9.

Colin Beer of Rutgers University, a psychologist, wouldn’t call my episode randomly spooky, a visit from the perverse imp. He would say that I was expressing an instinct that I share not with animals but with humans alone. In his words, nothing in the animal kingdom, not even the “necromantic behavior of elephants,” “quite adds up to human morbid curiosity in either content or intensity of preoccupation”—nothing, he continues, “to match the public torturing of condemned prisoners such as Byron wrote about in one of his letters, or the horrors that fill the annals of witchcraft, or the preoccupation with sacrifice, suffering, and martyrdom that looms so large in the history of religion.”

For Beer, morbid curiosity might be a “by-product” of imagination, which probably evolved along with intellect and language in response to environmental or social pressures that required more sophisticated communication techniques. A group’s ability to share information about nearby dangers or hunting opportunities, for instance, gave its members a major adaptive advantage, enabling them to weather potentially harmful changes by exploring new modes of survival.

If Beer is right, then, our morbid fixations are connected to an essential component of language and imagination alike: the ability to relate to others in ways beneficial to a group. The trait most useful for forging these human relationships is empathy, the capacity to identify with the pleasures and pains of another. Our attraction to the macabre is on some level a desire to experience someone else’s suffering.

This idea comforts me. It tells me that my macabre fascinations are expressions of a deep human need to feel another’s pain and also useful for the survival of species and individual.

We thought that the sunshine only—with its green elms and violets—was the object most worthy of our attention. Now the nighttime and all those cemeteries replace the day as the country most alive. Now the itch to touch a corpse is normal, noble.