Stice stuck to the window (pp. 870–871)
I believed in vampires when I was small. Himself allegedly used to see his father’s ghost on stairways sometimes, but then again toward the end he used to see black-widow spiders in his hair, too, and claimed I wasn’t speaking sometimes when I was sitting right there speaking to him. So we kind of wrote it all off.
Context
Stice, sealed by his frozen forehead to the hall window, asks Hal whether he believes in "parabnormal shit," and Hal answers with the family's whole unresolved relation to the apparition. The datum he reaches for is the exact Hamlet crux: Himself saw a dead father's ghost on the stairs — but Himself also, by the end, saw spiders that weren't there and heard his living son fall silent when the boy was in fact speaking, so the household "wrote it all off" as symptom rather than visitation. That is the ghost-question the entire novel then answers against them: the reader has watched the wraith be real. The scene puts the epistemology of the dead-king apparition — genuine revenant or artifact of a disintegrating mind — into a kid's bathroom-hallway shrug, and hedges it exactly where Hamlet won't: Hal, unlike the prince, refuses to decide. He balances the family's dismissal against Mario's testimony ("Mario says he's seen paranormal figures, and he's not kidding, and Mario doesn't lie") and lands on "I withhold all prejudgment on the whole thing."