lack of feeling from one of my most beloved authors is irritating. He goes on to say that it was a shame they let Jane Austen die a natural death. He is therefore somewhat less blockheaded toward Poe, but no less uncivil.

The Haunted Workplace: a Warning

Your job is likely haunted. Many workplaces around the nation are inhabited by restless spirits that, for one reason or another, make our places of employment more like a Gothic horror novel than the office where we go to earn our paychecks, benefits and hopefully to make a positive difference in the world. There may be just one ghost at your job. 

There may be a carnival funhouse ride’s worth of spectral beings there. The greatest drain on productivity and a devastating weight on progress is the worker who, whether they know it or not, has needed to move on without actually doing so. By continuing in place, they prevent the organization from reaching its goals and sap morale in the process. This is the Ghost Worker and like with literary specters in the Gothic genre, either no one wants to acknowledge their problematic existence, or colleagues and coworkers are so horror-stricken by the haunting that they cannot themselves function if they admit there are ghosts.

Hardened workers used to far worse conditions might actually go pale with fright if they knew what goes on in the workplace for those of us whose dress code is ‘business casual’. Poe would blench, Hawthorne grimace, Shirley Jackson would faint dead away if they could see the true eldritch nightmare of having a real live ghost at the office.

Like literary ghosts, Ghost Workers may manifest in several ways. There's the "Poltergeist," a constant source of distraction and disruptive noise and gossip, masking their inactivity as work behind empty action and ceaseless roaming in the halls. Then there's the "Spectral Wanderer," a dispirited employee who simply goes through the motions, disconnected, uninspired, drooping and yearning for a distant retirement date. The most toxic is the "Demonic Employee," whose negativity infects the entire team, setting a demoralizing precedent for others with nefarious toxicity which, if left unchecked, disrupts staff productivity, drains people’s will, sets a poor example for new hires and burdens everyone with problematic behavior ranging from lack of cleanliness or appropriate clothing to habitual tardiness and everything in between. In severe cases, one office might be unfortunate enough to house a “Malevolent Phantom”, a nightmarish combination of all of these traits, creating a truly hostile work environment that no one can stand for long.

Most administrations have, as part of their leadership responsibilities, the rituals to remove (fire) these unhappy spirits. Depending on the kind of business, the rites may be quite extensive and mean a lot of extra paperwork. Sometimes, the workplace becomes partial to their ghost, feeling like, even if they do no real or measurable good, they aren’t really harming the workplace either. Sometimes the ghosts become so bleak and awful that even the administration is helpless to purge the offending revenant. Worst of all, it can be the administration that is the source of the free-floating specter. Nothing casts a pall of terror over the office like a Ghost Boss.

Just like with literary phantoms, the general public is often unaware that a place of business is suffering a haunting. The bosses, too, sometimes really have no idea about the ghosts. They may believe that the issues are standard personnel problems and will be dealt with by the department heads or managers, or they think that they are the run-of-the-mill issues every organization has. Frequently, I think, the bosses just hope that the ghosts will go away on their own, believing that a passive approach will create an environment in which the ghosts will finally get the picture and move on toward the light. Whatever the administration thinks, those of us who exist in the Haunted Workplace know all too well the terror that wanders the corridors and we know the damage that these ghasts, ghosts, haints, phantasms and ghouls regularly do.

In Gothic novels, the old mansion that turns out to be haunted is populated with several different types of living being. There are the plucky characters who represent the untainted and skeptical perspective, (the new hires). They come to the ancient house to stay and though they know the legends and have heard eyewitness testimony, they nevertheless are not affected by the tales of terror and do not believe the stories right away. 

Then, there are those who have lived in the old mansion for their whole lives (the oldtimer employees); the heavy atmosphere and frightening happenings are a matter of daily endured agony to them. They may remember a time before the place was haunted, but they try to warn the unwary of the current state of affairs, but almost no one listens to them.

Sometimes visitors who come from the other dark places (oldtimer employees who have worked in blue collar or food services industries and wind up in the white collar world) offer their own wisdom for dealing with ghosts. These characters are sometimes like the sunburned colonel who returns from the jungles of Borneo or the grizzled parapsychologist who has faced and destroyed werewolves and vampires in the lonely forests of physical labor without a hint of fear. The world-wise adventurers know what the workplace is like in other, less professional places. They have seen things that would scare the office worker to death. Like chilled steel, they can teach the trick for dealing with the ghosts in a straightforward approach, but they are usually dismissed as cranks or kooks, themselves—too gruff and rough-hewn.

Finally, the ultimate priesthood, who have the power to finalize the rites of exorcism if alerted (HR) will only be summoned when things have gotten so bad the haunting is undeniable even to them. Most often, the ancestral mansion in the ghost stories is never visited by the bishop or priest until things have gotten far worse. Even if they do come for a brief visit in the meantime, the spirits almost never act up without provocation.

Most Workplace Ghosts don't really understand that they are ghosts. They have failed to see that their employment actually ceased a long time ago; that they are still collecting their checks and benefits well after their work life has ended. They are restless spirits who happened to get lucky enough to have a professional career, but have long since stopped caring about it and just go to work out of desperate habit. They have never known anything else and they don't know they can move on to a more peaceful realm, so they just hang on. 

If they don't know that they are ghosts,  many may actually believe they are still doing their best and giving 110%, unaware that each project they leave incomplete and each email they fail to reply to further mires them in the chains of the underworld. Their dreadful actions strike fear into the hearts of their coworkers. It is almost not their fault. No one helped them to understand that their place of work stopped being a good match for them or held them to account soon enough to keep them from fizzling out.

For the rest of the workforce, a Ghost Worker is a nightmare of unparalleled proportions. They cause a lot of trouble. They meddle, offer spooky advice, pester, gossip, ramble, haunt the staff lounge and corner people going to get papers off the copier. They impede productivity and they lower the general morale. They often get away with things that the other employees wouldn’t dream of doing and so, by their very existence, cause there to be a double standard in the workplace. If the bosses tell the ghost that they are doing a good job, just to encourage or appease them, what does that mean for the living workers who are actually trying their hardest? If the ghosts get away with anything and don't face consequences, does that mean the other employees are likewise free to do whatever they want without ramifications? The ghostly presence lowers the bar to levels where praise and merit, discipline and performance become meaningless. 

Because people don't believe in ghosts it is hard to take the people who do see them seriously, as Horatio admits when he sees the spectral figure of King Hamlet on the battlements at Elsinore Castle, when he says, “I might not have believed without the sensible and true avouch of mine own eyes”. In order to release the spirits, it is necessary to prove they are real. Thriving workers need to document spectral shenanigans as much as possible. This includes—but is not limited to—sightings, examples of bad behavior, dates and times, interactions and all failures to live up to the expectations in the employee handbook. Anything that could be used to make a case against the ghost must be put in a memo or diary and be copious. Those documents are then kept in a folder and when the time comes and the Bishop (HR) is headed to the workplace, if requested, the documents are available to add to the ritual of removal. They can help build a case against the ghost but they can also provide evidence that the ghost really is a ghost.

In the meantime, out of frustration, one may be tempted to turn to the elder states-persons of the office who have seen all kinds of horrors. They can both provide context or give advice and may know exactly what is necessary to remove the spirits, but because they are gruff, rough-hewn and world-weary, their tolerance for the bureaucratic solutions is always at low ebb. They would prefer to address the ghosts directly. They have no patience for the Bishop (HR is of no use to them, except as a source of information about their retirement and benefit accruals) and they have spent their lives being direct and tolerating no nonsense, even from the living. Unfortunately, the direct approach can backfire, causing even more paperwork and disciplinary action.

A séance is certainly an option. This is a variant of the direct approach where several members of the staff, without involving the administration, approach the ghost and address the situation honestly and hope for a response. It takes a lot of courage because ghosts can be frightening and terrible when provoked. The séance informs the ghost about their behavior and encourages them to come back to the living or to shuffle off this mortal coil. It is a kind of intervention or wake (the dead) up call. Rarely effective, especially because the ones who hold the séance are often not the mediators they think they are, this approach can just make things worse for everyone.

Most often, unless the administration becomes aware of the problem through someone’s documentation or evaluation processes, the problems just persist. The bosses are unwilling to address the haunting or they hope that some living employee will expand on their own work mandate and mentor the ghost until they fall in line or leave of their own accord. It's possible that someone's well-meaning modeling of appropriate behavior may help a ghost see they have been long gone for a long time, but it is doubtful. A mentor can only do and say so much. 

There will always be ghosts in the workplace. They are disheartening, upsetting, frustrating and frightening. They are of almost no use to anyone except as an example of how not to conduct oneself.  It’s not hard to look better than a free-floating phantasm. Show up on time, work the whole day, be a help to one’s coworkers, lend a hand, finish projects, promptly reply to emails, be respectful of the work your colleagues have to do and be serious and devoted about the job; pull together when able and be encouraging of one's coworkers with a cheerful and empathetic approach to the work. We all have a job to do. We don't have to love it, but it helps if we are at least productive members of staff. Remember too, that, at least in the capitalist sense, everyone is expendable. I am lucky to have a job, so I try to act like it. 

Someday, maybe the dead will move on and haunt another place. It’s not worth getting dyspeptic about. If it bugs and bothers, as ghosts will do though, take it from the fan of Gothic novels and tales: write everything down. No ghost can tolerate actual proof of their miserable state becoming evidence against them.