It’s September 2019 and Johnny Christmas is getting ready to enter an abandoned children’s hospital in Berlin’s Weissensee neighborhood.
“We weren’t ghost people, we weren’t Wiccans in junior high,” Christmas says. “Even now, when I speak of them, I say ‘the ghosts’ and ‘they,’ but then also try to claim I don’t believe in them. It’s this weird internal conflict.”
“My own personal theory is ghosts were once human, and they’re probably lost and confused and want to get back home,” Christmas says. “They remember a key is what they used to get back into their house. All we can do is speculate.”
“We go to Asia a lot . . . and we visit a lot of old temples and creepy places and bring stuff back sometimes,” Christmas says. “We wondered if some ghost had figured out how to try and make its way back home. It was super weird.”
“I try not to think too hard about the idea of kidnapping ghosts,” Christmas says. Maybe they liked where they were. Or, then again, maybe they were trapped and welcome the chance to escape. At the end of the day, he says he hopes things work out for both the object’s new owner and the ghost.
