For a fleeting moment in 2018, I was interested in writing something involving an item that appeared on an online auction site that deals with ephemera. The item was titled “1889 Johnstown Flood Letter Dead Body Morbid Pittsburgh PA Ephemera.”
There was a short description of the found letter, in which the woman who wrote the letter described this scene: “All day yesterday the drift wood and lumber was coming down the Allegheny River, and today Mrs. Cambel was found floating on the water just above the point bridge, all her clothes were off except blue waist with blue flowers….”
All day yesterday the drift wood and lumber was coming down the Allegheny River is part of a found sentence that I found beautiful.
At the time, I was working on a novel that had a character who was a dealer of ephemera—old letters, posters, ticket stubs, newspaper clippings, and so on. I had written a scene in which the man was discussing—with a woman he was romantically chasing after—what his ephemera fixation was all about.
The idea was to possibly work this item about the found letter into my novel somehow. Maybe the man in my novel would be the one selling the found letter.
…and today Mrs. Cambel was found floating on the water just above the point bridge….
I don’t remember finding this item, or saving it in an email to myself in 2018, but seven years later in November of 2025, I was looking through some saved emails in my draft folder and found it.
I must have been struck by that description (dead body morbid, etc.) but also the quoted passage from the letter, its unintentional vivid beauty that captured something real and true about the 1889 catastrophe that was the Johnstown flood.
I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t looking for real and true writing. Real and true can be hard to find even if you are hell-bent on the pursuit of it. You never knew where it might pop up. You could read a whole book by someone touted as the greatest writer in the world and not run across something like that.
So, in 2025 I found the item about the found letter in my draft folder and thought, I should do something with this, maybe not in the same way that I thought I might do something with it in 2018. But it was still there, perhaps waiting to have something done with it.
The man in my unfinished novel who deals with ephemera is possibly over-concerned with the past. The female character is a bit condescending in her attitude about what he does. In general, he is more taken with her than she is with him. She keeps him at bay. She finds him fascinating, like a character in a 19th-century novel, but can’t seem to break through the fascination into something viscerally, heart-poundingly true and real—true and real like the details of the found letter about the Johnstown flood. The man does not know that this woman is the wrong tree he is barking up. He will end up being hurt, but that part of the novel was never written—although it was written in my head at some point, as far as I can remember now.
When the character of the man first meets the character of the woman, it is in the absolutely bland, mundane surroundings of a Panera chain eatery. As the writer of the novel, I’m guessing that I thought it would be a clever contrast to the depth and mystery not only of what he is doing in his pursuit of ephemera but also the depth and mystery of his interest in the woman, who will not end up falling in love with him.
In November of 2025 I looked back on that scene in my half-written novel, which I had not looked at in a very long time. I suddenly wondered what happens to all the characters we leave stranded on the page.
At the time, I was, as I often am, afraid to write. I find it elusive and tumultuous. As Thomas Mann said, “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
Writers leave things behind, scraps of ideas or a string of words that make some kind of accidental music. A lot of these bits and pieces are lost, but some are saved and then found. Think of it this way: a bird might fly across the road and be hit by a passing car, while another is narrowly spared and survives. Chance, timing, the right split-second decision, who knows.
The writer of the letter about Mrs. Cambel floating in the water made a decision at some point in time to write those words, and maybe sent that letter to someone, who may have decided to save the letter. Or maybe there was no decision involved at all. Maybe the letter was just never thrown out and then was discovered in the house of someone who had died.
When I look back on the scene in my unfinished novel where the ephemera collector meets the woman in Panera, I can see what I was trying to do, what I was trying to set up for later in the story, but when I read it now I just see failure of what I really wanted and hoped for. I also see two characters who I recognize some of myself in, which is not what I intended when I first wrote it. But some of me slipped in like a ghost.
In the Johnstown flood letter, Mrs. Cambel floating in the water is a ghost, and the woman who wrote the letter is also a ghost. Both long gone.
It’s widely accepted that the Johnstown flood happened because the wealthy industrialists of Pittsburgh ignored the impending signs of a catastrophic flood, and that through their lack of concern for the ordinary people who lived in the area, they aided and abetted this disaster, in which roughly 2,200 people died. It’s just another example of the sort of cruelty and greed and neglect that has happened throughout history.
The ephemera collector in the novel I didn’t finish likes the fleeting nature of these bits and pieces of the past, but he also likes the concrete proof of their existence. At bottom he wants to have some small part in pinning down a feeling or a fact that is just passing through time.
I have so many bits and pieces of things I’ve written that at one point in time felt important or real or true, and yet, they were left stranded or floating or looking for a place to land. Birds and ghosts are out there but often unseen. I wonder if anyone ever bought that letter.
All day yesterday I found myself trying to understand why terrible things keep happening to innocent people. At any point there is a Mrs. Cambel floating in the river somewhere. Yesterday is today, drifting into tomorrow, and it can be hard to see where one day stops and the next begins.
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Janet Steen has published widely, including in The New York Times, Maggot Brain, Longreads, Details, Time Out New York, La Piccioletta Barca, The American in Italia, and many other places. She was a founding editor of The Weeklings, an online literary magazine that specializes in the essay, and was a co-curator of the Murmrr Lit reading series in Brooklyn, NY. She has received writing fellowships in the U.S., Italy, and Portugal.
© 2026, Janet Steen
Halfway Down the Stairs 