The Making of a Ghost

There is a precise and chilling moment in the process of being duplicated when you cease to be yourself. It is the moment the last patch of cool, heavy silicone is smoothed over your face, sealing you into a temporary, silent tomb. Your breath becomes a measured, conscious act, the sound of your own heartbeat a muffled drum against your eardrums. In this sensory deprivation, you are no longer a person. You are a subject, a living canvas, the raw material for someone else’s art. It was in that moment of profound passivity that my ghost was conceived.

The request was straightforward enough: a museum in Gettysburg needed a model to be cast in wax for a permanent exhibit. The role was archetypal: "The Wife" of a Civil War Marine, however, the reality of the process was anything but simple. It was a journey into the uncanny, a philosophical funhouse where the boundaries between the living self and the inert object blur and dissolve

The studio was the first clue that this was to be no ordinary day. It was a vast, high-ceilinged space in New York, a place where modern gods are forged. In one corner, like a sleeping beast from a dark fairytale, sat a massive, ornate carriage, all white iron and gothic swirls. It was a dormant stage prop from a Lady Gaga tour, a vessel of explosive, performative, and utterly contemporary fame. It was an artifact of a woman who screams her identity to the world. That say, my job was to whisper. To be so still and so silent that my identity could be lifted from me, copied, and given to another.

The artists began their work with a reverence that was both comforting and deeply unnerving. They were not seeing me, Kimberley, the writer from NYC. They were seeing a collection of planes and angles, a unique topography of bone and flesh that suited their purpose. Their gaze was not personal-- it was professional. It was the gaze of a cartographer mapping a new world. To be the object of such focused, dispassionate creativity is a lesson in humility. You realize your own inner world, your thoughts, your anxieties, amd your very spirit are irrelevant to the task at hand. The only thing that matters is the shell.

As they applied the layers of casting material, entombing me piece by piece, I felt a strange sense of detachment. I was observing myself from a distance, a curious spectator to my own slow erasure. The world outside the hardening shell disappeared. There was only the sound of my own measured breathing and the disembodied voices of the artists, speaking in low, technical tones. It was a kind of burial, a rehearsal for the ultimate stillness. It struck me that this must be what it feels like to be a relic, a thing whose value lies not in its life, but in its form.

Weeks later, the photographs arrived in my inbox and there she was. My ghost. My double. My perfect, lifeless twin. The experience of seeing her for the first time was a jolt, a trip into the Uncanny Valley from which I have not fully returned. The artists were masters and captured everything. The precise curve of my lips, the slight asymmetry of my eyelids, the way a single tendon stands out on my neck. It was undeniably me.

Yet, it was a stranger. The flawless replica lacked the one thing that makes a face truly alive: the flicker of contradiction. My face can hold joy, anger, doubt, and mischief all within the space of a single minute. Her face would hold only one expression—a quiet, noble sorrow—for eternity. Her glass eyes held a perfect, static gaze, but they held no history. My eyes saw love and loss, read a thousand books, cried at movies, and rolled in exasperation. She was me, but stripped of every story that made me who I am.

This is the strange theft of portraiture. The artist does not just capture you: they edit you. They select the version of you that serves their narrative. The museum needed a symbol of wifely devotion and endurance. They did not need my sarcasm, my ambition, my complexities. They needed my stillness. They created a ghost that embodied only that.

This ghost now possesses a life entirely her own. She is more famous than I will ever be, seen by thousands of people who will never know my name. They will look at her and see a piece of American history. They will not see the girl who grew up in Queens, who loves the smell of old books, who had to sit perfectly still for eight hours in a studio that still smelled faintly of a pop star’s perfume.

The existence of this double changes one’s relationship with oneself. It is a constant, quiet reminder that our identity is not a monolith. There is the "me" that I experience, and then there are the other "me's" that exist in the perceptions of others. In my case, one of those perceptions was given a permanent, physical body. She is the simplified, archetypal version of me, and she will outlive the complex, human original. It is a strange, unnerving, and deeply profound honor. She is my ghost, my perfect copy, my accidental legacy. I am the living, breathing, imperfect woman who was sacrificed to create her.

The museum's grand opening was on July 1st 2013, to coincide with the 150 year anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg. Information on the new exhibit can be found here: Seminary Ridge Museum https://www.seminaryridgemuseum.org/