When the Ghost Came Calling Again

A ghost knocked again at our door without warning, without sound, and demanded to be let in. We didn’t hear it coming. It didn’t scream or rattle chains. It just whispered. When we opened the door, we expected a breeze or maybe a package. Instead, we found the absence itself, a shadow where a person should be, something cold and older than sorrow. We didn’t invite it in, but somehow it slipped past the threshold all the same. It didn’t speak, but we understood.

It was soft at first, almost courteous. As if it were tapping its spectral fingers. But it grew bolder. Its presence carried the weight of stories unfinished, unspoken. And memories we never meant to revisit. Like a haunting, it lingered in every mirror, brushed past us in quiet rooms. It hovered in the space between what we knew and what we feared. We brought it with us, like an invisible companion, whispering doubts like the wind through cracks in walls, manipulating our days with the chill of uncertainty. But this was no friend.

We couldn’t see it clearly. It haunted the grains of scans and bloodwork. It echoed in the doctor’s voice, drifted between appointments like smoke that wouldn’t clear. We tried to ignore it, but it stayed like a cold apparition in the corner of the room.

It breathed when we did. It fed off our fear.

It forced us to confront things left unsaid and unfinished. What we buried. It brought back the past, ancestral shadows, echoes of grief. It disrupted our future, hovered over our plans with spectral uncertainty. But like a ghost, cancer is a master of return. And so, we must learn to live with this haunting, not in fear, but with eyes wide open. Watchful. Awake.

***

The ghost tapped quietly this time.

Not like before, when illness came loudly. Fevered. Visible. Impossible to ignore. This one crept silently, a shadow nesting behind his ribs, then lower, winding itself around his center with a grip we couldn’t feel until it tightened.

They called it prostate cancer, as if it was containable. But it felt like something older. It felt ancestral. It felt like something that knew our names before we did.

Something that remembered our fathers. Our grandfathers.

My baba would have called it a curse, or the ayin hara—the evil eye that lurks in blessings and jealousy. “Too many people said he looked good for his age. Too many ‘Baruch Hashems’ [Bless G-d] without a spit,” she muttered. “You have to spit when you say something too good or too bad. And say a kenahora, too,” she whispered as she spat towards the ground. “Pu, pu, pu.”

My husband initially put off his follow-up appointments. “It’s nothing,” he said. Like staying away could keep the sickness at bay.

But the word cancer lingered. Not loud, not obvious. Just present. Like a fragrance diffused yet still present, long after you had left the room. It whispered while we brushed our teeth. Hovered in the empty coffee cup after breakfast. Curled up beside us in bed.

We didn’t say the word to the kids.
But sometimes at night, I think I heard him talking to it. Like it was listening.
“Why now?”
“How long have you been hiding here?”
“Are you planning to stay?”

***

Jewish culture boasts a rich array of home remedies and cures for illnesses, often blending folk medicine, religious tradition, and superstition. These were passed down from generation to generation, intertwined with spiritual beliefs and practices. In my family, these weren’t just stories—they were survival. Remedies passed like heirlooms from grandmothers to granddaughters, embroidered with faith, folklore, and whatever hope they could muster when doctors were far away or didn’t understand our language. This is particularly true of our Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Middle Eastern diasporas, especially when access to modern medicine was limited. Each community had its secrets, its blends of Old World wisdom and sacred superstition.

As I stand on the edge of this recent diagnosis, I find myself reaching back. “What would Baba do?” I ask aloud, half hoping she’ll answer.

For starters, she would make chicken soup.

It wasn’t just food. It was medicine, memory, maybe even magic. The kind of magic that hums softly in the walls of an old house, that clings to steam rising from a stovetop and settles like stardust in the corners of your heart. The scent of the chicken boiling away would drift through the air long before you reached the kitchen. Garlic and dill sang through the steam, weaving themselves into every crevice of the house, wrapping each room in comfort like an old quilt passed down through generations.

It felt like a spell being cast, familiar, gentle, and potent. A warmth that settled not just in the belly but in the soul.

The broth thickened as the hours passed. The marrow, released from bone with patience and purpose, lent its strength to the simmering pot, an ancient blessing whispered from one generation to the next. Each bubbling breath of the soup deepened its color, its body, its resolve. What emerged was more than a meal; it was an elixir of faith, of quiet resilience, of healing so complete it spoke in silence.

I have my own chicken soup recipe, one that’s good in all the ordinary ways. But I didn’t think it would be strong enough to scare away the ghost.

So I googled recipes “from the Old Country,” to try to find one with the key ingredients that I remembered  – edsels and chicken feet. There were always three edsels in my Baba’s chicken soup. And if you were lucky enough to fish one out, she would lean in with a twinkle in her eye and say, “Close your eyes and make a wish.”

But not one recipe I found on the internet had an ingredient called an edsel.

In my research, I learned that edsels wasn’t the name of the ingredient at all, not really. Just the way it sounded in her voice, softened by accent and affection. The proper Yiddish is eyerlekh, the unborn eggs cradled inside freshly slaughtered hens.

Armed with the right name, I was ready to search again, but none of the recipes I found felt right. No whispers in the ingredients, no shadows of Baba’s hands over the pot. None felt like they had the power to scare away the ghost.

So I stopped searching.

I stitched together something new from scraps of memory, fragments of folklore, and the faint echo of her laughter in the steam. A little bit of research, a generous handful of remembering, and just a bisl of magic.

And when the broth began to bubble, I swear, the ghost flinched.

I knew in my heart that this was the right recipe, steeped in memory with an undercurrent of ancestral magic and quiet resilience. But I couldn’t find eyerlekh anywhere. I called a few chicken farmers and finally found a delightful organic chicken farmer named Kathy, who, unfortunately, had just butchered all her chickens and thrown out all their “innards.” However, she offered to put out a message to her three hundred closest farmer friends on her listserv to see if anyone would be butchering soon. She also promised to let me know in the fall when she was butchering again. Although it would be great to have a regular supplier, I had a sense of urgency that I needed to do this now rather than later. I learned way more than I ever wanted to know about the slaughtering of chickens, including that I likely wouldn’t be able to get any from a Minnesota farm until October. So I called. And I called. I called Asian markets. Kosher stores. Many butchers. And farmers. Deep down, I knew the magic wouldn’t work without those hard-to-find edsels.

When I finally found the elusive edsel, I followed the recipe exactly.

Hours passed. When I figured it was done, I finally lifted the lid. I didn’t cry until then. The soup smelled just like Baba’s kitchen, just like I needed it to.

When my husband came home from his appointment at the clinic, he looked pale and shaken. I served him a bowl and watched as he ate.

He didn’t speak for a long time.

Near the end, he paused.

“There’s something in here,” he said, poking at it with his spoon. He lifted it up to show me.

“It’s an edsel,” I said. “Close your eyes and make a wish.”

He didn’t laugh, but he smiled like someone who just remembered how.

In the quiet hours later that evening, as I sat alone with the leftover soup, I fished out one of the edsels, tiny and unassuming. Barely noticeable. I placed it on my tongue.

It tasted like hope and garlic. And a little bit of magic.

***

Even though I made the chicken soup, the ghost lingered.

I was once again grappling with, “What Would Baba Do?” Perhaps she would hang garlic around the house and in my husband’s room to “draw out” the illness. Or maybe cut an onion in half with a bowl of salt and place it under his bed to absorb sickness or bad air, “to catch what the doctor can’t see,” she would say. Or, she would place salt dishes in corners of the room to repel negative energy. So I went to the store and spent twenty minutes debating whether I should buy sweet Vidalias, yellow onions, or white onions. I bought some of each along with some cloves of garlic and more salt.

“Should I worry if the onion turns black?” my husband asked one night as he leaned over the bed to peer under it at my onion stash.

“Worry if they don’t,” I responded from the other room.

Baba would also probably tie a red string somewhere on his side of the bed to protect him from the illness. So I tied a string on his headboard. And his footboard. And around his wrist – a fancy one that I macraméd after googling to remind myself how.

“But isn’t it just going to remind me every day that I am dying?” he asked when I first tied it on.

“No, it is to remind you that you are loved,” I responded. “And to protect you from evil spirits that are lingering around.”

If my baba were still here, she would probably also suggest some soul-corrective measures, such as giving tzedakah (charity), repenting on High Holidays, or performing some mitzvot (good deeds) as remedial tools to gain some “G-d points” or spiritual standing.

***

On the follow-up visits, there were MRIs and biopsies. As the doctor gave his slow explanations, his lips moved, but his voice seemed to come from somewhere else, down the corridor, through water, across years we haven’t lived yet. There were “Gleason scores,” “grades,” and “treatment options.”

The ghost had a voice and a vocabulary now.

***

“Maybe the ghost can be taught to leave,” my husband said one night.

And I didn’t answer.

I just held him close, played with his red thread still tied around his wrist, salt bowls still tucked in corners, soup cooling on the stove.

***

***

The ManifestStation publishes content on various social media platforms many have sworn off. We do so for one reason: our understanding of the power of words. Our content is about what it means to be human, to be flawed, to be empathetic. In refusing to silence our writers on any platform, we also refuse to give in to those who would create an echo chamber of division, derision, and hate. Continue to follow us where you feel most comfortable, and we will continue to put the writing we believe in into the world. 

***

Our friends at Corporeal Writing are reinventing the writing workshop one body at a time.

Check out their current online labs, and tell them we sent you!

***

Inaction is not an option,
Silence is not a response

Check out our Resources and Readings