Ghost Wall
by Sarah Moss
Nominations: Dublin Longlist 2020, Women’s Prize Longlist 2019
Date Read: April 19, 2023
What happens when you mix an experimental archaeology college group on their hands-on part of the course with a family led by an abusive father of a wife and daughter with an obsession for primitive living? You get Ghost Wall, a terrifying portrayal of what happens when a girl has no one to stand up for her.
Sylvie is of high school age when her father drags her and her mother on an expedition to live as the pre-historic bog people lived in the Scottish moors. Not exactly Sylvie and her mother’s idea of a good time. This experience is occurring alongside a college class that is required to do this as part of their course credit. Sylvie’s family is doing it “just for fun.”
This is no ordinary camping trip, however. The dad insists everything be as historically accurate as possible and Sylvie and her mom had to beg for bras and underwear and wooden bowls to eat out of. While the college kids get to sleep in tents, Sylvia has to sleep in a slapped together hut with her mom and dad.
As miserable as everyone is living off of what they can hunt and gather and foregoing regular showers, Sylvie is even that much more miserable living under her father’s brutal thumb. Although they are amongst other people, her father still finds ways to beat her without others knowing or seeing. Same with her moms. If he thinks you’re being inappropriate swimming in the stream because of the heat? Wham. Let the fire go out? Wham. Stories like this are not only triggering for me but make me wish he had to walk around with the shame of bruises and the terror that accompanies them.
As the experiment progresses, Sylvie forms a friendship with Molly and begins to get a view of what a more normal existence looks like. She comes from a single mom but she was never fearful of her parent. Molly has a sense of freedom and safety that Sylvie marvels at. Sylvie’s dad refuses to let her get a job, most likely because of the power that would give her to someday leave.
As the title suggests, a Ghost Wall is built towards the end of their experience. A Ghost Wall was intended to scare off the invading Romans back in the day with the carcasses of community members. Their bodies would come about being hung on the wall after a ritual sacrifice. Of course, after the wall is built and sheep’s heads are used instead of humans, the professor and father become interested in what the sacrifice actually looked like.
They decide to reenact it using Sylvie as the sacrifice. The professor couldn’t use a student because a student could complain and feel coerced. With Sylvie, however, there isn’t much difference. Her dad puts her up to it and she is in no position to say no because of her father’s wrath. The entire time this is happening, I keep wanting just someone to come to Sylvie’s side and advocate for this poor girl.
They tie her up and begin poking her and cutting her. Molly had said she would stand by her and not let anything happen to her but at this crucial moment Molly is nowhere to be found. Then, as Sylvie has resigned herself to the pain that’s to come, police lights and sirens approach and her father is arrested. Molly had come to her rescue after all.
Although this story leaves off with an uncertain ending, such as what happens to the father and can Sylvie permanently get away from him, it’s an interesting story of what happens when the imaginings of the past are left to run wild in our imaginations. Even though the participants in the ghost wall ritual felt caught up in something, no one will ever know how close it was to the original ritual. This then makes what they’re doing not a relic of the past but something new they are creating in the present.
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