I went on a ghost tour in Annapolis the other night. Same cobbles I’ve stumbled over a hundred times, but at night they leaned uncanny. Spa Creek was full of stories about headless wraiths and creaking shutters. At the top of Main Street, opposite the Maryland Inn, I saw a figure in a tricorn hat watching the crowd. Blinked, and he was gone.

Probably a trick of light. Probably a ghost. At this point I don’t bother sorting them out.

It stayed with me because I’ve been building one of my own: Silas Dogood, Minister of the Gate.

Silas lives in 1771 Annechorage, my haunted twin of colonial Annapolis. He’s verbose, insecure, puffed up with rhetoric, undone by drool on the sermon page. His congregation is empty pews. His god is only a Door. He worries he’s unworthy. He worries he’s ridiculous. But he keeps the rituals anyway, because someone has to. That’s Silas in a nutshell — pompous, fumbling, stubborn, and somehow still faithful.

If Sam Stone was Cold War noir, Silas is civic ghost fantasy: pamphlets and tavern jokes alongside genuine terror, grief, and longing.

I’ve been practicing his voice by rewriting Franklin’s Silence Dogood letters. Franklin wrote parody; I write theology. Both of us impostors trying to pass as wise. And somewhere in that false widow’s cap, I hear something true.

Life in the present is a different kind of haunting. I’ve been sending work out again — Black Maria, A Place to Call Home, Remember the Republic. More rejection than acceptance, sure, but at least I’m in the fight. I’ve got my book clubs and my Thursday night D&D, the weekly yoga that keeps my back from stiffening, the stubborn little schnauzer who keeps me honest. Even started dating again, which is its own battlefield of memory and hope.

And then came Ken Burns’s Revolution. Historians talking about liberty, faith, rebellion — messy, haunted, human. It reminded me what stories are for. Ghost stories aren’t just for chills. They’re acts of memory.

The Brices of Annapolis walled away their mad kin. Franklin smuggled his voice out in the mouth of a widow. Silas Dogood tends ghosts no one else will. And me? I keep writing, half-convinced the Gate is shut to me too, but unwilling to stop knocking.

Because remembering matters. Because tending matters. Because the stories — yours, mine, theirs — are how we hold the line.

May the Gate remain closed.