This is one way to make a
quick buck . . . The popular site eBay is
notorious for users offering haunted items. The following story I found
amusing.
In February of 2015, an Apple laptop was put up for auction. The male owner of this computer
put his 2007 13-inch MacBook on the site. He stated his laptop was “very
haunted.”
He described a scenario where
he was out sketching a spooky mental hospital while he sat in a graveyard one
night—wait for it—under a full moon.
When he left he forgot to
take his laptop with him. He left it in this graveyard overnight. When he
returned to retrieve it he found it propped open and playing his favorite Beethoven
music—cue the spooky music.
This owner stated that soon
after this weird things began to happen.
He discovered all his songs
on iTunes had become “scary or haunted” and his desktop background changed to a
scary photo.
He then stated the ghost that
now inhabited his laptop began to leave him notes. Not typed on the machine’s
word processor but instead with pen and paper. The owner here points out that
the ghost, not being from a recent era, was not technologically savvy.
Considering this, then how
did this ghost change his iTunes songs and desktop photo?
The final bid on this item
reached well over $6,000. This is six times the value of this laptop when it
was new. Unbelievable.
It was an early Saturday
morning when my cousin, Ellen and her boyfriend, Seth picked me up so we could
go to band practice at our high school. It was bitterly cold and it had snowed
the night before. We lived in a small rural community in the Midwest. It was a
20-mile drive to the parking lot where we practiced.
Seth offered me a thermos
lid of coffee he was drinking as Ellen explained that she was going to take a
brief detour from our destination. She wanted to visit Tommy’s grave. Sadly,
Tommy her younger brother, had died in an accident the year before.
As Ellen drove into the
cemetery the road was covered in ice and snow. She drove up a steep incline and
stopped the car on the top of the hill, she got out. Seth and I watched as she
walked over to Tommy’s grave. Seth glanced back to where I sat, “It is way too
cold to be doing this today.”
Ellen must have agreed
because she hurried back to the car and turned on the engine. But when she put
the car into reverse in order to turn it around the back wheels just spun.
Seth got out and pushed but
the car didn’t budge. We were stuck. Ellen always the drama queen got out of
the car and started to argue with Seth. I huddled in the backseat freezing.
I gathered from their argument
that Ellen didn’t want to call her parents for help. They had not visited the
cemetery since their only son’s funeral and Ellen didn’t want to upset them. Ellen
started to pace back and forth which she tended to do when nervous.
Seth leaned against the passenger
side door. Ellen walked back over to her brother’s grave. We heard her state
loudly, “Tommy, send help.” Seth locked eyes with me, laughed and shook his
head.
I looked over to where Ellen
stood and was surprised to see a man with long blonde hair standing between her
and the car. I looked around but didn’t see any other cars.
Ellen addressed the man. “My
car is stuck, we can’t move it…” The man quietly smiled and replied, “ I know.”
Before Seth could protest
this stranger got in the car and turned on the engine. Noticing me in the back
seat he turned and smiled, “It’s okay.” He then backed up the car and turned it
around without the wheels spinning.
He got out of the car and
left the engine running and the driver’s side door open. I heard Ellen thanking
him profusely. “You asked for assistance--glad I could help.” He then walked around to the
back of the car.
Ellen and Seth got into the
car quickly. The three of us sat for a while in stunned silence. Ellen then
drove the car slowly down the hill. I looked out the rear window and the man
was not anywhere in sight.
More odd was the fact there
were no footprints in the snow near where he had stood at the back of the car.
Ellen looked at Seth and stated, “Did you notice he didn’t have a coat on?”
Ellen and I at the time
agreed that he must have been a guardian angel that Tommy sent at her request.
Seth refused to talk about the incident afterwards.
It has been years since I was
in high school but I still remember this man’s gentle blue eyes as he looked at
me with reassurance.
One well-known African American ghost tale that is often retold is “Wait Until Martin (Emmet) Comes”. Black slaves in the southern United States originally shared this story before the Civil War. In a future post, I will discuss the rich African American oral tradition this story represents. Another less known African America ghost folktale from South Carolina is about a black umbrella. This tale takes place in the early 1930s.
“The living may forget the dead, but the dead never forget.”
One rainy afternoon as an elderly housekeeper went about her work she heard a mournful song being sung in a nearby cemetery. She grabbed her coat and crossed the road. She loved to sing in her church choir, and she was proud of her voice. Despite the rain, she felt compelled to join the mourners.
As she approached the grave she heard them singing:
“No more rain gonna wet you—
No more…
No more cold gonna chill you—
No more…
Oh lord, I wanna go home— Go home...
Bring me home…”
The mourners continued to sing even when the wind picked up, and the rain came down harder. A tall male mourner dressed all in black with pale features approached the housekeeper. He handed her a black umbrella stating that a beautiful voice like hers should not get wet.
Eventually, the preacher who faced the grave offered a prayer and ended with a resounding “Amen”. The housekeeper bowed her head for a moment to offer her own silent prayer but when she looked up confusion overtook her. She looked around, but all the mourners were gone. The cemetery now was completely silent.
The sun was out, and the earth at her feet was dry. Scared she hurried back across the street. As she entered her employers’ house, she realized that she was still holding the black umbrella. She placed it in the corner of the entryway and returned to her work. Later that day as she left the lady of the house called out to her, “Betsy, you left your umbrella.”
One modern day version of
this story was retold in Alvin Schwartz’s book “Scary Stories To Tell in the
Dark.” The basic structure of this story begins with a group of teenagers who
are attending a Friday night party near a graveyard. The conversation always
evolves into a discussion about the cemetery One teenager states that you
should never stand on a grave after dark because the dead occupant will pull
you under.
At this point in the story a
brave person in the group, usually a girl announces that she doesn’t believe
this—it is just a superstition. The group then always “dares” the brave one, in
this scenario a girl, to stand on a grave that very night. She accepts
announcing she isn’t scared. The group gives her a knife and tells her to stick
it in a grave as proof she was there.
This brave teen then has no
choice but to follow through on the group’s dare because if she doesn’t, she
will lose face.
So the story follows the “girl” into the graveyard where she
tries to put up a brave front, but she is terrified. She reassures herself by
talking aloud she hastily picks out a grave
bends down and sticks the knife into the soil.
The catch here is as she
turns to leave she finds that something is holding her. In a panic, she
struggles in the dark but whatever has her will not let her go. She screams in
terror and collapses. Meanwhile, at the party, it is getting late, and her
friends notice she hasn’t returned, so they go look for her. They find her body
sprawled across the grave. It seems that when she had plunged the knife into the dirt, it
had caught her skirt pinning her to the ground. At this point, the reader is
told she died of fright.
Marie Laveau's grave.
Another version of this story
takes place in New Orleans in the French Quarter. This story involves three
young male tourists who have drunk too much. They are bored, so their talk turns
to one of New Orleans’s famous Voodoo witch queens “Marie Laveau.” One of these
three men is enticed into a wager—thirty dollars if he dares to climb
the wall of St. Louis Cemetery #1 and drive an iron spike into Marie Laveau’s
final resting place. Courage is needed for this task because Laveau’s tomb is considered haunted.
The foolish young man takes
the thirty dollars and throws himself over the wall. His friends wait for him to
return for over an hour. They drink more and pass out. In the morning they
curse their friend for he has not returned. Angry now, they
walk through the cemetery gates calling to their inconsiderate comrade. They
find him by the side of the witch’s grave dead—thirty dollars in coins strewn
about. In his drunken state, he had hammered the spike through his coat and into
the stone sarcophagus.
The misguided nail had held
him in place as he rose to leave. Panic and fear settled over his
drunken hazy mind for his stressed heart gave out as he struggled to free
himself. When his friends find him dead, his frozen features tell the story of
his last emotional moments: horror and despair.
