There are ghosts in the penitentiary.
I’ve seen their shadows shuffling through the most mundane paces. A glint around a corner, a flicker through the fence, a translucent semblance superimposed over the shells of the living. They never fail to arrest me, these shimmering reflections, to cinch my breath, falter my heartbeat for a fractional moment, and bend my memory toward old friends and acquaintances who once walked in this desolate place, now moved into new chapters of their lives or into the next dimension of their existence.
Gangly Don, the genteel Texan, in appearance and tone a Fess Parker doppelgänger. A former counsel substitute, master carpenter, president of the Toastmasters club, cheerful in the company of companions, happier still in solitude’s blissful silence.
Her served twenty-five and took everything with him when he paroled, from complex personal carpentry tools to sandpaper sticks; clothing outgrown and tucked away for years; packs of Ramen noodles and tins of Vienna sausages—everything cleaned out as if to erase all the traces of his detention. But he could not take his shadow self, that slice of his spirit that did not realize he was free.
Except, he wasn’t. Don was unable to shake whatever devils kept him chained to a pain that was his to suffer alone. He survived a year, maybe, out in the free world, before opening his veins. His prison friends were stunned. We shook our heads, cussed him, and grieved.
I glimpse him regularly. When he calls my name I turn but he is gone.
Easygoing, surfer-dude Hatcher, a California hitcher who caught a ride with the wrong perv and wound up on death row for five years. Got lucky, got a time reduction to life without parole, got a good job with the prison magazine, grew paranoid and obsessive. He ate, wrote, went to the gym, practiced yoga on the floor, went to bed, according to a strict schedule. Deviation meant numbing stress, incessant pacing, potential meltdown. Rare visits from the outside messed with his head because they disrupted the routine.
He got lucky again, gained parole eligibility and discharged at thirty years, six years ago. I teared up the day he left. Lost a friend in a place where friends are few. Hatcher married a doctor, moved to Hawaii. I see him once in a while, fast-walking through the slow walkers, rushing between parallel portals, gray hair flashing, flushed and pursuing his meticulous schedule.
And Rick. Physically wrecked after a lengthy decline, waddling within an ethereality whose draperies part for fleeting moments to reveal my obese old friend, grinning, blank-eyed, whose forty years in the pen anchor even his specter. Rick went home to the piney woods on compassionate medical furlough. Went home to his maker less than a year later, eaten away by the cancer, eaten away by decades of loneliness.
Three years ago, diminutive, guitar-picking Ron returned to Mississippi after twenty-five in Louisiana. I spied his shade last week, standing alone outside the band room, then he vanished.
Lil’ Mike peered back at me from ahead in the chow line, six months after discharging a robbery sentence.
In the early morning, stooped, one-eyed Sharp saunters through ankle-deep mist toward his pepper plants neatly rowed behind the education building, but of course he transferred to another facility months ago.
And muscled-up Tuscan, who let out a roaring laugh at some raucous retort anf fell dead right outside my dorm. And the cobbler whom I’ve seen leaning expressionless against his hobby shop box even though the box now belongs to someone else because Fluery died six years ago. And happy-go-lucky Ronnie, a yard orderly and born-again Christian, ever quick to offer a bottled water to all takers. All dead. All still here.
Who slapped the foot of my mattress in rapid succession—the universal prison wake-up call or polite passing greeting—from behind a veil of imperception? Who called to me with such a familiar clarity that I wheeled to face what I knew was impossible? What incomprehensible cruelty would tether a soul to the tangible prison long after the physical sentence is served? Perhaps my mind slipped somewhere along the way and, like Hatcher, I’ve grown increasingly eccentric as my third decade unravels.
But I don’t think so.
I think we cast shadows wherever we walk, even in darkness, and the places we’ve lived are replete with the vestiges of our presence long after we’ve moved on. Ectoplasmic phantasms? Dreams, figments, subconscious manifestations? Residual splinters of the soul driven deep into places of intense emotional distress? None of that is for me to tax my brain. All I know is, I have seen these people long after they’ve left.
Perhaps some may see me, too, when I’m gone. I have loathed every minute of my incarceration, and that abhorrence must surely have seared some essential portion of my spirit into the very DNA of this essence-eating wasteland. If not, I suppose I will count myself lucky.
And free.
John Corley writes from the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola where he has served 29 years of a life sentence. He is a recipient of the PEN award for playwriting and a National Council on Crime and Delinquency award for journalism. His first poetry collection, Pagan, was released in 2018.