Day 3: Popcorn Ghost by Rebecca Johns

This story comes from my in-laws, at least four of whom were witnesses to the events I'm about to recount. 

My husband's grandmother during her life was very fond of popcorn. She'd make a pan of it every night and eat it watching old movies on TV. My mother-in-law says that the house constantly smelled of popcorn.

One night many years after she died, my in-laws went to visit my husband's grandfather at his house in Northwest Indiana. He was a bit of a shut-in then, with strange habits. They weren't at all sure he'd even open the door. But when he let them in that night, they smelled a very strong scent of popcorn. My mother-in-law asked her father, "Have you been eating popcorn?" and he said, "Popcorn? Are you nuts?" because he didn't have any teeth. But there it was: the distinctive smell of popcorn. And my father-in-law smelled it just as strongly.

They might not have thought too much of it, though, except that a few months later they took the kids (my brother-in-law Matt and sister-in-law Erin) to visit their grandfather. As they were pulling up to the house, the front door opened, and Erin, who was maybe ten at the time, said, "Who's that lady next to Popo?" and Matt (12) said, "Yeah, who IS that?"

When they got to the front door they asked their grandfather if there was a lady in the house with him, a friend or a nurse. No, he said. He was alone.

But Matt and Erin swear to this day they saw her standing next to him.

Tag You're It: Joel

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Rebecca Johns is the author of The Countess: A Novel of Elizabeth Bathory, and of the novel Icebergs

Day 4: Emma in the Ouija by Laura Valeri

This time I’m going to tell a Ouija story I haven’t yet told.  It’s from the time i was in college at NYU and rather than studying for tests, my friends and I much preferred gathering in one of the cramped dormitory rooms, drink rum and coke out of plastic cups and play Tears For Fears on a boom box.   Somehow one night the conversation got onto Ouija.

My friend Vinny, the only one of us who wasn’t dorm-bound, was intrigued by the stories some of us had told of playing with Ouija board and things getting increasingly weird, so he went to a toy store or two, only to be let down that nobody carried such an outdated thing anymore. It was the dawn of the age of video-games.  Tower Records was still on Houston.

Then one morning he stepped out of his home, walked for half a block and literally stepped on a Ouija board that someone was hawking on that Brooklyn sidewalk.  Those sort of things, I’m told, happen a lot with Ouija.

Vinny arrived one late evening at our dormitory and slipped it out from under his windbreaker with a winsome smile and a chirping, “Surprise!.”  Before long we all had our fingers on the planchette, trying to make it move.  With collective will, it’s not hard to make something happen. Soon we were asking stupid questions at a piece of hard cardboard and getting mostly misspelled, terse answers.  Still, no one wanted to leave the door room, not even for more rum, afraid we would miss something funny from our four favorite Ouija ghosts:

Emma, an 18th century woman who died of some kind of fever

Mo, the guttermouth who died in Vietnam

Mary, a mostly shy ghost who seemed to like speaking only to Clemencia, my roommate

And Andy, who died in a motorcycle accident and whenever we asked him where he was standing, would say, “On your tit.”

(It wasn’t until months later, when I woke up one morning to stare at my only-half read Jane Austen masterpiece that I realized that all the initials spelled Emma).

Before long, a room that was intended to be a tight abode for two smallish college girls became a speakeasy with smoke tufts blowing from under the door, music playing late in the night, and voices ringing with questions like, “Which one of us will be the first to marry? No, no, wait, I have a question but I don’t want to ask it out loud. Can you read my mind?”

The dormitory door was always open and boys and girls were streaming in between classes to get their turn at touching the planchette and asking after a grandfather, aunt, or lost cousin.  One girl became convinced she was talking to her long gone grandmother, in Greek.

Soon the room began to smell of feet, bad breath, and unwashed laundry.  Our little gatherings didn't sound so fun anymore when we were accusing one another of hogging too much time or for not being a “good enough conduit.” We were all so caught up in this addictive intercourse with the other world that we didn’t even care when Vinny began to shout that he’d had enough, that we stank as badly as that room, and that we all needed to cool it and get some fresh air or he was going to take his Ouija and go home.

We all unanimously agreed that Vinny was an uptight asshole.  As for his taking his Ouija back, “Over my dead body,” said Clemencia in a deadpan, and then slept with it under her pillow for a night or two.

One day, a skeptic friend who had been observing us for days asked the Ouija for proof.  He didn't want to put his finger on the planchette: too easy it would be, he claimed, to get caught up in the illusion. Instead he asked the four of us who were sitting in session to ask Emma the ghost what his middle name was.  The planchette unwaveringly spelled it out.  I was in the room, and I saw my friend’s mouth hang open.  He muttered “That is correct. I’ve never told anyone.”  

Finally, Tracy, a girl who was a self-proclaimed Born-Again Christian, talked me into stealing the Ouija and sneaking it  when Clemencia was sleeping.  Clemencia, she pointed out, was a church girl with nothing but Christ in her mouth.  Yet that afternoon, when we told her she was becoming obsessed with Emma, Clemencia had looked at me and said, “Fuck you. Both of you. Get out of my room.”  

Tracy dragged me down to the dorm’s basement, with a Bible in her coat pocket and the Ouija under her arm. Once we’d set up the board over the ping pong table, Tracy began to invoke Emma, the ghost who had most consistently haunted our Ouija board.  At first the planchette moved hesitantly under my index finger.  Then it began to pick up confidence.

“Are you there, Emma?”

Yes.

“Your name isn’t really Emma, is it?”

No.

“You’re Satan, aren’t you?”

Goodbye

“Do you know God, Emma?”

Q    U    A

“Do you fear God, Emma?

Q   U   A   C   K

“Quack?” I didn’t speak English all that well yet, and it seemed odd to me that Emma was impersonating a duck.

“Yes, you're a quack, the quacks of all quacks,” Tracy intoned.  She read a passage from Revelation, fire and brimstone and lakes of sulfur spilling out of her mouth in dramatic Evangelical overtones.

I don’t know whether Emma was a duck or a dead person, whether she meant that Tracy was a quack or that God didn’t exist.  But I do know, sure as I know I’m typing this right now, that the planchette was spinning too fast for my finger to keep up.  I lifted up my finger and after a second or two, Tracy did also.  The planchette kept spinning all by itself.

It spun for about four or five more seconds, so fast that it looked to my naked eyes like it had lifted half a finger’s height off of the Ouija board.  Then it shot very fast and hard like a hockey puck at Tracy’s face.  Tracy ducked. The planchette landed somewhere in the darkness of the dormitory’s basement.  We heard its thuck thuck thuck and then it was quiet.

Tracy congratulated herself on a job well done of exorcising the demon in the Ouija.  As for myself, I don’t know what it was that spoke in Greek and could move a planchette without a physical body.  But one thing is for sure: I never played Ouija again.

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Laura Valeri is the author of two award-winning short story collections, Safe in Your Head (SFA Press)  and The Kind of Things Saints Do (U of Iowa Press).  You can follow her blog at www.lauravaleri.com

Day 5: Haunted Holland

Note: I begged Jennifer Graham, my awesome photographer friend, to let me borrow some of her famed cemetery photos for this post. All photographs are copyrighted. Please do not use without permission. I've included Jennifer's contact information at the bottom. I highly recommend liking her White Rabbit Creative Facebook page.    

When my oldest child was a toddler, we lived for a year in the Netherlands. Our neighbors joked that we inhabited the oddest house in all of Holland.  It was a brick row house that was built in the 1920s and ran eight meters across the front, like its normal row mates, but shrank to only one meter in the back—enough for a single door. When the rental agent showed it to us, we immediately fell in love with the oddball home and nicknamed it “The Wedge.” We signed the lease and drove out to IKEA to furnish our beloved wedge with modern Swedish decor. 

Soon, I became friends with our most interesting neighbor, an astrological adviser. Given her profession, I assumed that she was open-minded to the supernatural. I saw no reason not to ask her if she had noticed any weird occurrences at The Wedge or if she had heard stories of it being haunted. She looked at me, shocked, and said, “There are no haunted houses in Netherlands.” No haunted houses in Netherlands? My foot! I’m from the South. Everything is haunted (“got haints”). No amount of modern, minimalist furniture can excise persistent ghosts from the past.

The Wedge didn't possess bad energy. In fact, it was a sunny, cheery place.   My toddler son would giggle, wave, and carry on a delightful conversation in babble to an invisible person on the balcony.  Often I would return to the states and, alone at The Wedge, my husband would work late into the night.  He told me stories of how he had locked the balcony door, only to find it open again.  Once he looked into the mirror and saw the reflection of a man standing behind him. I guess my most interesting experience was waking up in the night to see a tall, reed-like man standing in our bedroom, wearing a dull 1940s suit, smoking a cigarette, and peering out the window.  He looked as if he had been drawn in charcoal.

I have since learned that these grayish, sketch-like apparitions are a particular classification of ghosts.  I understand that they can have yellow eyes. Luckily, I didn't get to see my night visitor’s glowing orbs.  

These were just isolated incidents in our time in The Wedge. I still remember the home with tenderness and warmth. Maybe it was so lovely there that its former inhabitant didn't want to leave.

Question: Have you ever had a supernatural encounter while traveling? If so, please share your story.

You can see more of Jennifer Graham’s work at the White Rabbit Creative photography website, Etsy, Twitter or Facebook. 

Susanna Ives is a mommy and romance writer living in Atlanta. Her upcoming book Wicked Little Secrets will be available on December 3^rd.  You can learn more about her books at www.susannaives.com, Twitter, and Facebook. 

Tag! Laura, you're next!

Day 6: My Sister's Story by Maryanne Stahl

This is my sister’s story.

My youngest sister lives on a hill where Indians once roamed, near the Long Island Sound.  Incredibly resourceful and blessed with wonderful taste, she has transformed what was a rather ordinary ranch-style house into a lovely, unique home that is open and bright, filled with vintage treasures.  In this house she has raised four sweet sons, three dogs, five or six or seven cats, four rabbits, several lizards, and some fish.  From her gardens the scents of lavender and roses mingle with the sea breeze. A haven, one would think.  And yet.

She didn’t notice anything when they first moved in. Life was busy and the signs were gradual. Her middle boys, twins, had trouble going to sleep at night.  They heard whispers in their ears, they said.  But what child liked going to bed when there were video games to be played and frogs in the yard to be caught?  “I hear whispers” seemed no more alarming than “I need a glass of water.”  Go to sleep, my sister would say.  Often, the boys would pile together into one bed.

“Shut the closet door,” they would plead when she bid them good-night, and she would do so. After all, she understood how creatures could seem to lurk in closets; at the least, shadows could be cast.  But the boys told her it was more than that.  Something bad was in there.  Or someone. The whisperer came from there, they were sure of it.

So the closet was kept shut.  And some nights, that was enough,

But the room was cold, the coldest in the house, no matter what window caulking was done or heat adjustments were made. The twins’ room was icy.  So the boys would hunker down under the blankets,  covering their ears, whispering to each other to keep from hearing other, creepier sounds.

And so time passed and the twins grew.  They did their best to ignore the whispers by playing music or the television.  They slept in their own beds now, but still piled on the blankets. Sometimes, the room was quiet for weeks.  They got to high school, grew tall, played sports.  They had a dog who would guard the house, barking when anyone came up the path, fearless, apparently, except where their room was concerned.  She refused to enter it.

One night when the boys were about eighteen, one of them was away, so the other slept alone in the room.  He didn’t hear anything as he began to drift off, but before long he sensed something: someone else was there in the room with him.  He felt someone near. Had his brother returned? He opened his eyes.

At the foot of his bed, bending, looming over him, was a huge, dark figure—with burning red eyes.  The kid screamed , leapt from his bed and ran to his parents’ room, where he spent the rest of the night, half ashamed, at age 18, to have acted in a way that was not at all usual for him, half still frightened out of his wits.

Shortly after that everyone started hearing the whispering. It moved between the twins’ room and just outside their door, in the hall.  It said my sister’s name one night, as clear as if she’d said it aloud herself, and she was not the only one who heard it.

For years my sister had tried not to upset the presence, whatever it was, but enough was enough.  It had been terrorizing her sons for too long and her youngest son was afraid it would one day haunt his room too. One day when no one else was home, my sister entered the twins’ room and spoke to whomever or whatever was scaring her family. She asked it to stop. She insisted. It was time for it to go. And then she lit a bundle of sage the size of her arm and spent an hour cleansing the room from bed corner to closet corner.

That was about a year ago and the presence has not made itself known since. Of course, both boys are out of the house now—one at college, one in the navy.  If the same entity is still around, it is manifesting itself differently. But that is a story for another day.

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Maryanne Stahl is the author of the novels Forgive the Moon and The Opposite Shore, and the chapbook Electric Urgency.

Tag, Susan is next.  Boo!

Day 7: The Postmaster by Ann Hogsett

Of all the more colorful ghosts in my small West Virginia hometown—the woman who shot her mother, the man who killed one, or was it both, of his parents with an axe—my phantom, the one who came calling that night in Apple Alley, was merely the Postmaster. Unremarkable in life. Doggedly persistent in death. Vengeful to the depths of his sorry soul.

We should never assume that the unpretentious apparition is not the one to be reckoned with. A ghost is a ghost is a ghost.

The Postmaster lived with Mrs. Postmaster, who was also The Postmistress, in a pretty cottage on the main street of town. Whatever else might have gone awry in his life, the house must have been his refuge, his satisfaction, his place of pride. At some point he told someone—someone who remembered and entered it into the saga of the town—that he was NEVER going to leave that house.

Then he died. There was a funeral. There was a burial. After that, he headed on home. His wife was still there for company but then she died, too. And when they drove her over to the IOOF cemetery, she stayed where she was planted. The Postmaster had the house all to himself.

For awhile.

Then an enterprising young couple with two lovely children and a cat named Olive Jones converted it into a bed and breakfast. Now there were guests. Things got crowded. And that’s when we showed up—for a class reunion weekend—in the room at the top of the stairs under the peak of the single gable, in the old bed that “came with the house” courtesy of the man who still preferred to sleep there. Alone.

They told us about their ghost. I knew him by name, of course. Remembered his face and his wife’s, both of them staid and efficient, managing our mail. The young innkeepers were quite merry about how he was still around. He was good for business now. The frisson of dread was entertaining at breakfast.

3 o’clock in the morning? No.

I remember moonlight filtered through lace. The silence everywhere. City people forget how still the night world can be in a lightly inhabited town. Still, still, still. Except, of course, for the sound of footsteps on the stair. Slow. Heavy. Closer and closer, as I rifled my mind for a reasonable explanation. Here’s what I came up with: The Postmaster is now standing right outside the bedroom door. 

I slipped out of bed, shivering in the sultry August dark. I stopped at the door. Now what? We were facing each other with two inches of old oak between us. I put my palm on the wood. He laid his on the other side. Palm to palm, me and The Postmaster’s ghost. I know this because my sweaty hand bonded to the door as flesh always does when it touches frozen iron. And I know because our minds froze together, too, and he showed me exactly what it was like to be dead.

It was not what I expected. 

Ghosts are realer than you. Truer than a Monday. More forever than a Sunday afternoon. 

And here. We are right here.

(Tag, Maryanne Stahl, you're next!)

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Ann Hogsett is a mom, wife, and novelist who lives ten yards -- ten! -- from the shores of Lake Erie, which she describes as "beautiful, compelling, threatening, raging by turns. Always impossible to ignore." You can share her adventures at her blog: Lake E.

Day 8: Huggin' Molly by Tina Whittle

Image courtesy of adamr / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Every community has its local legend, and my small hometown in Middle Georgia is no exception. Cochran has always been a sleepy little farming community, dotted with cotton fields and catfish ponds. When I was growing up, the railroad cut through the swamp behind my house. On summer nights I’d hear its keening wail and imagine it was some mysterious animal.

I wasn’t the only one to mythologize the midnight train. My friends and I made up stories about it— where was it going? where had it been? who rode those rails through the humid night, anonymous behind the glass and steel?—and imagined a life beyond the red clay ditches. Perhaps this was the reason for the legend that sprung up about the railroad tracks. Perhaps our parents and grandparents sensed the lure of the outbound train, headed for exotic new horizons. Perhaps it was they who first started the stories of Huggin’ Molly. Or perhaps her story really is true, and having passed from mouth to mouth down the railroad line, has become legend.

Cochran isn't the only Southern town who knows of her—there's a town in Alabama that has a Huggin' Molly cafe, and though they claim the legend is unique to that area, it's not. Their Molly is more benevolent than Georgia's version. A hug from their Molly is disturbing, but not deadly, as people who claim to have experienced her embrace will tell you. Cold and unpleasant, they say. Chilled them right to the bone, they say.

Our Molly, however...nobody ever made it out of our Molly's arms to tell the tale.

All I know is this: on moonless nights, when the train would come through, if you stood close to the tracks you could hear her crying for her lost lover. Her sobbing would mix with the train whistle. And then you’d better hide. You’d better move as far away from those tracks as you could get. Because even though Huggin’ Molly looked like any other woman, she always wore mourning clothes topped with a long black veil—and a sailor hat. And she had arms so long that she would snatch you right up off the side of the road, snatch you into her relentless embrace, snatch you onto the midnight train. And your scream would mingle with the banshee whistle and you’d be taken away down the tracks, never to be seen again.

I never saw Huggin’ Molly. But I cannot hear a train whistle without feeling a shiver race down my spine. Without taking a step backwards. Without imagining those long, long arms. 

(This post first published at Little Miss Train Wreck, a blog of fashion, book reviews, and author interviews)

TAG, Ann Hogsett! You're up next!

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Tina Whittle is a mystery writer living and working in the Georgia Lowcountry. Her current novel, Blood, Ash, and Bone — the third in the Tai Randolph/Trey Seaver series — is available now.

Visit www.tinawhittle.com to learn more.