Jamaicans’ relationship with duppies aka ghosts, and spirits is a strange one, but perhaps strange is not the right word: it is contradictory, layered and deeply complex.

As a child, I remember sitting at the breakfast table one morning when my mother simply announced that her father had dreamed her. Her father had been dead for years. I knew this because I had stood at grandfather’s graveside. Yet there was nothing unusual in the way she said it. It was a statement of fact; she wasn’t trying to convince anyone; she wasn’t frightened. She was simply stating a fact, as ordinary as saying rain had fallen in the night.

I never questioned it or even doubted that a dead person could dream a living person, meaning appeared to them in a dream.

My mother maintained a relationship with her father beyond death. He would dream her, she said, and warn her about things. In our house, that wasn’t supernatural. It wasn’t magical realism or folklore or whatever labels academics like to attach to Black and Caribbean cosmology, belief system. It was simply part of living, and it was not limited to my mother or some of our other family to have this ancestral connection.

Then there were the stories. People bucked up on duppies all the time—good duppies, bad duppies, restless duppies. We inherited an entire pantheon of spirits. When I visited my great-grand-aunt Zilla in St. James, she would tell us about Rolling Calf, supposedly the duppy of a man who was a butcher, now condemned to roam with chains dragging behind him and fire shooting from his eyes. Only a left-handed person could send him away.

There was Hog-n-Sow, the woman who died in childbirth and wandered searching for the baby she never got to raise. There was Three-foot Horse and countless others. Louise Bennett and folklorists have documented them, but long before they reached the page, they lived in our conversations, our warnings, our jokes, our common sense.

Even today, someone seeing your shirt inside out might ask, “What? You running duppy?”

It happened to me at the gym. My top was on the wrong side out, and immediately someone laughed that I was running duppy. The old belief says that turning your clothes inside out confuses spirits and sends them away.

I have been thinking about that.

The woman in the story I am writing wears all her clothes wrong side out after her husband dies. People told her to wear red panties so his spirit couldn’t trouble her. She wears double red panties. Yet every night she still feels him in the bedroom. Eventually she turns every garment inside out—not because she fears him, but because she is done with him. She loved him once, when they first married. But that love wore thin. He was never physically abusive, perhaps only emotionally so, lacking vigor, lacking curiosity, lacking the willingness to meet her how she wanted to live. So she dresses wrong side out as her own declaration: Gwane yu way and lef me.

Maybe that’s what running duppy has always been, saying no to what no longer serves you.