Behind the Science: William Ray Jones

Behind the Science: William Ray Jones William Ray Jones is the reason the situation in Salem's Daughter: The Haunting is so much worse than a family moving into a bad house. By the time Anna starts putting the history together, people have already been hurt, the exorcism has gone horribly wrong, and the danger keeps moving instead of staying in one place where they can deal with it. I think the important thing about William is that becoming a spirit doesn't suddenly make him a different kind of person. The history Lettia shows Braden is already ugly. He was a killer before this. He threatened her family to get access to their spiritual knowledge and used Lettia as a child because she could serve as a vessel. His return follows the same pattern. Find somebody with something he wants, force them to provide it, and deal with the consequences afterward. Anna is a particularly valuable target because of how much power she has. He wants to return through her, take that power for himself, and settle his grudge against the town. His surviving son Mark is working on the living side of the arrangement. Lettia is still being used as the doorway. This is a whole operation, with people who have different roles, rather than a ghost that happens to be wandering around a basement. The detail I like most comes after William actually gets into Anna's body. He can feel how powerful she is, and he immediately starts talking like he could rule the world. Then Braden shows up, and William admits he needs time to master what he's taken. His wife, occupying Lettia, borrows Mark's gun instead. That is a pretty good limitation to put on a possession story. Having access to a person's body and abilities doesn't automatically mean you can use everything as well as they can. There is a real distinction between physical capacity and learned control. Having strong muscles doesn't give you a gymnast's balance. Being able to move your fingers doesn't mean you can play an instrument. Skilled movement involves practice, sensory feedback and changes in the nervous system. William's difficulty has something in common with that distinction, even though the thing he's trying to operate is magical. The comparison stops well short of explaining possession. Memories and learned skills depend on the functioning brain; we don't have evidence that an independent personality can leave one body, survive death and install itself in another. The comic treats the soul, the body and supernatural power as things that can be separated and recombined. That's a rule of this fictional universe, not a medical explanation for real people behaving differently. What makes William especially unpleasant is how quickly everybody else's life disappears from his plans. Anna becomes a powerful body. Lettia becomes a portal and then a body for his wife. A child becomes somewhere to put his dead son. He gets to call it bringing the family back together because he never has to ask what happens to the people already living in those bodies. And even after all that preparation, he still has to stop in the middle of the confrontation and figure out how Anna's power works. I appreciate that the book gives him that moment. He's arrogant enough to think stealing it makes it his, and then he discovers there's a difference.