My wife, Aileen, watches ghost shows, *lots* of ghost shows, on what remains of the Travel Channel. I’d like to chide her for this indulgence, but like her, I have had experiences that I cannot account for without resorting to some paranormal explanation. I clearly share my apartment in Switzerland with a departed former female resident, for instance, a woman who is not pleased with my bathroom habits: she has repeatedly put the toilet lid down sometime during the night while I am sleeping, when I know for damn sure I left both the lid *and* the seat in the fully open and upright position that marks bachelor living when I went to bed.
But the place where I have really felt the presence of tormented spirits is in a pawn shop – because I understand that guitars have souls. How could it be otherwise? I recognize that they are made of wood and metal, but they are put together for the sole purpose of creating art and adding beauty to the world. They are held, cradled really, for years on end by humans with heightened sensitivities and energies who both pour their excesses of emotions – their joys and their heartaches, their love and their anger – into these vessels and then seduce or coax or tear them back out again. How could all this power coursing through them not affect them, not linger, not leave some trace, some echo? I no longer go into pawn shops, but when I did, every one of those guitars on the wall was wailing a tale of woe, was stuck in a very bad time with its previous owner, or else it wouldn’t be there. Every one of them hummed, crackled with a very bad vibe, a story that ended in a bad place. I wanted to take them *all* home, like dogs from the pound, and nurse them back to health, teach them how to trust humans again, and find them new players who would treat them right, respect the partnership, and use them again for what they were made for, let them fulfill their purpose, their destiny, the reason for existence.
But for really tortured souls, nothing compares to the Guitar Gallery next to the House of Blues in Disney Springs, the after-hours nightlife and shopping center in Disney World in Orlando. You could see them from far away through the gleaming, antiseptically white storefront and massive window: some of the world’s most desired guitars – early 1960s Gibson Les Pauls and Explorers and Flying Vs, 1950s Fender Broadcasters and Telecasters and Stratocasters – hanging 12 to 30 feet in the air, pinned to wall like stuffed and mounted big game, with ludicrous price tags underneath each one in big, brazen numbers, with the most expensive instruments highest up on the wall, of course. It was worse than a museum. It was a morgue. These extraordinary instruments, these blessed moments of human ingenuity and craftsmanship, had been taken out of circulation. They would never really be played again. No musician could ever buy them, would ever buy them under these conditions. You couldn’t get anywhere near them. There was a massive guitar-shaped sales counter, a wall erected between you and the instruments, and I don’t remember seeing a single amplifier in the store. I can only imagine that these poor instruments were there for trophy hunters, people with obscene amounts of money but no commonsense who would buy them like any other souvenir at Disney, bring them home, and put them on their own walls. Whoever bought these poor instruments would have to be a soulless ghoul not to hear their shame and anguish.