A Prequel to a Ghost Story
There’s a haunted hotel in Gaza. Only a few know about it. To be precise, everyone knows the hotel. It’s where the VIPs stay — journalists, NGO workers, diplomats. Also known as foreigners. I digress. What I mean to say is that only few know that it’s haunted.
We had just driven past the dusty, brick red building with white trimmings when I was let into the secret. My friend who was giving me a lift to a beachside cafe had previously worked at this hotel. A fan of horror stories with credible narrators, my ears perked up.
“The ghosts, they dance on the roof. You hear it so loudly throughout the building. It sounds like thunder.”
Perhaps against the backdrop of religious conservatism, it felt like an exhilarating rarity to hear someone in Gaza speak so openly of the supernatural. I smiled at these words leading my imagination to new terrain. Leaning in and reciprocating his matter-of-fact energy I asked, “What else do they do?”
“They call each other on the hotel phones from the different rooms. I could see that the phone lines were busy from the receptionist’s desk. The rooms were empty, but the lines were busy.”
The imagery of the red lights inexplicably flashing on the receptionist’s console in the middle of the night tickled me.
“They play football in the halls,” he continued, shoveling more coal into my gleeful fire.
“I believe you,” I concluded. “It’s definitely haunted.” A haunted hotel in Gaza. Now that’s a story, I thought. I’m going to write that story.
Here I am. Sat down to write the story. My mind begins by unpacking the ghosts’ antics. I imagine after they dance on the roof, they sit on the edge to rest their legs and catch their breath. This hotel has a stunning view, the dining room with its floor-to-ceiling windows is situated right upon the Mediterranean. Sitting side by side, their legs dangle off the roof. Their laughs howl to the moon hanging low and heavy in the night sky. In my imagination, for some reason, they’re holding hands. In my daydreaming, I find myself longing to join them.
Late night phone calls and football in the halls. In the summer of 2014, the four boys murdered on the beach by Israeli airstrikes were playing football by this hotel. Their ages were between nine and eleven. I’ve been told they were the sons of fishermen. Their bloodied bodies retrieved from the beach by hotel staff. I wonder if my friend worked there at this time, if he had been apart of such brutal chaos.
I think about the ghosts’ choice to occupy this particular hotel. I stayed there the first time I visited Gaza in 2016 and returned several times after for dinner and shisha. Its high ceilings and low occupancy rate of fleeting foreigners always made it feel eerily empty.
“This hotel is deconflicted,” they told me upon check-in. It was several months later that I learned that when a building is “deconflicted” it simply means that the Israelis commit to not dropping a bomb on it. It would be bad PR to level a building where diplomats enjoy the sunset over the Mediterranean, I guess.
I don’t blame the ghosts for choosing a place that’s safe and beautiful. It’s mostly empty anyways.
It doesn’t seem plausible to me that these ghosts dance to instill fear. What’s more likely is that they dance in joy. They dance to mark their liberation. To celebrate their arrival to a liminal place where warplanes can’t reach. To embrace a sense of safety they have never been afforded.
Late night phone calls and football in the halls. These are the antics of children, not supernatural terrorists. I begin to feel uneasy about these ghosts, the more I am convinced their hauntings are not sinister. They haunt because they’re not ready to be invisible yet.
In my final time crossing out of Gaza last month, I noticed a banner had been installed at the Hamas checkpoint. A compilation of photos of the 67 children killed in the latest violent aggression in May. Each photo accompanied by a name and age. Upon entering and exiting Gaza, you are forced to remember. Perhaps therein lies a definition of being haunted: being forced to remember.
Ghost stories at their core are tragedies. Stories of a soul’s unfinished business. Of loss that merits avenging. Perhaps joy — or more specifically, childhood — are my ghosts’ unfinished business. The tragedy of this ghost story lingers in the idea that a beautiful hotel has been converted to a refuge for orphaned souls. There is no place in Gaza that is free from being forced to remember.
I free my mind from the notion that ghosts are beings to be hunted or comically vacuumed up. That their stories are relegated to horror.
In my daydreaming, I find myself longing to join them. Longing to write stories that defend the space they take. That celebrates the irreverence of their youthful antics. That laments the lost time they’re making up for. That mourns their stolen childhoods. In my writing, I find myself longing to hold them.
