As they do for so many social phenomena, the internet and the pandemic share much of the blame. Online existence had already offered many new and easy ways to ignore or avoid a person, but all the time spent in isolation made it worse. As everyone’s lives became both smaller and more difficult to manage, casual friendships were cast off without a word. The social contract broke down, and all rules of propriety — an obligatory “good luck,” or even “I never want to see you again” — became relics of the past. Ghosting now seems to be happening in realms in which disappearing without a trace is harder to pull off — in offices, where colleagues don’t bother returning several emails in a row, opting to risk an uncomfortable elevator run-in instead, or among friends who share a social circle and can’t withdraw as easily as they once did on the internet.
All of this has made us more preoccupied with a possible vanishing than ever before. The act of a person seemingly evaporating into thin air, never to return, has fueled our cultural imagination, bordering at this point on cliché. It’s the plot of Joyce Carol Oates’s 2023 novel, “48 Clues Into the Disappearance of My Sister,” and the Apple TV+ mini-series “The Last Thing He Told Me” starring Jennifer Garner. Netflix has created a cottage industry of true-crime documentaries, including some centering on cold cases of those who puzzlingly disappear; among these is the 2020 revival of the popular television series “Unsolved Mysteries.” And we maintain a deep curiosity about artists who explore the psychic trauma of absence, as does Jasper Johns, who made some of his most effective works — his remarkably dreary gray paintings, from 1961 — the year he and his former friend and lover Robert Rauschenberg became estranged. Others, from the novelist Thomas Pynchon to the conceptual artists Cady Noland and David Hammons, have made ghosting their audiences a focus of their work, or at least of their personas, either by declining interviews and photographs or by refusing to explain their aesthetic decisions.
It’s not as if the 21st century invented the concept of unceremoniously cutting ties — only that we’ve now connected that act to a primal fear. Ghosts are by definition lingerers, and they’ve been a fixture of popular culture going back millenniums. The Babylonians produced what may be the world’s oldest rendering of a ghost on a clay tablet around 1500 B.C., as well as instructions for vanquishing an unwanted spirit to the underworld. In works ranging from the “Iliad” to the tragedies of Shakespeare to the newest entry in the Conjuring Universe — a 2023 stinker called “The Nun II” — a ghost represents unfinished business, something important left unresolved. In the simplest terms, it’s an overwhelming regret. To be haunted by a ghost is to be possessed by something you can’t accept, from which you can’t move on. It won’t let you.
But as scary as a ghost can be, a ghoster is even more vexing: What do you do when someone suddenly no longer acknowledges you exist? What can you do, besides take all the sadness and anger that will never be recognized by its source and find a way to live with it all by yourself? No ghost hunter or exorcist will help you. Ghosting, as we understand it today, is the worst kind of haunting because the burden of the disappearance is left entirely on the shoulders of the haunted. It makes you long for an old-fashioned demonic possession. At least in horror films, the ghost, however unwelcome, still bothers to make an appearance.
