Ideas - Haunted: Imagining Ghosts Out of Loss

Episode Date: March 7, 2025

Sometimes, ghosts 'appear' for very human reasons. Loss, change, and grief can alter our perceptions of reality. In this episode, the reasons why ghosts are seen everywhere from new high-rises in Mumbai, to urban food courts, to a gay gym in San Francisco. *This episode originally aired on Oct. 25, 2022.

What does a mummified Egyptian child, the Parthenon marbles of Greece and an Irish giant all have in common? They are all stuff the British stole. Maybe. Join me, Mark Fennell, as I travel around the globe uncovering the shocking stories of how some, let's call them ill-gotten, artifacts made it to faraway institutions. Spoiler, it was probably the British. Don't miss a brand new season of Stuff the British Style. Watch it free on CBC Gem. This is a CBC Podcast. The following is a rebroadcast of an episode first aired in 2023.

When I was three, I lived in a house in France with my parents, and it was in a small village called Flavigny in Burgundy, and the village was a medieval village. It was old, it was one of those stonewalled villages. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed, and that is the writer Emily Urquhart with the opening to a ghost story, her own. I stayed in a small bedroom. It turned out that I was bothered by something in that bedroom, something that I referred to as somethings that matter, because I didn't really have the kind of language that an older

child might use, as a ghost or a monster or whatever. I refer to it as something's the matter. She's written about it in an essay where she imagines her adult self revisiting that time and place. The air is chilled and still. I see her blink. She is awake.

Her gaze fixated on a spot overhead. This is where the inky fluid mass has materialized, seeping in from the corner of the room above where the bed has been snugged against the wall. She's not seen a sting ray in her life, but when she does, 20 years from now in the Caribbean, she will recognize something in the ocean creature, in its darkness and its size, and also in its rippled movement. The inkblot is made of air or water or maybe gas. Some might argue that it is conjured of mind or spirit. But to the small girl, it is matter. It is part

of the physical universe. There is no urgency to its visit. It bides its time as it quivers in the dark, making its presence silently known. But eventually, as she knows it will, the inky mass speaks to her in a breathy hiss. It declares itself in a language that is either French or English or some other form of communication that is not linguistic. It says every time, Emily, go get your mother. Emily Urquhart's research revealed that she had not been the only one to sense an eerie

presence in that bedroom in Flavigny, but... What I ultimately can't do is tell you if it was real or if it wasn't real. I know that I was bothered by something in that room and other children were bothered by something in that room, but I can't say what it was. That is a classic ghost story, an eerie tale of the unexplained. But on this episode, something different. Ghosts rooted in the rational. Phantoms that take shape for all two real reasons,

political, cultural, and personal. It's a paranormal that comes from the normal, from feelings of loss and change, grief and mourning. Because sometimes ghosts represent something all too human. People would tell these stories about the elevator being haunted. This sort of becomes a metaphor for the destruction of the lives these people used to have. I think those pieces, the pieces that I did around HIV AIDS,

helped me in a certain way to deal with all my ghosts, all my wonderful friends, my lovers, my partners, who are no longer here. Your relationship doesn't end with death. It carries on afterwards. Here is Ideas producer Lisa Godfrey with three alternative ghost stories. An episode called Haunted. A cold, dark bedroom in a medieval French village? That seems like the ideal setting for a ghost story. But it's not where Azania Imtiaz Patel found hers.

Her ghosts rose up from the hot, teeming streets of a major global city. I grew up in Mumbai, a beautiful, brilliant coastal metropolis in India. And then I moved to the UK and spent the last two years at the University of Oxford and have recently just moved to London. Azania travelled back home to India to conduct an unconventional research project. She was out to investigate the connection between ghost stories and the politics of urban change.

I've been a literature student and then for it into public policy. So it was a way of balancing those two interests of mine out. And I've grown up listening to ghost stories. So it was a way of balancing those two interests of mine out. And I've grown up listening to ghost stories, so it was almost natural, supernatural, whatever, foray into this sort of field. India really does have a lot of ghost stories. Across religions, in folk tales, in Bollywood movies, and some would have you believe, in daily life. Or so say the nation's top paranormal investigators.

They're always around, actually. They're everywhere. There's not a single corner. They're not present. So, yeah, there's a high chance there might be someone right behind you. Azania Patel says that, unlike the eternal spirits of England, ghosts in India seem to pay close attention to their changing surroundings. Ghosts in India adapt. Ghosts in England are far more stagnant.

So for example, there's this hotel called the Old Bank Hotel in Oxford. It used to be a bank but before it was a bank it was a house and apparently this house used to house a lovely young woman who lived with her family and she fell in love with a soldier and during the Great War he died and never returned and so she died of a broken heart and the story goes that she now haunts the lane around the old bank hotel,

crying from the window, looking for her lover to return. And now this is a story that's remained the same since the Great War. She does not make use of the surrounding in the way that, you know, there's never a story of her being in the bank and like kind of ripping currency,

or like throwing staplers, or her being, you know, in the hotel and sort of poking at the bellboy. Whereas in India, that's what would happen. Oh yeah, she haunts the honeymoon suite because, you know, she never had her marriage or like if there's a marriage that happens here, it's going to be cursed. So it's almost like, you know, the Indians fix up their ghost stories to match the surroundings. Whereas with England, my sense has been that the ghosts, they're not updating. You know, it's almost like a software thing.

As entertaining as ghost stories can be, Azania Patel approached her research with serious intent. She listened to people who claimed to have seen ghosts or heard about hauntings in their urban neighborhoods. And she realized that these stories can be less about ghosts and more of a portal to certain feelings, not so much about death or the supernatural, but about life itself. I was curious about something that she'd written in the magazine Aeon, calling cities inherently haunted, uncanny places. We as a civilization did not evolve living in cities. Cities are this sort of invention of modernity.

Even if the city is home, it's not likely to feel the place you're most comfortable in. There is this sense of almost separation from the organic. Cities are these vessels almost for infrastructure and development and you feel unfamiliar in it. Facing that, facing the rapid changes that come with infrastructure, the rapid changes that come in your everyday sort of experience and very much so the sense of being almost replaceable in the city. You know, we all play parts, but someone else can play that part too. And that is a scary feeling for most of us.

We're trying to connect cities, we're trying to like get more integrated within cities. It's almost like cities are a project that's never quite finished. And I think that kind of need for constant improvement, constant fulfilling the needs of people who come within cities, sort of gives this that uncanny character of it never stops. It's never going to be familiar because the minute you get used to it

looking a certain way, it's gonna change. And five years down the line, it's gonna look completely different. When I was in Mumbai, when I was in my undergrad, there was the large metro construction, this railway line that has been in perpetual construction since I think I was in my last years of school till the very point where I left the city. It was just being built. And the landscape of what I used to look out of my window was completely different. So all this would seem to be a very kind of unlikely spot to associate with ghosts,

but you write that even in the modern technological city people often see and in fact seek out ghosts. First I have to ask you like really is that true? I would say so in like three and a half odd years of research now, the one thing that has been this sort of almost common thread is people's clinging to ghosts. It's almost the sense of desperation to make sense of being haunted, to give like, you know, a name and a face or even a personality to, you know, what kind of follows you around. She says that the simplest explanation comes from a difficult French philosopher. Dorita says that each moment of the present or each landscape in the present is haunted

by its past. You have specters of the past, these sort of liminal images that existed before. For example, when you walk through a busy street, that moment you're in is at the same time occupied by all the people that walked in it before. Like even if a space changes completely, it still exists as it was in someone's memory. And there is this sort of model, a ghostly model, a spectral model called it what you will, that sort of emerges. And if we're to say that cities are constantly changing, there are many, many ghostly models all around. And that means there's just more potential to be haunted. There's just more things to be haunted by. In your field research, you focused on urban India particularly, which under Narendra

Modi has seen an enormous amount of rapid change. Why do you think that is rich ground for ghost hauntings? Interesting thing with urban India is the fact that it has been not just with Modi, but even previously it has been in a state of constant change, whether it was post colonization, where you have this sort of nationalization of the industries, this sort of Nehruvian push for like, you know, top down development, or whether you come to the 1990s, when India had its liberalization reforms and became a far more open economy. So you have like sort of international MNCs making an appearance, changing the space of the country. And whether you come to more like sort of recent era changes that demolition is almost like the sort of political punitive tool that you're choosing what parts of residents to destroy depending on what sort of political ideology you are trying to oppose. And within that space, change has this character of speed and also its own personality.

So I think very often in the early, and even now in the iterations of development plans for urban India, you seem to follow a Western lead, which is like a slum-free Mumbai and all sorts of vertical urbanisation. High rises in Mumbai can go more higher. After a delay of over a year, the Maharashtra government has finally approved the ambitious Mumbai Development Plan 2034 in a bid to boost real estate activity and the development of affordable housing in India's financial capital. Without really sitting back and trying to figure out if that's actually the best

model forward for these communities. So it's almost simple things like in India you need larger windows than you would in say council housing in a London because when it's hot it gets really hot in a London because when it's hot, it gets really hot. And we cook food very often still on stoves and not on like flat heating induction tops. And so you need more ventilation. And those are things that are not really accounted for when you just like copy paste these ideas of modernity. It's a top-down approach that doesn't take people's actual experience into account. There is the human element of it and this sort of idea where your state tells you what development should look like, people often get left behind.

And you often have this sense of perpetual marginalization. And when you have the sense of marginalization, what you also have is people who don't have the agency to tell their stories. They don't have the agency in a way you or I could go and complain and be like, this is not okay. They know there isn't any point to that because no one's listening to them. And very often within my field research, I'd hear people be like, we've said this so many times. We don't feel like saying it anymore because it's about dignity. It's about not making yourself look weak again and again in front of authorities who won't listen. And this is where ghost

stories come in, says Azania Patel. People's anxieties hitch a ride on them. People want to listen to ghost stories. I always say this, it's easier to talk about things that may not be real. It's easier to talk about problems that have this sort of paranormal supernatural root. It's harder to address issues that have very structural institutional reasons behind them. And that becomes this sort of apparatus for people on the margins to do two things. One, address their issues with the conditions they're in, and B, have something to blame it on. It takes away some of the edge of the helplessness,

because if it's an entity that's so beyond you, it's not your fault. And I mean, even if it's easier to do that, then sort of try and, how do you ascribe an articulate blame towards a state or a group of people who don't really care? You can't really blame someone for who you are collateral damage or an afterthought. So it's just this sense of agency within the margins that makes urban cities so fertile in many ways for paranormality.

Can you give an example of a story that you heard that illustrates that for you? I think one of the most interesting examples I found was that when I was working within a slum rehabilitation complex in Mumbai, there were multiple people who told me the very same story of this young man haunting the elevator because a lot of workers had died while building the building structure. They're like, oh, you know, there's the cost of this young worker and he wants vengeance

because they were like, you know, there were no safety precautions taken in the building and there's been so much loss just in building these structures up. Now, what's important to note is that these are structures that were slums. Within the site, which now you can see three or four buildings, it used to be about hundreds of small shanty houses. All these shanty houses were removed to build

these vertical housing projects to rehabilitate the poorer sections of the city. So these people would tell these stories about the elevator being haunted. And I was like, oh, okay. And the reasoning was trauma behind the building. And as a researcher, of course, while I look at the stories, I also want to balance it out with fact. And when I looked up like the records for that area,

there were zero records of worker deaths. And when you speak to people who were involved in the building, they said that no one had died. So this sort of myth of destruction sort of becomes a metaphor for like, you know, the destruction of the lives these people used to have. And it lets you have this

sort of ghost story, which is a classic ghost story of a wrongful death being avenged. People genuinely believe the fact that there is a ghost and it was caused by the negligence of the builder. And this vocabulary of the negligence extends beyond just the building and to their own living conditions, own living conditions because living conditions in these houses are very poor like in fact scholarship has called these vertical slums like you've just put people in a building and that's not going to be an improvement to the quality of life and these building structures have such limited light such limited ventilation that they look spooky

in the middle of the day. It's not just around housing. There are ghost stories around the workplace as well, or where the workplaces used to be. The textile mills in Mumbai were shut down due to an indefinite strike, which ended with the owners of the mills shutting shop and selling said mills because they'd become very expensive real estate. And that kind of is this example of what happens when you have rapid urbanization

and the workers that build the city just stop being useful to it. Azania says that Mumbai went from a place of textiles and industry to a hub of finance and tech with lightning speed. Any kind of land, just like the property rates, are probably the highest in the country. So you have these mills that used to be sites of activity shut down abruptly and suddenly they're being sold. And even then you have the sense of the period of disuse where there's a lull.

Mukesh Mills lay abandoned, ruins with an Instagrammable atmosphere of spookiness. This mill was used as a site for film shoots and continues to be used for film shoots. It was also used for a fair bit of horror films. But in that period, you have these stories of incidents of like, you know, fires being set, a actress feeling like someone is leering at her from the back of the mirror. You have stories of things falling, people getting possessed, dogs coming in and barking. Now, whether these stories are true or not is beside the fact that there is a deep sense

of anger attached to this space because a lot of people living within that locality actually used to work there. And now you see what was your workplace when you were trying to protest for fairer wages become this sort of spot for like Bollywood glamour. We were shooting in somewhere, New Bombay. Nobody could explain what it was. So every time my director would say action and we could hear a girl singing. So it was very weird. Bollywood glamour is as distant from you know crunch reality of working-class Mumbai as possible. It's aspirational. It's the sort of dream and it's this sort of idea that Mumbai or Bombay is the

city of dreams but it also rests on a lot of buried labor unacknowledged sort of idea that Mumbai or Bombay is the city of dreams, but it also rests on a lot of buried labor, unacknowledged sort of horrors. And you have the story of like the mills just becoming this site of bad entities. Like it is one of those sites where you just hear things will go wrong. You will get possessed. Don't go there after, you know, a certain hour. Many people enjoy a good scare and everyone likes a good story. So how do local people take to this academic ghost hunter in their midst, looking behind

the supernatural curtain at all too dismaying realities? When you're trying to rationalize every sort of ghost story with reasoning, people often don't like that when I do that. It's almost like being a party pooper, where you want this sort of juicy story of some entity coming at you from within the walls. But I think for me, what's far more important is this idea that where is this ghost story coming from?

They will usually follow this trope of, you know, something bad happens, someone needs to be avenged. It is like, you know, a story that doesn't have a proper conclusion. And so an entity from the past returns within the present to try and like fulfill that arc. And you try to figure out like, okay, what is this sort of, you know, core problem that apparently this entity is emerging from? And again, whether the entity exists or not, the likelihood is that that trauma definitely does. You know, you find such meaning around ghosts in your work. You say, ghosts are a rallying cry for us to remain human. There's something poetic and also deeply kind about personifying what we fear. I think most of our fears are related to this idea of loss of any

kind. You know, whether it's the loss of a way of life, whether it's the loss of a person, whether it's the loss of, you know, ourselves in almost some way, giving it this sort of human face is almost a way of understanding it. You know, I think of something as simple as a Ouija board. And the first thing you'd ask is, is anyone there? Or like, can you hear us? Is there anything you would like to say to me? And I think when we're faced with our own fears, Can you hear us? Is there anything you would like to say to me?

And I think when we're faced with our own fears, it's almost the sense of, is there anything you would like to say to me? That is the reconciliatory power of ghosts, that if you acknowledge them, and if you recognize the presence of a specter, whether it's historical, whether it's present, whether it's traumatic. You give it this sense of personhood, you give it this sense of acknowledgement. It becomes full. You're listening to an episode called Haunted about the rational reasons that people see ghosts. That was journalist and researcher Azania Patel.

Ideas is a podcast and a broadcast, heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca.gov. Find us on the CBC Listen app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed. I'm going to hold your hand when I say this. This is not the time to avoid the news. There's a new administration in the White House. Canadians are about to get a new prime minister. And how we address global trade, foreign wars, and the climate, it's all changing fast. I'm Marcia Yang, weekday host of World Report. And I'm here to help you stay on top of the news in just 10 minutes.

Find and follow World Report everywhere you get your podcasts. You're listening to an episode first aired in 2023. Ghost stories can emerge out of human reality, particularly feelings of loss and absence, with death being the most profound and lasting loss of all. It's a fact of existence that still unnerves us, particularly when a life is ended too soon. Sometimes, a person's faith or beliefs can close the gap between the living and the dead. At other times, it's the power of the imagination.

Always, it's in our minds. Here again is Ideas producer Lisa Gottfried with Haunted. Emily Urquhart thought it was over, but then recently it happened again. I was sitting at a hockey game and I looked down and I think it was like, I don't know, the referee maybe who looked up into the stands and in a second I thought, oh, there's my brother.

Except, Emily's brother was no longer around. He died suddenly, shockingly, two decades ago, of medical complications related to alcoholism. For a long time, seeing her late brother in daily life was a thing she couldn't explain. There was no way that I could make it happen and no way that I could stop it. In her essay collection, Ordinary Wonder Tales, Emily writes about the experience. After he died, I began to see my brother with surprising frequency.

These appearances were not ghost-like apparitions, nor were they dreams. Instead, I saw him in the bodies of strangers. He was waiting for the traffic light to turn so we could cross at a busy intersection. A man tipped his hat skyward to read a street sign, and my brother's face hovered beneath the brim. He was the token collector at the subway entrance, the lone soup eater in the basement food court

of a downtown shopping mall. I couldn't anticipate these visitations. They happened at random. So my father was married before and had four children, and then later he married my mother and they had me. My sisters lived with us but my brothers came on the weekends. I had two brothers and it was very exciting when they arrived. They were nine and eleven years older than me so my brother Marsh was very protective of me.

I remember that as a young child but also as a teenager. He liked to scare my boyfriends, my high school boyfriends, which was kind of embarrassing. And then once I was in my 20s we did, we both lived in Toronto but I didn't really see him. He was struggling at the time dealing with alcoholism and I think I was too young to really understand the severity of what was happening with him, but he would call me occasionally. We weren't super close, but I cared for him and he was my brother and he was always there. He was a part of my life from the very beginning.

It was devastating when he died. I didn't tell anybody about what was happening in terms of me seeing my brother on the streets after he died because I first of all didn't want to upset my family any further. His death was quite tragic. I didn't want to tell my parents at the time and further worry them at a time when they had a lot going on to begin with. And the other reason is that I was nervous about what would happen. So these sightings didn't bother me.

They didn't make me feel scared, but I knew that hallucinating or seeing the dead was certainly taboo. And I feared that if I told anyone, and certainly anyone of authority, that it would be pathologized in some way. I didn't know what would happen next. I feared that much more than keeping the secret.

So I actually, I didn't tell anyone for 20 years until I decided I started writing about it. And I thought, you know, I wonder if I looked into this, if I just started doing some research on this, now that, you know, I'm 20 years older, I have a background in journalism, I have a PhD in folklore, I've learned how to research and ask questions and examine ideas. And I started looking into it at that point, and I discovered that it was actually not uncommon at all, that it was actually a fairly normal part of the bereavement process. that it was actually a fairly normal part of the bereavement process. Some of the studies that I looked at suggested that people were more likely to have,

what the term is, is post-bereavement hallucination, if the death itself had been traumatic. For instance, I had lost my grandmother around the same time, but she was in her 90s and we had a really good relationship, and knew her very well and I did I never hallucinated her on the street and yet my brother I saw all the time and I had known him less well than than my grandmother so because I think as a young person I was still trying to work out why it happened at all you know he was only in his mid- 30s it seemed impossible and that maybe I was subconsciously trying to work out that question, work out that problem. In both stories and psychology, there can be some interaction following that death.

There's a Swedish concept and I don't know how to pronounce it. It looks like hug. It's written like hug. And it's the soul and the soul that's been unsettled that can't rest. And so continues to come back and interact with the living because there's some relationship that they have not worked out.

And then of course in psychologically speaking, you know, for the living, your relationship doesn't end with death. It carries on afterwards. And if there are issues that you've left unsettled, those will carry on as well, and you will keep trying to work them out, and you have to conjure some aspect of that person in order to do that.

And whether that happens consciously or unconsciously, it depends on the person. I think that life goes on and that in itself is terribly sad. But it is the truth and you start to think about their death less and think more about their life. And I think at some point there is a tipping point maybe where the tragedy of their death stops becoming your main story

and you can get past it and begin to think about their life. And I hope that this is what has happened with my brother. And then just last year, it happened again. It carries on, and maybe it'll carry on forever, but with less frequency. Grief can feel all-encompassing, but sometimes it is all-encompassing. Sometimes, instead of one brotherly ghost, you carry an entire generation's worth. War can do that to a person, natural disaster, or a disease such as AIDS.

81 was a big year. That is when everything changed. I remember looking in the window of Star Pharmacy and there were these little Polaroid photographs. Watch out guys, there's something out there. The first time I heard about AIDS I think was called the gay cancer. I am Daniel Goldstein. I make art. That's mostly what I love to do. make art. That's mostly what I love to do.

Daniel's an American sculptor. He lived for many, many years in San Francisco, but moved recently to Portugal with his husband. He makes huge shimmering mobiles. They flow gently above the heads of worried people in hospitals and medical facilities like the Mayo Clinic. Two of his pieces have just been added to the collection of the Gates Foundation, and his work has been shown all over the world.

His list of accomplishments is solid, but phantom figures float through his life and work. The cause of that is devastatingly documented in a film called We Were Here, about the AIDS crisis in San Francisco in the 80s and early 90s. For Daniel Goldstein, ghosts were and remain a tangible presence.

They are his absent, beautiful friends. It was the 70s. It was the mid 70s. Yeah, I moved there to finish graduate school and it was it was sort of the village that we know that most gay people had always dreamed of. It was lots of gay people were moving to San Francisco at that time. It was inexpensive, unlike now. So a lot of artists and writers and people like that could actually afford to live in San Francisco.

And a lot of gay people in particular sort of gravitated to the area, which was called the Castro. And it was sort of like a village. You could, um, you knew most of the shopkeepers and there were a couple of cafes, there were one in particular that had a lawn in the back, so you could go and get your lovely piece of pastry and a coffee and go sit down on a lawn and run into your friends. And that was, I think, just a wonderful and new experience

for so many people who were coming to San Francisco from all over the country to find their community. It was right after Stonewall, so there was, Gay Liberation was very much happening, and it was a very relaxed and free place. And though I was mostly working in my studio, I knew that I could always run into some people I knew. So it was pretty idyllic, actually.

And then this unbelievable period of change and horror for your community. Maybe if you could just describe what happened in the Castro. By the time that the epidemic started, I had been with my partner for about four or five years, maybe even more. And he was a scientist studying basically infectious diseases. So he had been such a science nerd before and nobody understood what he was doing. All of

a sudden, he was very relevant. He felt very, very valued to be able to be a carrier of information. But he also found out that he was carrying HIV, and so was I. So we knew that we were HIV positive before everybody else because he was working in the HIV lab at UC San Francisco. So he was able to draw our blood at home, bring it into Jay Levy's lab and come home and tell me that we were both positive. So that was pretty horrible to find out because at that time AIDS was a death sentence. There were no treatments and we had friends who were totally fine and they would get sick and then they would be dead a week or two later. Because the first presenting diseases were Pneumocystis, which when you have no T cells, we have no immune system, can kill you very quickly.

It's a pneumonia, Pneumocystis pneumonia. And so literally our friends were people who were like strong and healthy one week and then dead the next week. It was sort of like a tidal wave. And it's pretty hard to imagine it. But I always say, imagine that you were at a party in 1984 and there were 10 people there. And three years imagine that you were at a party in 1984 and there were 10 people there. And three years later, you were the only one left. I basically lost 80% of my cohort.

So it was like I describe it as like living in a war zone. You just never, never knew where the next bomb was going to drop and what phone call you were going to get. Because the community was separate from our families, because a lot of people had left their families behind, moved to San Francisco from Idaho, from Mississippi, from everywhere. We had to create our own families to take care of each other. And I remember my father, my parents lived in Santa Cruz, which was only an hour and a half away.

And my father said, why are you spending so much time taking care of these people? He said, they're not family. And I said, they are. They're my family. So he got it. He understood because he adored my husband and my friends and he saw them dying. And he actually helped take care of them. And that's what we did. If you weren't going to a funeral, you were taking care of somebody. And then if you had HIV, you were also hoping that you would be okay. And once the drugs did come around, the drugs were so toxic that that's what was killing

people just as much as the disease. And I always said that, you know, I'll probably die from the drugs before I die from the disease because my first partner, because he was a scientist, was one of the first people to get into a drug study. We both got into the study and it killed him. There were, I think, 80 people in that drug study, and all but two of us died from the drugs. So I was very lucky that I couldn't stand the side effects, and I quit. It's hard to think about it. It's hard to remember what my life was like, because it was

it's hard to remember what my life was like because it was not the real world. You felt like if you were inside this, you were living in a world that was separate from everybody else's world. You saw people going about their daily lives and our daily lives were going to the hospital, taking care of people and going to funerals. That was it.

And hopefully trying to get some artwork done at the same time. You were making art. How did you make art during this time? For years would go by where I would not make art. I didn't really start making art about AIDS until the early 90s, when I could sort of have a little bit of distance that there were treatments out, so people, not as many people were dying. It was, you know, the studio when I could concentrate was a safe haven. It was the one place that wasn't about death.

When I got my AIDS diagnosis, I had been a printmaker for many years and fairly successful, but I had always wanted to do sculpture. That was my first love. And when I got my diagnosis back in 84, I basically closed up my print studio because I just basically thought I was going to die soon. And I thought, I've got so many sculptures in my head that I want to make, and so I better do them. Little did I know I was going to live until now. But that was the impetus. It sort of took that death sentence to say, you better do it.

So during those years, I was sort of in the studio experimenting. It was just experimenting and play, which is the best thing you can do with your art. And then I started, I used to go to this gym that was the primary gay gym in San Francisco. And it was like the only gym I've ever seen that had leather workout benches. Everybody else used Nogahe. And after years of the sweat sinking into the leather and the abrasion from the bodies, I started noticing these patterns on the leather. And I basically bribed the manager when they would get too gross and started falling apart, he would take them off and have them replaced with new leather.

And I said, can I have the old skins, the old leather? And he finally started collecting them and giving them to me. And when I finally got them to the studio, I nailed one of them up to the wall, because these were like big, they were like six feet tall pieces of brown leather. And when I nailed one to the wall,

it almost, the power of it almost knocked me over. It was a ghostly figure. The only thing I can liken it to is the Shroud of Turin. And these images were created by people who were now dead. So, they were, I call them reliquaries. They were relics of all these hundreds and hundreds of men who, trying to stay alive, were working out at the gym to keep their bodies in some form of recognizable. Because part of AIDS was your body started wasting away. So the only way you could keep your body together was to make muscle because your fat was literally disappearing. And so it was a ritual for a lot of people. It was also the gym was like the village green.

It was where you could keep track of people, find out who was sick, who was, you know, what funerals, when were, because that was the nexus of the community. So these skins, they embodied the sweat and the effort of these, all these men. So the skins were such powerful images for me, and they were ghosts. I like to say they were sort of the presence of absence, which is sort of what a ghost is. It's the presence of absence. So some of the skins, some of the larger ones, have these figures that almost look like mummies. And I thought, how can I make these three dimensional? Because I'm a sculptor. First, I started making them with pieces of bronze mesh, because I wanted them to feel permeable.

Most sculpture is hard edged. There's an outside and there's an inside. I didn't want these to be like that. I wanted them to be almost like ghosts that you could see through. And at the same time, I was collecting all of my medication bottles. I don't know why. I was just collecting them for something.

And then a curator from Los Angeles called and said they were doing an exhibition called Make Art Stop AIDS. And so I thought, what if I make a sculpture out of the pill bottles, the same shape as this mummy shape? And they were orange and they were translucent so the light could come through. So they're my pill bottles and my partner's pill bottles. And then the outside felt like it needed something,

so I created like a penumbra of syringes. Because part of living with HIV is you're getting stuck with needles all the time. Sometimes you have to inject yourself. So there was like this halo of the syringes around them. And I sort of fell in love with the syringes around him. And I sort of fell in love with the syringes when the light hit them. They were like crystal and I thought, why can't I make a figure just out of the syringes? And I was invited to be, there was going

to be one of the AIDS conferences in Vienna. There was going to be a big exhibition. So I did a piece, which is my favorite piece that I've done around AIDS. It's called Invisible Man, and I created a piece out of 864 syringes all pointing inwards, but the center of it is a void, and the void is in the shape of me. And it's a figure created by a void. So it's once again, it's a ghost. It's the presence of absence. So it was sort of how I could deal with this concept that I was living with ghosts of all these people who weren't there. So for me, these ghost pieces are about that. All my friends,

all these people who died, what they didn't get to do. So that's, for for me what the ghosts are, is those lost lives and what they didn't get to do. We've lost so much from so many talented people that didn't get to do their work. So that's what ghosts are for me. Do you consciously stay with those images? Are they images that have forged your your art? Or did you find that your that your art changed as you as time passed? Well, I think those pieces, the pieces that I did around HIV-AIDS, helped me in a certain way to deal with all my ghosts, all my people, my wonderful friends, my lovers, my partners who are no longer here. And I have not made any new pieces around HIV AIDS for a while.

The last one I did was probably 10 years ago. I've done other pieces, mostly the work I've done since then are very, very large public sculptures, but all my pieces are in hospitals. And I feel really honored that they're very large suspended pieces in atriums and entryways of hospitals, because I've spent way too much time in hospitals and I know how cold and uninviting they can be. I wanted my work to be at least somewhat uplifting and welcoming to people who are sick or come to visit people who are sick and all the caregivers

who work in those places. One time I went back to a hospital in Modesto to photograph one of my pieces and there was a woman who was being wheeled through on her wheelchair and she said, are you the artist? And I went, yeah, I am. And she said, you know, I come here twice a week for chemotherapy, and this is the only thing that makes me feel good. She said, I even look forward to seeing this piece.

So I thought, okay, this is why I'm doing this work. In terms of how I've been dealing with my losses since then, it's strange. I deal with them in my dreams. My friends and my partners visit me constantly. And it's sort of a continuation of the presence of absence. They populate my dreams. And it's wonderful in a continuation of the presence of absence. They populate my dreams. And it's wonderful. And most of the times, the dreams are positive. I see my ghost in dreams.

Yeah, yeah, it's so wonderful. My first partner is in my dreams all the time. So I'm very grateful for dreams. I have the presence of their absence a lot. You know, my life is not as full of friends as it was back then. And I feel that loss constantly. And I also think that so many of us who survived from that time, we never really got a chance to grieve

because we were so busy taking care of each other. And a grieving process is a healing process. And when you don't get to grieve, you don't get to heal from those losses. And I know there's so much pain and trauma inside my body, and it's sort of scary that I feel sometimes that if I let it out, I'd just completely fall apart. You know, obviously I'm not carrying that every minute of the day, but it's there. You know, if anybody who's lost somebody close to them,

it never goes away, really. It's always there. You know, time heals all wounds. Sorry, it doesn't. I wish it did, but it doesn't. And you know, that's life, you know, life and death, you know. That's life, you know, life and death, you know. We all lose people. For some reason, you know, when parents die, that's a loss, but my mom lived to 100. She had a wonderful, full life. She really got to complete her life.

My friends didn't. For me, I feel like I get to get old. That's my, the gift to me is I get to get old. My friends didn't. So we all live with ghosts of one form or another. And mine are friendly ghosts, luckily. You know, I love them. I honor them. You've been listening to an Ideas episode from 2023 called Ha haunted with artist Daniel Goldstein, author

Emily Urquhart and journalist Azania Patel. In February of 2025, news came that Daniel Goldstein had died of an abdominal illness at home in Portugal. He was 74 years old. In an obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle, art historian Jonathan Katz remembered him as treating life as a gift always unwrapped with both hands. He knew that its single greatest joy was love. Episode Producer Lisa Godfrey. Web Producer for Ideas is Lisa Ayuso. Our Senior Producer is Nikola Lukcic. The Executive Producer of Ideas is

Greg Kelly. And I'm Nala Ayed. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.