The Flotsam of Sunken Dreams

It has been over a hundred years. A century plus since the dreadful night that the RMS Titanic - the proclaimed "Ship of Dreams" - sank into the frigid, dark depths of the Atlantic.

The passengers were all seeking new and better lives for themselves and their families; hence, "the Ship of Dreams". Something about that moniker seems so ironic over a century after the sinking. Perhaps the idea that all those aboard were seeking a new life elsewhere, and instead many only found their end; their dreams unfulfilled and lost among the wreckage at the bottom of the ocean.

Seemingly.

As it happened, technology improved vastly within the first hundred years. Once thought completely lost to the deep sea and all of its constraints - the immense pressure no human could withstand, the overwhelming darkness, the sheer ferocity of the Atlantic's power - despite all of it, the wreck was eventually found.

The ship itself was too large to remove from the sea bed. Moreover, having been so long exposed to the salty water had rendered even her thick, metal body vulnerable to damage. There would be no raising of the remains of the Titanic - or the dreams she carried.

Except, the modern technology deployed was able to raise parts - bits and pieces and small personal effects of the passengers. Brought back from a century lost to the dark depths, piece by piece, these remnants were to serve as a reminder of the maritime tragedy in the modern day. A glimpse at the cast who boarded for the ill-fated maiden voyage. A voice - a quiet murmur - speaking for those silenced departed.

The relics rescued from their watery grave were carefully soaked and cleaned, restored, and eventually displayed in museums throughout the world. And it was through these actions that some of the long-lost voyagers found second life.

Items made of metal and photographs made the perfect vehicles for this revival. As museums displayed the artifacts and hundreds of thousands of people stopped to gaze at them, something truly unexpected began to happen.

Whether they gazed in solemn solidarity or leered thoughtlessly at the accumulated collections, the museum visitors unknowingly left parts of themselves in the items displayed. Those metal items and photographs - and other well-loved personal items bearing the greatest of attachments - readily absorbed parts of the accumulated energy put off by visitors. As so many ventured out to see the artifacts dredged from the deep, huge amounts of energy were released into the rooms. The buildings helped to seal in those vast waves of energy, and eventually, items began to absorb it.

Items with greater personal attachments - the items that had absorbed the most energy from their original owners - were the most effective at bringing back the ghosts from the inky-black obscurity of nonexistence. And as the phantoms began to awaken with enough energy, so too did their memories.

Some artifacts were displayed with the saddest of stories about the night of the infamous sinking. Those intimately personal details often stirred more emotions that those without, and it is the specters of these deeply detailed items that reemerge into our world the quickest.

I watch them as they gather strength.

I am a security guard of one of the museums that maintains a constant display; our Titanic artifacts are never moved about and rarely ever handled. We have hosted traveling collections of the wreck as well in the past, and I believe the ones that are left to rest in their glass displays are better able to act as conduits for their departed owners.

I never used to believe in such things; the afterlife, spirits, energy in this sense. In a lot of ways, I still question how it possibly works. But I cannot deny that I have seen strange and wondrous things.

It started with a small, metal locket bearing the restored images of two young girls. Safe behind the glass of a communal display, I was not the first one to be attracted to this small item. A daytime security guard then, I witnessed many, many visitors focus in on the small locket. Women in particular would often become overwhelmed by a wrack of pained sobs and a sudden surge of guilt. I'd seen so many with their own young children scoop them up gratefully to hug and kiss and snuggle them like they'd never see them again.

Often, I'd had to approach and make sure things were all right, and time and again, I'd get similar responses.

"I'm fine, I'm fine. I just had... the most unbelievable need to hold my child."

"Whoever owned this necklace, it's so sad to think that they knew these girls and likely never made it back to them. Or maybe they (the girls) went down with the ship too."

As it turned out, the woman who owned the locket eventually managed to begin manifesting herself in a mist-like form, presumably due to the stable condition of her artifact's display and the punctuated, intense energy her item procured.

She scared the daylights out of me.

At the time, I had recently switched my shift from daylight hours to overnight, as the daytime traffic was borderline claustrophobic and I sought a quieter work experience. Moreover, I thought that the numerous accounts that had occurred around the locket and other artifacts had made me susceptible to seeing and hearing and feeling things.

Even in the night, I thought I saw shadows and movement in the dark, or heard faint whispers and footsteps. I'd thought that that was normal for working alone at night, to think that I saw and heard strange things. Just my mind playing tricks.

Then came the night after my younger brother passed away. It was this night that changed everything for me; everything that I thought I knew about the museum that I'd worked at for four or five years by that point.

That was the night that the Lady of the Locket made herself known.

And she did so by touching me.

In the dark quiet of my shift that night, I was overcome by the grief of my brother's death. Younger siblings aren't supposed to pass away first, but James had had a heart defect that modern medical practices hadn't found in time.

I sat on the steps of the museum's reconstructed grand staircase of our permanent Titanic exhibit, sobbing at my - and my family's - loss. The staircase was a popular spot for visitors to take photos and open for foot traffic, so there was no harm in me stopping and grieving there for a moment. This was before cell phones were a widespread staple, however, so I only had one recent picture of my deceased little brother, taken about a year before on his twenty-first birthday. I looked at it the entire time I sat on the stairs.

Knowing I still had a job to do, I only allowed myself about 10 minutes to really break down at the stairs. I was just starting to calm down and breathe more steadily when something made my hair stand on end and my shoulders tense.

I had felt a hand on my back, as though in comfort. The touch was brief, but the stunning coldness of it lingered as I whipped around, staggering to my feet and shining my flashlight throughout the room. Finding nothing, I quickly left the exhibit, deciding to patrol the opposite side of the building.

Towards the end of my shift, long after I had calmed from my strange experience on the stairs, I began thinking of my brother again. I searched my wallet for the picture I had been looking at earlier when I made a dreadful discovery; the image wasn't there.

Frantic, I thought through what I had done with it last. My stomach sank as I realized I must have dropped it when I was startled on the reconstructed grand staircase. I was not eager to return so quickly, but that was my most recent image of my brother. Besides, like it or not, I still had to patrol that section of the museum once more before my shift's end. I nervously made my way back to the Titanic exhibit, fear nestling in the pit of my stomach until I was shaking at the doorway.

Slowly, I entered, aiming my light around the entire perimeter before focusing my search around the staircase. Seeking the telltale reflective gloss of a photograph, I found myself getting upset when I couldn't find my missing image. Distraught, I crumpled onto the stairs again in anguish, now grieving this symbolic secondary loss of my brother.

A sudden tapping caught my attention; as though someone were tapping long nails against one of the glass displays. Curious but cautious, I walked over to investigate.

There, on top of the display containing the locket, lay the photograph of James. I stood shocked and in disbelief before I snatched the image up, intending to put it away instantly. Instead, I took a look at the image I had so nearly never seen again, tears welling up once more in my eyes.

This time, I was grabbed from behind in an embrace, the coldness of which seeped in through my uniform. I froze up at the unexpected touch, and all I could do was shift my gaze to the glass of the display before me, hoping to catch the reflection of whoever held me.

She was a faint white glow, but I could easily make out her features in the glass, and I was stunned. Not only was I looking at a ghost, but the ghost I was looking at so eerily resembled the two young girls in the locket. Her face was sullen and eyes pained, and I instinctively knew she understood my loss and grieved with me.

And then she was gone.

From then on, working nights in the museum, I knew I wasn't as alone as I had originally thought.

Employees and visitors alike, regardless of whether they too had had an experience with the locket, all speculated on if the locket belonged to the mother of the girls or the older sister of them. I knew that over a hundred years ago, women often had children quite young. However, for reasons even I don't quite understand, I believed that the Lady of the Locket was the older sister of the two young girls, perhaps leaving them behind to embark on a new life across the sea.

But she isn't the only specter awakened in our museum.

Among our collection are remnants of the musical instruments aboard the Titanic. And the musicians are finding their tunes again.

They don't get quite as much attention as, say, the Lady of the Locket, so I think it's taking them a lot longer to awaken in our museum, but I know they are starting to make themselves known.

It started when my coworkers from the day shift began talking about visitors mentioning the, "lovely instrumental music" playing in our exhibit. This would have been a pleasant compliment, if not for the fact that our exhibit features no such music. While I didn't pay it too much attention at the start of the rumors, as I worked my own night shifts in the weeks following these reports, I too began to hear music.

I'd only catch small bits here and there - a few chords at most. Each time I'd look around carefully, expecting to find a musical toy or a lost music player still running.

Eventually, as the music grew in strength - growing louder and able to manifest for longer periods of time, I came to realize that the source was none other than the artifacts of our Titanic exhibit. Unsettling at first, I've now come to enjoy what can only be described as my own personal performances throughout my shift - the music stops when I exit the Titanic exhibit and resumes upon my return.

I think they like me.

There's been a huge upwelling of activity in the past few decades at our museum. Claims of the paranormal have not been contained, bringing in paranormal investigators and psychics (as well as faux "psychics") from around the world. They've caught snippets of the classical music, recorded various voices throughout the exhibit, and even caught a few images that showcase the Lady of the Locket and several other entities.

The gruffest among them being Edward.

Edward doesn't care for the modern world; he finds it confusing, intrusive, and idiotic.

Two psychics have come to me on my overnight shifts to communicate with the specters, and then came to tell me their findings about Edward. However, I only believe one.

One told me that Edward was cross because he could not access his personal items on display; an old pipe and the partial remnants of an old pair of gloves. This one I believe, and I have no experiences to contradict that belief. In fact, after this was told to me, I even began to catch whiffs of pipe smoke periodically; I guess Edward must have found a way to access his pipe. This detail was compounded when museum staff began reporting that the pipe seemed to be placed differently each time they came in.

The other, however...

The other tried to tell me that Edward was one of the most heroic people among the sinking ship, offering to help the crew instead of seeking a way off the doomed vessel. While I'm sure Edward was a good man in his own right, this claim was made without any evidence. There's no accounts of Edward's "good deeds" aboard the ship. But the thing that makes me - and the paranormal investigators who brought him in - think this "psychic" was nothing more than a fake is a recording the group captured as the "psychic" told us this theory.

Upon playback of the recording, as the faux psychic concluded his "vision" of Edward, a gruff male voice can be heard commenting with sarcastic venom, "I was no hero, you insolent crackpot". Following this, the voice seemed to move away from the "psychic" and towards where I stood during the story and recording, "Can you believe that idiot? What a crock of-!"

We all stood in disbelief at the recording, the faux psychic turning beat red with embarrassment. Soon after, he was dismissed by the paranormal investigative group, and I escorted him out. He was unable to speak to me the entire way, and wouldn't meet my eye. I watched as he dejectedly made his way over to his vehicle in the parking lot and drove off.

I've now been working at the museum for about 25 years. And I am good friends with many of the exhibit's resident ghosts - most of them from the Titanic exhibit.

I still miss my brother James desperately. The Lady of the Locket - who we now call Jane after a recording was caught of a woman responding with that name in response to us asking about the Lady of the Locket - often comes forth to comfort me on the worst days. Her astoundingly cold touch and embrace have become synonymous with reassurance. We've since come to learn that I was correct - it is her young sisters portrayed in the locket's display case. She'd left them, hoping to settle in America and send for them when she could, but had gone down with the ship.

The classical music swells mightily at the height of my night shifts these days, and I take pleasure in hearing those skilled musicians ever-perfecting their craft - even long after death. Their presence eases the discomfort I still feel at walking the museum late at night.

Even gruff Edward seems to have taken a shine to me; on occasion - particularly when I've been missing James - I find his old pipe in my locker after shift. Though I must always return the item, I make sure to thank the man for his generosity.

Tonight, I miss my brother again; it is the 20 year anniversary of his sudden departure from the living world. As I pat my shirt pocket for his photo, I realize it is once again missing. But this time, I don't fret.

Jane has been "stealing" the picture of my beloved brother for many years now, though I always know where to find it; she seems to like keeping the image near her locket. I am generally unbothered with it - I know where to find it come shift's end. But tonight, I wish to see it in the middle of my shift. I make my way into the Titanic exhibit, met with Edward's pipe smoke and the roaring thrill of the musician's music.

I smile with a soft grimness as I approach the display case containing Jane's locket, both desiring to see my brother and dreading it. As I pick up the photograph from the top of the case, I say how I'm feeling to my beloved younger brother.

"It's been so long, bud," I choke out as tears well in my eyes and my throat constricts painfully, "You have no idea how much I miss you". By the end, my voice cracks and I begin to cry.

As a chill embrace grips me tightly, I open my eyes. I can see in the reflection of the case that, over my shoulder, Jane stands smiling. It takes me a moment to register that she is standing well behind me; it isn't Jane embracing me. I move my eyes to better take in the reflection of who it is that is holding me, and I start crying with more vigor.

A white figure huddles over me, the coldness of which seeps into my body and the face of which both causes me pain and brings me much relief.

It is James with me.

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