Ain't skeered
Today I had lunch with the Honorable Steve LaBate, who was in town on an undercover operation. Or something. I had already apprised him of all recent life developments the other night on the phone (I just tried to spell it fone, y'all) and vice versa, and our lunchtime conversation, thus freed from the back-and-forth current events update, was almost exclusively contained to telling each other ghost stories. Ghost stories are all about how you tell them, and many of the ones we exchanged had me totally creeped out. But mostly, if you write down the kinds of ghost stories that people like to tell to each other, they suck. As an exercise in brevity, and to demonstrate how much power they lose when translated from oral telling to written word, here are today's ghost stories, told in one sentence.
- A teenage Ryan Adams (whom Steve recently interviewed) was in a bathroom in a house reputed to have a poltergeist, when a shower door inexplicably slammed shut, shattering the glass.
- In third grade, I saw the filmy white apparition of a little girl praying in my bedroom.
- My friend Jace once awoke to find himself pinned to the bed by the malevolent spirit of a dead rottweiler who was growling in his ear.
- Some of Steve's friends were locked out of their dorm room by a mischievous haint who moved their Halloween candy.
- My friend's mom was driving down a lonely road through a historic Civil War battlefield at night when she saw a man with a face of bloody, rotting flesh walking alone down the shoulder.
- Steve was at an abandoned house where a man went crazy and murdered his family when he noticed that all the crickets he'd heard at the top of the driveway were now silent.
April
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"Some of Steve's friends were locked out of their dorm room by a mischievous haint who moved their Halloween candy." WTF?
-When she was young, my aunt slept in the 'ghost part' of the house (it had two separate upstairs portions, one was always creepy and cold) and one night, she had a dream that this little leprechaun-like man was sitting on her shoulder telling the story about his lost love. The woman had been very ill and had committed suicide by jumping out of a window. The man's tale went on until my aunt woke up, and she claims when she did she heard someone whispering "brokenhearted" over and over again in the room. Upon further investigation it turned out that in the early 1900s a girl who used to live in the house killed herself on that side, by jumping out the window. Her fiance' died a few months later, unexpectedly, and the town said it was due to his broken heart.
-My mom is a writer. One day she found a story written on the backside of a legal pad. She had written the story on the front, but the one on the back of her pages she couldn't recall, and it wasn't in her handwriting.
http://www.ghostvillage.com/ has some spooky ghost stories and also some really hilarious ones.
btw, I love your blog! You're so interesting.