Ghost on stairways, the drinking-line dread, and Hal's late inventory

texture · sightings ~end of J.O.I.'s life; standing dread and inventory, YDAU

• When: the reported sightings fall "toward the end" of J.O.I.'s life (so ~Y.T.S.D.B.), reported by Hal in Nov YDAU; Avril's dread is standing YDAU narration; Hal's inventory is late Nov YDAU
• What: Three YDAU-era attestations keep him in the record a generation and a half on. (1) The ghost: Hal tells Stice that "Himself allegedly used to see his father’s ghost on stairways sometimes" — the dead man haunting the architecture he died on — though Hal immediately supplies the deflating context: "toward the end he used to see black-widow spiders in his hair, too... So we kind of wrote it all off." Sighting, hedge, and dismissal all as printed. (2) The dread: Avril's standing worry about Hal's drinking is genealogical — she thinks of "the way his father had drunk, when alive, and reportedly his father’s own father before him, in AZ and CA" — the grandfather present in her risk-calculus only as the "reportedly" at the top of the line. (3) The inventory: in Hal's late-November litany, the grandfather surfaces twice in adjacent facts — "All my grandparents were deceased." and "Himself’s middle name had been Orin, his father’s own father’s name." — the second a genuine name-puzzle (see Dating notes: it collides with 071's naming of Mario after the same ancestor, unless the sentence is read the other way).