I've had the privilege of visiting many haunted towns in my life including Albuquerque, Gettysburg and Savannah. When visiting, my family and I often will take a ghost tour with the hopes of learning interesting tidbits and hearing strange tales about the area.

Once in Savannah, on a late night tour, my wife and I both caught a whiff of cigar smoke. We stood just outside the home of a gentleman who'd been seen walking his halls since the Civil War, puffing on a cigar. It was just our tour guide, my wife and I, and our then-8-year-old son.

No one else was around. None of us were smoking. Not even our little boy.

Marietta is haunted, too. Our own ghost tour can enlighten anyone interested. With its history, it's no surprise there are plenty of restless spirits who either can't move on or have no desire to.

Or perhaps ghosts are just recordings of lives gone by. More like family photos or sketches.

Kept safe in an album, those photos and sketches will always be available to stir up memories that tie the generations together. But pictures not cared for can be lost or destroyed. And with them the memories become precarious.

Ghosts and memories need homes if they're not to fade away.

While the new five-story building that Philip Goldstein proposes to build on Marietta Square is not as ugly as it might be, its size is out of character with most of Marietta Square.

While it may be expensive to renovate the Cuthbertson building, that would be ideal. Perhaps a new structure should be built. But let it fit the character of the Square in shape and scale. Those of us who want to feel connection with our past and those who went before us want a Square that strengthens those ties.

Marietta is not yet Midtown or Buckhead. If we allow it to become so, it will be. Today we decide what tomorrow will look like. Just as we live in a world given us by those who went before, tomorrow is our gift to our children.

Goldstein, as owner of the property, will not be stopped from doing as he sees fit. One hopes he can be persuaded. One hopes that his sense of responsibility to and respect for his fellow Mariettans, who want to see their town's past cherished and preserved, not destroyed and forgotten, might play a larger role in his designs.

Either way, we'll all be gone soon enough and any brouhaha over the building will be of precious little account. If at all, only a careful, pedantic scholar who finds pleasure in the most trivial of details about how one small Southern city grew and changed will pay it any mind.

Marietta's ghost tour will tell new stories about denizens in buildings not yet conceived.

But sentimentalists like me worry about the ghosts now haunting our city. Where will they go? Because memories need homes.

History is informed by a sense of place. Books and pictures, while necessary, are not enough.

We can choose either to accommodate our stories and memories, or let them fade.

We can choose to find a home for Marietta's ghosts or evict them.

But if we choose the latter, surely our turn will come. And it will be our stories and memories gone. It will be we who are the evicted.

Alan Levine is a former school teacher who taught math and science all over the country. His wife, Dawn, and he now practice law in Marietta. He is PTA co-president for the 2010-11 school year at Marietta Center for Advanced Academics and author of the children's book "The Adventures of Short Stubbly Brownbeard." He once spent the entire night alone locked inside Buckhead's reportedly haunted restaurant Anthony's.