What's in a City?
On a moment in time in Los Angeles in the mid to late 2000s
I used to see a ghost. I lived in a century fourplex in Koreatown when I was ten years old. We were there for two or three years. It was on New Hampshire Avenue between 2nd and 3rd Streets, a couple blocks north of the first place I remember living in (that one was an apartment).
It was the most room I’d ever had in a home, with a long hallway separating the bedrooms from a roomy living room, which was unfortunately taken over by unopened moving boxes for the entire two years we had lived there. It had a dining room, which I hadn’t understood the meaning of until seeing it there. It had beautiful arched windows facing the street that would let light flow in magically during sunrise. It was especially more room than the place we had lived for almost a year beforehand, the smallest place I’ve ever lived in: a tiny, boxy studio apartment off of Mariposa & 7th, where I slept on a mat on the floor between the computer and the entrance to the closet & bathroom, and gained an almost-allergic reaction to watermelon I still carry today after having a nauseous encounter devouring scoops all night.
It was the first street I’d lived on that felt like a city. Every building on the block was a duplex or fourplex, besides an apartment building or two at the ends of the street; fences were either low or not at all there; kids often played in their large front yards and would be massively loud in the mornings; and a selection of three supermarkets were just a block away east or west, between Jons, Vons, and Ralphs.
And it was lively to live there. I remember us all squeezed into a tiny den connected to the master bedroom on a hot summer morning to watch the 2006 World Cup on a heavy, old Sony CRT television, balanced delicately on a cute, green, children’s IKEA table, with a smattering of gear in support of the South Korean team. Our neighbors would have family parties blasting cumbia almost every single day of the week, generating plenty of raged complaints from my dad. I once stayed up for 40 hours to play through Metal Gear Solid 4 all at once. My mom once ignored week-long warnings about our street being closed to be repaved and drove down the wet street, one wheel on the curb and one wheel in the asphalt, leaving a trail underneath parked cars for years. We were a short stroll down the street to California Donuts, several years before the premium donut craze spawned long lines. Our landlords were a quaint Korean family living in yellowed fluorescent lighting, bedding and tables all at floor-level, with not much care for anything at all but the day-to-day.
It was the first time I had felt I was living some sense of a normal life. For my ten years beforehand, we hopped from apartment to apartment in Koreatown, within the Park La Brea complex, and Santa Clarita as my parents balanced stressful, bare-margins entrepreneurship with raising an only child, in the context of a contemptuous relationship that deteriorated after years of medical assistance to conceive a child in the first place. After years of barely seeing both parents at once, besides bedtime and mornings, I had two parents in the home regularly. And a hamster.
It was here that I used to a see a ghost. I also saw a new load of roaches every day—I managed to step on one with my bare foot once when I stood up too quickly from my chair, and saw that it had green mush inside of it. Police would regularly knock on our door at 3am on the dot, citing reports of a domestic disturbance; they would eventually give a vague, nonsensical explanation that our fax machine’s phone line may be faulty and reporting to 911 as it disconnects repeatedly. I would never see our neighbors that weren’t our landlords. Towards the end of our time there, I had a lucid fever dream of the entire storyline of the young-adult novel Inkheart while I was shaking and screaming with my mouth closed, my eyes open, and my body locked in position, all while my parents arched over me trying their best to wake me up; I would have seemingly random anxiety attacks for the next couple of years.
My dad and I drove out to drop me off at school one morning, 7:45 or so. We were late as usual. At the end of our street, as we turned onto 3rd, I noticed a spot of smoked sidewalk and caution tape covering the corner. I wondered out loud to my dad what may have happened. It stuck with me for the entire day; as I arrived home in the evening, I saw a widespread vigil with a framed photo, from which my dad recognized the man. I came home to cycle through the local channels during the news hours later that night to see what may have happened—nothing. I looked it up on the internet.
An unhoused man, John Robert McGraham, had been doused in gasoline and burned alive near the corner. My dad recognized him as someone he’d run into all around Koreatown for close to a decade. The man seemed to know and be generally friendly with everybody, from Starbucks baristas to local Korean shop-owners. I remember I was surprised to hear about a homeless person with such kind but genuine candor. We mourned together for a man I never had seen and he’d never spoken to.
The man who murdered McGraham sits today in prison, sentenced for life. He had had a long history of outward hatred against unhoused people and retaliated for getting fired, after he was caught assaulting McGraham on the job. It was understood among those who knew the murderer that he struggled with mental illness.
I began seeing the ghost long before this time. The bedroom I stayed in intersected at the end of the hallway with the bathroom. Whenever I would exit the bathroom or the bedroom and face the long hallway, at the end of which a curtained window toward the street sat, I saw a blooming light around a rounded figure. It remained featureless, long, almost cartoonishly-shaped, and merely a glowing light for the duration of my time there. I would get chills down my back and arms as I stared into the darkness of the hallway every night and every day. It was a tragic time when I realized I saw the shape of the figure in daylight hours, too. Taking showers was a terrifying time every time; the bathroom door didn’t close, and opening the door was always a risk of the ghost having gotten closer. Needing to get to the kitchen, down the hallway, was a task in itself during nighttime.
But the ghost never got closer. It would always remain in place at the other end of the hallway, just before the portal into the living room. By the end of our stay there, I almost wished it would do more, just so my parents would believe that it was there, and that I had reason to be genuinely frightened every night and day.
My parents and I never met and befriended any other neighbors on our street. My dad routinely snitch-called the cops on some fun family that liked having backyard parties. We never walked to the markets and back, despite them being so close to us. I never had any friends from school over because my parents were afraid of showing other people the stacks of unopened boxes taking over the living room (let alone the massive roaches). I never got to run into John McGraham.
When my parents started doing better with work after transitioning away from their businesses, we moved back to an apartment in the Park La Brea complex. I stopped seeing the ghost after I left, enough that I completely forgot for a long while that I’d seen it. My dad started believing that I’d seen the ghost one day when he came across a Korean forum post describing and illustrating a ghost with the same features that someone grew up seeing in Korea. I believed it a little more too. Eventually, he forgot that I used to see a ghost in that fourplex. He forgot about McGraham too.
In October of 2008, over 300 people packed into Immanuel Presbyterian Church to mourn a man in their community. Today… what’s in a city?