Free Ghostbusters by Nancy Holder

was thrilling to feel they were on the cusp of doing something truly novel: taking the paranormal out of the Dark Ages.
    At first.
    Now, not so much.
    As Erin hurried across the Princeton campus to a crisis meeting with her physics department graduate advisor, her heart was filled with dread. What she was considering doing was not just cruel, it was unforgivable, and she hoped the advisor could provide her with alternatives that had eluded her.
    Initially she and Abby had tried to get some interest in the book project from university and mainstream science publishers, but no one wanted to touch it. The academic reviewers’ comments they got back on the partial manuscript were painful and eye opening:
    â€œMade me a believer. After reading this manuscript I know what being dead feels like.”
    â€œScience, this is not; incomprehensible rubbish, this is.”
    â€œA hodgepodge of science and science fiction. This effort proves the old saw: a little education can be a dangerous thing.”
    â€œHow old are these authors? Twelve?”
    Abby wasn’t put off by the possibility—or the fact—of rejection and ridicule. Keeping the anticipated goal in sight, she simply ignored it. If she had self-doubts, they took a backseat to what she saw on the horizon. So they had agreed to publish it themselves. But with the ghastly academic reviews, Erin felt herself withdrawing intellectually and emotionally from the enterprise. She hadn’t told Abby or her parents, but she’d gone back to therapy, which was offered through the Princeton student health program. The therapist had helped her reassess what had been going on, her own motivation and mechanisms since childhood.
    In fact, after six years of diligent searching, Erin and Abby had not found a single ghost. With no car at their disposal, as undergrads they had traveled all over southern Michigan on foot, bike, bus, and train, and still could not confirm that the spectral plane they were researching even existed. Part of her was relieved, because her memories of Mrs. Barnard were so deeply disturbing she didn’t want to see another ghost. Part of her was terrified, because not finding any ghosts meant she had probably been crazy as a child, that what she’d experienced had been a recurring, violent hallucination. If she gave up the search, she’d never know the truth about herself, whether she was a nut job or not, but to the rest of the world, including her parents and her academic peers, the searching for ghosts in itself was the act of an irrational person.
    Her therapist asked her to consider the possibility that she was caught in a repeating, self-generated, irrational loop fueled by fear and guilt. She was afraid of finding out the truth, and guilty about pursuing it. It made perfect sense to her.
    Writing the book had been great fun, and so far at least, hardly anyone knew about their private research, their secret adventures. Publication and its implications were bringing the underlying issues to a head. The book’s impending release threatened Erin with exposure and made her vulnerable. Deep down she knew she had come to a fork in the road, that she couldn’t combine a career in conventional science and the science of the paranormal without paying a dear price.
    Putting it all out there was exactly what she’d done with Darla Murray back in elementary school, and look how that had turned out—she had become Ghost Girl, a perpetual joke. Her therapist helped her to see that beyond the very real concerns about her future professional life, she was afraid of history repeating itself. The early ghost experience had left Erin wounded. The fact that her parents hadn’t believed her and thought she might be mentally disturbed had undercut her self-confidence and shamed her. What happened in grade school and after had only made it worse. Whom could she trust to protect her? The lesson she had learned was: no