“Have you ever seen a ghost? If so,” Langston Hughes requested, “please let me know.”
The June 16, 1951 edition of the poet’s regular column for The Chicago Defender was an ardent call for the paranormal. “I don’t know why the supernatural has never come my way,” Hughes lamented. “I don’t say that I don’t believe in ghosts,” he clarified. “I just say that I have never seen one.”
For nearly a decade, Hughes had been writing columns for the influential Black newspaper. These short articles have been rightly lauded as a proving ground for Hughes’s craft—and a spirited defense of his ideals. “Things that happen away off yonder affect us here,” Hughes wrote in his first column, on November 21, 1942. “The bombs that fall on some far-off Second Front in Asia rattle the dishes on your table in Chicago or New Orleans, cut down on your sugar, coffee, meat ration, and take the tires off your car.”
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