Day 5 is ‘Spiritual Manifestation’
I have a weird relationship to the concept of ghosts, now, I think, especially as a ‘oooooo spooooooky~~’ kind of thing. I don’t believe in them and they feel kind of bad to me now under most ‘let’s make things scary’ circumstances. I like them vengeful, mostly, and there of their own will rather than something like ‘religious ritual not performed properly due to technicality’ or whatever. I want ‘I’m here to destroy the person who abused me’ ghosts, not women named Elizabeth who got influenza in that one hotel room and now she’s there forever. Since I’ve done all this research into old family history and have been to several colonial cemeteries by now, it is hard for me to see anyone as just a generic spirit for a story and not as a person who had connections. I can’t not imagine all their siblings and cousins sitting in the enormous family reunion photos I have. Seeing stories and photos just makes people less ‘and then they became the cold spot in the hallway’ for me.
In my quests for graves of relatives, I searched for videos of relevant cemeteries on YouTube, and since I come from a bunch of Revolutionary War folks, the places where they are buried are typically the most visited by people who just want to see Ye Olde Spooky Graveyard Shit, But I’ve got much closer and more recent family in the same cemeteries, too, and people going out and sitting among them and trying to ‘communicate with the spirits~~~’ just makes me so mad. It’s easy to just see rows of names and not think about it, I guess. Or easy to think that there’s no one left who feels that people buried 200 years ago are relevant, but now that i know how tightly woven I am to nearly every cemetery in the county in which I grew up, I feel very protective of everyone, even if they’re like a second cousin four times removed or something.
That all said, I based this image loosely on a girl in a century old photo found among my family things who I haven’t identified. Her environment is based on photos of my several greats grandparents’ living rooms. Long flowing tatter sleeves didn’t work super well, but ah well. I started this with the full intent of this just being the sketch, but I ended up just getting in the zone and filling it out more and more, so it’s much smaller in real life than all the others and is just pencil. Pencil felt more ghosty than ink anyhow.
Anyway, here’s my turn of the (last) century ghost girl. In my mind she’s here to right an injustice she was killed trying to right in life and she’s going to get shit done. She’s not tortured or miserable, she’s orchestrating.
