Ghosts

SHE HOLDS on to my neck as though I were a tree rooted at the edge of a cliff, the very edge of the world, beyond which lies the shadowy realm of things that go bump in the nightmares of children. Four years old, she has been through enough to feed the night-time beasts of old men. The Howard County shelter where I work and she lives with her grandmother offers warmth and food and a place to play. She goes to a good day-care center, where she has begun to exercise the intelligence hidden behind her stammer.

No. 4 Stevenson not only defeated No. 12 and reigning national champion Salisbury, 12-6, in a NCAA tournament semifinal to advance to the program's first title game, but the Mustangs may also have banished some ghosts of the past. Stevenson had been escorted out of the postseason in two of the past three seasons by the Sea Gulls, who still command a 10-6 advantage in their series with their former Capital Athletic Conference foe. What made Sunday's triumph even more special is that the Mustangs had been evicted from the Final Four in 2010 and 2012 by Salisbury, a program that has captured 10 national titles.

Lately I've felt as though I were seeing some ghosts of the Baltimore of the 1950s.I did not live here then; but when I arrived in 1962, I heard about them: The block-busting, the dying of churches and schools, the trashing of streets and morals, the terror and sorrow that come when neighborhoods are ripped apart and all the ''responsible'' (I think the word then was ''respectable'') people leave.The Northwood movie theater was being integrated in 1962, and people were furious over this invasion of the rights of business to select its clientele.

Thursday marks the 20th anniversary of the death of Baltimore-born Thurgood Marshall, the civil rights lawyer and first black Supreme Court justice who was instrumental in ending Jim Crow segregation. His representation of schoolgirl Linda Brown resulted in the landmark 1954 Supreme Court ruling Brown v. Board of Education, which ended separation practiced in a wide variety of public facilities and institutions. Yet Marshall sought more than just desegregation. Explaining his vision, Marshall proclaimed that "a child born to a black mother in a state like Mississippi … has exactly the same rights as a white baby born to the wealthiest person in the United States.

Since its restoration was completed in 1999, roughly 100,000 people per year have flocked to the Baltimore waterfront to tour the Constellation, the last all-sail warship built by the U.S. Navy. Security at the Inner Harbor site seems tight enough to prevent anyone from sneaking aboard the old Civil War vessel without paying admission. Yet three visitors, it seems, not only never paid, they've also never left. That may sound abnormal. In fact, it's paranormal. Tomorrow beginning at 5 p.m., members of the Baltimore Society for Paranormal Research will board the Constellation in hopes of finding the stowaways: the ghosts of sailors Neil Harvey, Carl Hansen and Capt.

Angelica By Arthur Phillips Random House / 336 pages / $25.95 Edmund Wilson's 1934 essay "The Ambiguity of Henry James" famously put forth a Freudian-steeped argument that the apparitions in James' The Turn of the Screw were not real ghosts but figments of the sexually repressed governess' imagination. No one but the governess sees the ghosts, after all, and James himself had remarked in a preface that the apparitions "are of the order of those involved in witchcraft cases rather than of those in cases of psychic research."

The weather is awful, the beaches are overcrowded, the hammock sags, and you're going to scream if you see one more article about UFOs or Bill Gates' billions. The expensive cure for such troubles involves whitewashed cottages, grape arbors, and Mediterranean sunsets. The cheap solution is to take a leisurely cruise through a bookstore.As you sail through the soft air-conditioned breezes of your bookstore, keep a sharp eye out for Dennis McFarland's exquisitely spooky novel "A Face at the Window" (Broadway Books, 309 pages, $25)

"Oh, social convention! I often think that is what's behind all the mischief in this world." This statement -- made by Mrs. Alving, the lead character in "Ghosts" -- is at the core of Henrik Ibsen's 1881 play, which is receiving a lean, incisive and at times riveting production at Center Stage.Mrs. Alving makes this declaration against social convention after telling her pastor the truth about her sham of a marriage, in which she covered up her late husband's dissolute life.The title, "Ghosts," is often narrowly interpreted to refer solely to the venereal disease Mrs. Alving's son, Oswald, inherited from her husband.

Those who decry gun control of any scope or form -- the ones who never seem to give an intellectual inch in the political battle over handguns, in particular -- are starkly silent on those rare occasions when the ghosts scream in their faces. There are ghosts in the eyes of literally millions of men, women and children whose loved ones have been killed with guns. And yet, they could all line up and tell their stories and light candles, and those who oppose gun laws would note the emotional ravings, then assert as higher principle the absolute right to bear arms.

In the heat of a Baltimore summer, when the city seems to be wrapped in a depressingly endless gray haze, the mercury seldom falls below 90 and thunderstorms rumble over Cockeysville, a package arrives from Ed Okonowicz offering some relief, if only in my mind. Okonowicz, the Elkton author who has more than 20 books to his credit on regional folklore, oral history and ghost stories, has sent us his latest, which immediately reminds me of cool autumn days, fields filled with pumpkins turning orange, swirling leaves doing a macabre dance and crisp air filled with the scent of wind-borne pungent wood smoke.

We pick things up at Kyle's Morrocan dinner party with Mauricio continuing to go in on Brandi. After Brandi finally tells Mauricio to go eff off, Kyle jumps in and whispers to Mauricio to back off. In her confessional, Kyle tells all: "You can't control what comes out of that girl's mouth. " It's annoying because Mauricio was definitely berating Brandi for about 30 minutes. People have limits. Kyle tries to gloss over it all, making it clear she didn't want Brandi to be attacked tonight and explaining that Mauricio's tight with Adrienne, so he felt compelled to insert himself into the drama.

When author Margaret Meacham was a little girl, she let her imagination soar while perched high in the branches of a buckeye tree in her family's Pittsburgh backyard. Now, half a century after those leafy daydreams, the 60-year-old Meacham is a popular author of children's books, some of which have been translated into German and French. She has taught creative writing to hundreds of students at Goucher College and online through the Gotham Writers' Workshop. She is the mother of three grown children and lives in Brooklandville with her husband and their two dogs.

A favorite holiday tradition has come to Toby's Dinner Theatre of Columbia for the first time in a musical production of Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol. " Toby's has chosen the version by Oscar-winning composer Alan Menken, known for his work in Disney films, with lyrics by Lynn Ahrens of "Ragtime" fame. The show ran for a decade of holiday seasons at New York's Madison Square Garden, where it consistently played to capacity audiences. Menken's music brings an upbeat quality to Dickens' familiar tale of stingy, nasty Ebenezer Scrooge, who is visited by several ghosts on Christmas Eve to bring about his transformation by Christmas Day. More relevant to contemporary tastes, this fast-paced version is suitable for all, from grandparents to children.

Vernon Loeb, the Washington Post editor who worked with Paula Broadwell on the bio of David Petraeus, says he was blind-sided by the affair that ended Petraeus' stint as CIA director. "My wife says I'm the most clueless person in America," he begins in a first-person piece in the Post, describing his involvement in the book "All In. " Loeb says he got involved after a call from his agent about collaborating on a book about Petraeus' leadership. Loeb was a logical choice -- he had embedded with a division under the general's command in 2003, while covering the Pentagon.

In the crisp autumn wind, as leaves fill gutters and darkness falls ever earlier on the Colonial-era streets of Maryland's capital city, ghost season arrives in Annapolis. "Dying trees, boy, that's the good stuff," folklorist Ed Okonowicz said. "Everything adds to the ambience. I'd rather do a graveyard tour in October than any other month of the year. " Annapolis is among his favorite haunts. The three-century-old city boasts enough bump-in-the-night tales to support two competing ghost tours and two books on the topic, both published within the past five years, the most recent one this fall.

Russ Noratel is the first to say that his paranormal investigators aren't anything like the Ghostbusters of movie fame. The Elkridge resident and author of "Ghosts of Ellicott City" wants to make clear that there are no such things as proton packs or ghost-containment units as dreamed up in the popular 1984 film with the musical tagline, "Who you gonna call?" But he also readily acknowledges that there are a lot of skeptics who enjoy poking fun at his Baltimore Society for Paranormal Research, especially around Halloween, when college kids are prone to playing pranks by phoning in false reports of sightings.

Writer-producer-director James Cameron was last seen on the public stage five years ago accepting an Oscar for Titanic and, in an exuberant (some deemed arrogant) quote from his movie, proclaiming himself "King of the World!" Rather than trying to top the biggest box-office hit, Cameron has provided a modest, stirring real-life postscript to it with Ghosts of the Abyss, a 60-minute, 3-D IMAX account of his return journey, in 2001, to the epochal wreck at the bottom of the North Atlantic.

NEW YORK - On a rainy, windswept night In Yonkers, Dr. Fran Bennett is walking the darkened corridors of a 300- year-old mansion hunting for ghosts. It's a typical Saturday night for Bennett, a paranormal investigator and founder of the New York Ghost Chapter, who for 16 years has been documenting what she claims is evidence that spirits walk among us. Most weekends find Bennett and her small team of investigators wandering in the dark and searching for spirits in an assortment of "haunted" locales - historic houses, museums, private homes, cemeteries and even restaurants - while armed with electronic equipment that includes digital cameras, infrared video, tape recorders, motion detectors and specially designed electromagnetic field meters.

When Tim Paggi is asked if he has ever experienced ghost phenomena, he will always say yes. "They are around us all the time," the 30-year-old Seton Hill resident said. "The only way you'll see them, though, is with an open imagination. " Paggi is a tour guide for the Fells Point GhostWalk, which run through Nov. 30 (for tickets and times, go to fellspointghost.com). The job attracted him for two reasons. "First, I enjoy interacting with the public and generally making an entertaining spectacle out of myself," Paggi said.

Visit the campus of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County on any cloudless afternoon, and you're likely to happen on an intriguing sight: a slender fellow bent over a contraption that looks like a cross between an 1890s camera and a bulky steamer trunk. That would be Sanjit Karmakar, a post-doctoral physics fellow who's using his "magic box" to take pictures by following the sun across the sky. One day, the pictures will be of objects thousands of miles away. In a deeper sense, he is trying to help answer a question that still engages scientists: What is the nature of light?