Neewollah: Or, a Ghost Story
My last semester of college, I fell into a depression. There was no particular reason for it. In fact, I had every reason to be happy. I was about to graduate, and I’d be off to a new city and a new job. I was even starting a relationship with a woman I thought — rightly, as it turned out — that I might one day marry. I kept looking out and forecasting my future, imagining where I might live, what I might do, the family I might have. The possible paths varied widely, winding this way and that. But they all ended in one place: Death.
Not that I hadn’t pondered mortality before, but it struck me deeply, became a fixation. I would skip class, just sitting in my room, working it over in my mind, like Billy Crystal’s character at the start of When Harry Met Sally. “Have you ever thought about death? … Sure you do, a fleeting thought that jumps in and out of the transom of your mind. I spend hours. I spend days…”
I was scared. Whenever I closed my eyes, I saw myself falling eternally into darkness. Yet, no, not even that. Death would not just be the absence of light, but the absence of my ability to perceive, to think, to be. So no darkness. Nothing at all. Becoming nothing. As if I had never been. I’m a journalist by training and love nothing more than a good fact. So I read about death, researched it, hunted for some bit of data. But there’s nothing concrete about death, no way of knowing, of blanketing this fear with rationalism.
Religion offered me no comfort, either. I was raised in my Mom’s Methodist church, but when I was in high school, my hometown pastor suddenly became virulently anti-gay. As much as I wanted to believe — to belong — I couldn’t imagine myself a part of something so hateful. I visited several churches in college, but found a home in none. So while I still hoped for some afterlife, I didn’t have faith that one was waiting for me.
I was in the depths of this when my Dad called. He had a question, or, an invitation, really. He was going on a road trip and wanted company.
Did I want to go ghost hunting?
Now, I realize you almost certainly don’t know Tim Jensen, D.D.S. I assure you my father is the most rational-minded person I know, not given to flights of fancy — a Lutheran through and through. And yet: The invitation stood.
See, my Dad was not after just any ghost, but a particular ghost. In our family, she is The Ghost. The ghost of my great-great-great grandmother, Joanna.
This takes us on a short detour into my family tree: My great grandmother Olive “Ollie” Fisher was a small, no-nonsense, redheaded woman who, in her later years, became driven to trace the family’s genealogy as far as she could. This eventually became a nearly 500-page volume that stretches back centuries, across the Atlantic.
A large part of the impetus behind this research was Joanna Thomas, Ollie’s grandmother. Joanna was born in Wales in 1835. She lost her mother at a young age and immigrated to the United States with her father and sister. And, in 1861, she married Robert Marion West. Robert was a bit of a vagabond, never holding a job or staying in one place for long. At one point he moved the family onto a houseboat, roaming up and down rivers, finding work as a carpenter. Joanna was his second wife, and they would have three children, eventually moving to southeastern Kansas. We know that on October 19, 1876, Joanna died of pneumonia. Her daughter, Mary — this is Great Grandma Ollie’s mother — was 7. Robert packed up and moved the family back east, where he married yet again.
Later, the West family moved a final time, to a farm in western Nebraska. There, my family stayed. Mary never could remember exactly where her mother’s grave was, eventually putting up a headstone for her in a Nebraska cemetery. Joanna became a mythical figure in family lore, a tragic matriarch lost to history.
For Great Grandma Ollie, Joanna bordered on an obsession. Ollie was driven to find her true grave, but she never did. The task then passed on to her daughter — my Grandma Doreen. Then to my father. For years they’d searched and found nothing. But, recently, they had found a new clue.
On a trip through Utah, my parents had visited the Family History Library in Salt Lake City. The Library holds the greatest store of genealogical data in the United States, assembled for a somewhat unusual purpose. The Church of Latter Day Saints holds that families can be reunited in the afterlife, but only through sacred sealing ceremonies. These temple rights can be performed by proxy for those who have died, as long as they know for whom it is that they’re praying. So a vast team of Mormon volunteers searches to find everyone they can — living or dead — to offer them entrance into life eternal. Three billion souls and counting.
At the library, my Dad searched the databases for information around Independence, Kansas, where we had always believed Robert and Joanna had lived. Dad found nothing, but on a whim, he decided to look one county over. There, he came across an 1875 agricultural survey that listed Robert West and his family as living as tenants near the town of Sedan. That must have been where Joanna died. It was there that we would go hunting.
Dad pulled up to my rental house in Lincoln, Nebraska, early on a fall morning, driving his old green Ford Explorer. We headed south, with me masking my precarious mental state. I remember stopping for fuel on the drive, and I set out to clean the windshield. A monarch butterfly had smashed against the vehicle, its body battered. As I watched, its wings slowly opened and closed. Once. Twice. And never again. I broke into sobbing right there, squeegee in hand, and ran to the men’s room, hiding until I finally managed to hide my fragility.
We pulled into Independence, Kansas — the home base for our hunt — in the late afternoon. The small city was decorated for its annual fall festival. Banners, hanging from buildings and utility poles, advertised the name of the festival: “Neewollah.” Dad grinned at me and asked if I understood the name. He loves a good puzzle. I stared at the letters, trying to unlock some secret. “No,” I finally said, annoyed at having been stumped. “Is it a Native American word?” His grin spread, delighting in my aggravation. “Keep trying. You’ll get it.” I saw sign after sign, but the letters never amounted to anything more than gibberish. “Did you get it yet?” Dad would ask from time to time, as my ears would steam.
The next day, we went into the County Courthouse, scouring records for old cemeteries. Dad had come down once before with my Mom, and he thought he knew of the right cemetery, but he wanted to rule out all other possibilities. There were several small abandoned burial sites, scattered through the countryside. We visited them one by one, climbing barbed wire fences and walking through sunflower fields to reach forgotten graves. We hacked away underbrush, sweating under the sun, searching each stone for Joanna’s name. We never saw it, and most of the cemeteries weren’t old enough to be her resting place, anyway.
It was hard work, but I lost myself in it. And it allowed me to connect with Dad in a way that I never really had. We talked about Cornhusker football and movies and I tried in vain to get him to understand my love for hip hop. And, as the sun faded on the prairie, he told me more about the ghost.
Great Grandma Ollie wasn’t just fixated on Joanna. She was haunted by her long-dead relative. Ollie dreamed incessantly of Joanna, dreamed a vision of her grave so specific she could describe it in great detail — on a gentle hill above a river bend, a large tree casting shade. One hot summer night, Ollie awoke to find the air in her bedroom was ice cold, beads of condensation forming on the walls. Joanna appeared to her, demanding that Ollie find her and bring her peace. The dreams passed on to my Grandma Doreen, and my Dad had had them as well. He described one that had struck with lucidity, a vision of his own death. And then a reunion with Ollie, with Joanna, with all the family.
At night, Dad and I would go back to Independence to eat, rest and talk some more. He’d point to one of those signs. To “Neewollah,” and needle me. “Get it yet?” I hadn’t. I couldn’t. The harder I tried, the farther away it seemed, and the bigger the mystery became.
The next day, having ruled out every other cemetery in the county, we turned our sights toward one just a little north of Sedan. On his last excursion, Dad had found a record in the courthouse that showed exactly where Robert and Joanna had lived. Not far from the farm rests the St. Charles Cemetery.
We drove out of town, eventually turning off a paved road onto a rutted dirt track, dipping down through a rocky stream bed, moving slow so the Explorer wouldn’t become stuck. Then up onto a grassy hill, where the small cemetery sat behind a fence, a tall tree casting afternoon shade across it. Dad didn’t even have to say it. This was just as Great Grandma Ollie had dreamed.
At one edge rested a series of headstones from the early 1870s, then a gap until a grave from 1881. And between them, a grave with three pieces of red sandstone lying atop it — a Welsh tradition. If the stone had born any markings, they’d long since eroded away. Dad told me that the first time he’d come here, he brought a video camera. And it worked just fine capturing the rest of the cemetery. But when he brought it near that grave, the camera suddenly turned off. He had taken it back to the Explorer, and it worked again. So he tried once more to record the unmarked plot, and it turned off a second time.
We had gone down to rule out any other possibilities, and so we had. Still, there was no way of knowing for certain. No hard, rational proof. But my Dad smiled. He had found it. He had found her. Joanna. He had faith.
Back in Independence, Dad commissioned a new granite tombstone, which would be installed later. Every year, he has flowers placed on the grave. As we headed out of town, back toward our lives, I realized that amid all the searching, the excitement of the hunt, my depression had faded, disappeared. I had been too busy for anxiety. But returning to routine, would I fall back into fear? It felt as inevitable as death.
Just then, Dad pulled me from my wallowing. We had reached the edge of town. That devilish grin returned. “Well,” he asked, “did you get it?” We’d had this wonderful trip, and there he was, pestering me with “Neewollah” all over again.
I’d had enough. I snapped at him. “No! I didn’t! Okay? I couldn’t figure it out. What is it? What does it mean?” Dad pointed to the passenger-side mirror. I looked in it. There, I saw one of the “Neewollah” signs reflected back at me. Its letters were reversed in the mirror image. “Do you understand?” he asked.
I saw it clearly. It was so simple. So stupidly simple. There was no great revelation. If you take “Neewollah” and spell it backwards, it just says: “Halloween.”
As the absurdity and silliness of it sunk in, I understood that another puzzle had been staring at me. Taunting me. Teasing at a great truth that ever escaped me. And while I still hadn’t solved this riddle, not yet, I did find an answer. A revelation. And, once again, it was stupidly simple. The kind of thing you’d find inside a fortune cookie. And that revelation is this:
In this world — and whatever lies beyond — there are some things that you simply cannot understand, until they’re behind you.
