The first time I heard about ghostly spirits in Baltimore had to do with the hotel the cast stayed at when we first arrived there - The Inn at Henderson’s Wharf.
But someone got that wrong because I can’t find stories about it anywhere. The only hauntings at Henderson’s were of the human kind.
At this moment in time, I’m not a spirit-y guy. I’ve never had an experience of a ghost and my wife has done her fair share of actual ghostbusting on TV and in articles. So, I am skeptical, to say the least.
Yet, back in the day, I was a tad more receptive to supernatural notions. Sure, there were things I couldn’t explain - things that I should not have been able to see logically. But, aside from the floating Buddha that showed up a few times AFTER I got sober…all perfectly explainable.
What I’m finding out though, is that Baltimore, particularly Fell’s Point where we shot a lot of the series, is considered one of the most haunted areas in the United States. There are a ton of old stories explaining why - the War of 1812, all those drunken sailors knifing each other in alleys, the mob fights, the slave trade, brothels, mysterious murders, macabre writers (Poe), and 90’s detective shows. But I’m not here to dig into this city’s old and checkered past. I’m just shining light into different corners, from different angles, searching for a piece of truth.
So, let’s imagine this:
Let’s entertain for a moment, that instead of a bunch of Hollywood actors showing up in Baltimore - that we were the Spirits (see pic above).
Boo!
At times that’s how it feels to me. Taking into account the decades involved, all that water under the bridge, my futile attempts to forget about Homicide, and those eerie, recurring Bayliss dreams - it’s freakily, spectral-like.
There’s a Rumi poem which begins:
“You wake the dead to life, you fountain of grace, you fire in thickets of tangled thought.”
With Homicide, it all started, not with Rumi - but with Barry Levinson, Tom Fontana, David Simon, Gail Mutrux, and Paul Attanatsio. They summoned forth, in an artistic sense, the Spirit Actors. Their collective vision and scripts jimmied open the basement doors (FYI - actors notoriously lie dormant, in basements, until a project kicks them in the ass!). They woke us up to an exciting but dubious idea; that of bringing to life fictional characters, based on real people, who proclaim they “speak for the dead”.
Could Rumi, the 13th-century mystic poet, have imagined that the you in his poem, per our crazed hypothesis here, would be a group of highfalutin creatives? A Jesuit-educated, artistic radical from Buffalo (Fontana); a Harvard Law graduate turned film critic (Attanasio); a standup comic turned director (Levinson); and a beat reporter turned author (Simon). They resurrected us like a “fire in thickets of tangled thought”. They unlocked the basement door, and the actors once awoken, emerged full-blown with a thousand tangled ideas - alert to, but naive of, the Homicide world that awaited them.
The originators laid out their vision to we vulnerable thespians, often loving, sometimes harshly, but always with the intent of revealing and clarifying something about the human spirit. Never content to just tell a good murder plot, they invited everyone into the process, actors and audience alike, to join in with the ongoing investigation. Remarkably, this led to the mysterious Long Game of Homicide. Adjust your glasses slightly and you could view the series as one long cold case in which the audience - anointed as detectives - must keep wading through files year after year.
And what’s the mystery we are trying to figure out?
“Why does this show keep hitting so deep?”
Like I said, the Long Game. It’s a good and rare piece of art that accomplishes such a feat and to which there are no easy solutions.
Take, for instance, just one of our visionaries: there’s no doubt that Tom Fontana is here to shake and wake folks up. Whether you appreciate Homicide as just a good cop show, or something more puzzling, he helped gather all the wild, talented, and damaged forces together. Then he got us to believe, for enough of the time, that we were in the service of something far greater than ourselves, even if it was a fictional imperative. Which became something so strong that it affects viewers to this day and compels them to watch it again and again.
How strange to return to those things that have touched us: a song, an album, a poem, a certain meal made a certain way, a drink, a dance, a film…it goes on.
It’s those damn writers! Wrestling with their mortality, straddling the dark and sacred realms, whipping up a battalion of ghosts that needed to be answered for. Then they go and pass on their ethics, influences, and tastes to the hungry actors (whom you may recall, stand around in basements for days at a time, and don’t come out until they have a scene to do).
If it is done well enough, if everyone has fulfilled their job and believes in what they are doing - in that moment, the audience steps into the actor’s shoes, takes on their ideas, or their conflicting values - and the actors disappear.
Then comes the most unsatisfyingly satisfying moment -
The TV goes dark.
If our magic has worked - it becomes the audience who carries, transforms, or shares with someone else…
…while the spirits return to the basement.
The full Rumi poem:
You wake the dead to life,
you fountain of grace,
you fire in thickets of tangled thought.
Today you arrived beaming with laughter—
that swinging key that unlocks prison doors.
You are hope’s beating heart.
You are a doorway to the sun.
You are the one I seek and the one who seeks me.
Beginning and end.
You greet need with generous hands.
You flood us with spirit,
rising from the heart,
lifting thought.
Rare one, you reveal the pleasure
of wisdom and practice.
Beyond these, what is there
but excuses and deceit?
We lust after the afterlife.
We stew over trinkets.
We stage battles between black and white.
Our ears are plugged with twisted delusions.
You carry the cure.
Silence!
I’m in a hurry. Leave the paper. Break the pen.
The cupbearer is here, jug in hand.
Meet us in the land of insight,
camped under ecstasy’s flag.
That’s so good. A haunted object. Rod Sterling of Twilight Zone probably had a similar take. Thanks so much Natasha.
Last year I interviewed the writer Stephen Volk who wrote the seminal 1992 BBC show Ghostwatch – which thoroughly traumatised a whole generation of British kids staying up after their bedtime - and he said something that stuck with me, that one of the reasons that show was so effective is that the television is a haunted object, it brings the dead into our living rooms - it's a box full of ghosts.