SUBSTANTIAL GHOSTS

They are there in those dusty, almost always ill-smelling shops.  Battered and musty or perky and defiant, sometimes, one can almost imagine, sad and tearful.  They are substantial ghosts who tell real stories with no aim to frighten their beholder.

In one of the first shops I visited I saw a ghost of deeply polished mahogany, a high-boy which had evidently graced some pretentious home, the home of a family with so handsome a piece.

It was a resigned sort of ghost which submitted with well-bred tolerance to its fate, to be elbowed by a low-brow piece of pine furniture on one side, the variety that used to be called a commode, and on the other by a broken table of black walnut.

PERSONALITY IN FURNITURE

Even the dealers find personality in their wares, it seems.

I found a tall press of handsome red cedar.  It was on its side and the dealer was busy hammering a leg into place.  A pot of glue, which had boiled over, simmered on the coal stove close by, and filled the place with an odor which one would go rather farther to avoid than to encounter.

That press must have provided a shelter for many a handsome gown, for its inside was arranged for the careful hanging of delicate pieces of wearing apparel.  There were two deep drawers in its lower part and on the floor of these could still be seen the imprint of dainty shoes.

Ghosts of dead and gone beauty issued from the one door which swung helplessly open as the mender struggled to put the refractory leg where a clothes-press leg should be.

A tiny go-cart with well-warn cushions and the spokes of one wheel rather bent looked as though it might be going to offer a real and teary ghost suggestion, but the dealer made light of my suggestion that perhaps the little one who had taken pleasure in riding in it had died and left its parents broken-hearted and alone.

"Nuthin' to it," he replied.  "They all grew up, that's all.  Seven of 'em used it, and now they're too old to ride in a go-cart.  So I've got it on my hands."

GHOST OF CHILDHOOD

But the ghost was there, the spirit of childhood gone forever.  Perhaps the mother who had trundled seven little ones about in that go-cart is not obliged to mourn them as having gone out of life, but can anybody be sure she doesn't mourn their lost babyhood?

There was a jolly old "spook" in a corner of the next shop I visited, a round table which still bore the marks of uncounted jovial sessions.  The round print of many a glass base showed in darkened circles on what had once been a highly polished top.  The table was chipped and scratched on its top and its base was marred by the heel of many a boot.  No sorry ghost here, but one that had evidently done as Kipling avowed he did, taken his fun where he'd found it.

A companion piece stood near the table, a handsome cabinet with glass doors which in a more dignified manner proclaimed the same somewhat Bohemian story.  The two stood, like master and man, for on the shelves of the tall cabinet were the marks where many bottles had stood and made their imprint.  A spirit of conviviality seemed to issue from its rather sagging doors, but it was not flamboyant in its avowal as was the table.

ROMANCE LINGERED

Romance, too, lingered along with other ghosts in the second-hand dealer's shop.  Who but lovers would ever have used a little reception room set of whitewood with tiny blue flowers in blue enamel painted thereon, and who but persons from whom romance had departed would have consented to place these tale-bearing bits of house furnishing where the eye of the casual observer could see and read their history?

Romance of a more comforting sort hovered over two deep-cushioned chairs which sat "side by each" in a dusty corner of an East Washington street shop.  It was easy to imagine those two chairs occupied by a man and woman who had gracefully grown old together.  One could almost see their shapes through which the shabby upholstering of dark leather shone dully.

The large of the two, that with the broad arms over which the leather was frayed and into which innumerable holes had been burned by the ash from a pipe-bowl, was "father's" chair and almost one could vision the aureole of white hair which had, by its constant contact turned to a darker shade a space at the top of the back cushion.  He was a large man, was "father," as could be adjudged from the deep sag in the seat cushion, just as one could deduct that the opposite was true of "mother," whose companion chair cushion was hardly beat from its pristine plumpness.

PICTURE MOTHER THERE.

But she was an energetic little mother, said the ghost that breathed softly from the depths of the comfy chair.  She had used the padding on the arm of her chair for a cushion for needles, its leather top was a mass of tiny perforations which could be explained in no other way.  And there was mighty little discoloration on the back top of that chair's upholstering.  One doesn't darn holes in father's sock or sew buttons and patches on sonny's coat and pants with the head resting comfortably on a cushion.

A pair of andirons fashioned in the shape of dragons and looking unutterably fierce suggested yet another romance ghost.  They whispered of dimly twilit periods when the firelight vied with that of the fading day and when plans were made for bright futures while the sightless eyes of the iron, dragons looked on almost sinister in the fact that while they saw nothing they might well have seen beyond to the point where castles in Spain vanish into thin air or materialize into a modern apartment, five stories up and no elevator....

EASY TO UNDERSTAND

After a half day of "visiting" ghosts in these shops where they have their habitat it was easy to understand why a person who had come unexpectedly upon a piece of furniture which brought vividly to her mind memories of a past which had long ago been relegated to the place of forgotten things, should exclaim:

"I have seen a ghost."

All those ghosts of the past are housed in Syracuse second-hand shops. All those and hundreds more.  It isn't quite necessary to consult a spirit to get "contact" with an honest-to-goodness ghost.  They stand, cheek by jowl, in the shops of the men who buy and sell old furniture.

By Gwen Hatch - Syracuse Herald, Syracuse, New York - Sunday, April 13 1919

When your time comes to sit in my Chair,
Remember your Father's habits and rules,
Sit on all four legs, fair and square,
And never be tempted by one-legged stools!

Rudyard Kipling, My Father's Chair  (1911)