My Own Ghost Story

It’s Halloween again, and having borrowed my headline from Kipling, I shall now borrow this column from myself. I wrote it a dozen years ago, and it seems to have lost none of its popularity. One can hardly lose what he does not possess.

Most people like ghost stories.

The lover’s lane killer with the hook, the headless corpse, the disappearing midnight hitchhiker all are timeless tales that have chilled bedtimes since bedtimes began.

Why?

It’s fun to be scared.

Well, it’s fun to be scared when being scared is all in fun.

There are no intriguing yarns about things truly scary: poverty, oppression, loneliness, madness.

No, real ghost stories are about things surreal, things that, in the cold, clear light of day we know can never be.

Such fanciful fears excite us, stimulate our imaginations, make us appreciate that we are alive and, regardless of our goose bumps, well and safe.

But some ghosts are real; though not in the way we imagine.

I know.

I once did battle with just such a ghost.

When I was a first grader in Avery, Texas, my parents moved into an old house near the tracks.

It had once been a grand Victorian, but had fallen into disrepair over the years and divided into apartments.

My parents, my brother, older by three years, and I lived in one and a pleasant, elderly couple named Marsh lived in the other.

Across the rear of the house we shared a large screened-in porch.

Before public water service became available in East Texas, most folks depended on cisterns, large, brick-encased holes in the ground that captured and stored roof runoff for household use.

Even though Avery had long since installed a city water system, many homes still had a cistern.

Our cistern was located in the middle of the back porch.

After school one day, my older, smarter brother, Fred, and I learned some eerie facts about the house in which we lived.

“It’s haunted,” pronounced my friend and classmate, Guy Lemmond.

“The feller that lived there taken a butcher knife to his wife and kids. After he cut ‘em up and throwed ‘em in the cistern, he tied the wringer off’n that big warshin’ machine on the back porch ‘round his neck and drowned hisself down there, too. Ever since then, his ghost climbs up out of that cistern an’ roams the house with a bloody butcher knife lookin’ for his wife and kids.”

“How come he roams the house lookin’ if he threw ‘em in the cistern? Why don’t he look for ‘em down there?” I asked. “That don’t make no sense.”

“How do I know? I ain’t no ghost. ‘Sides, ghosts don’t have to make sense. They’re dead.”

“That ain’t true,” scoffed Fred.

“Is too!” Guy whined.

“Ain’t neither. You don’t know nothin’. You’re just a little kid.”

“Oh, it’s true, all right. ‘Least the part about him jumpin’ in the cistern,” added Paul Wayne Meggason.

He was older than any of us.

“I seen th’ sheriff an’ th’ farmen when they come to drag him out with ropes and big ol’ hooks.”

Neither Fred nor I said much more about it, but I knew that the tale was much on my brother’s mind.

Certainly it was much on mine.

That night at supper, we asked the ultimate authority in all such matters, our father.

“Yes,” he said, adopting a grave, school principal’s expression.

“A man named Farley did live here before us. Poor man went nuts.”

“And did he kill his wife an’ kids and cut ‘em up an’ throw ‘em in th’ cistern?” I asked, already dreading his answer.

“I heard that, but I’m not sure it’s true. I also heard that he just attacked his wife; that she ran out of the house and escaped with only a badly cut arm.”

“And is his ghost….”

“This is not fit conversation for the supper table,” pronounced my mother.

While my father was the ultimate authority, my mother was the ultimate authoritarian. The subject was closed.

We wondered about the dreaded Farley ghost for some time after that, but it effected us little until basketball season.

Both our parents coached; my father, the boys’ team and my mother, the girls. Each Tuesday and Friday night they were away from home until quite late.

Fred and I were left on our own with a cold supper and strict orders to be in bed by nine. It was only on nights that our parents were away that the ghost of Farley began to move about.

Ghosts are clever like that.

They never appear around those who can dispel their mythology.

After we were in bed, the noises began.

First we would hear a seemingly harmless drip from the dank cistern.

Or perhaps it would disguise itself as a sound like the scurry of a cat or some other innocent night-prowling animal.

But we knew better.

We knew it was the Farley ghost beginning his ghastly ascent, gory knife clinched in his rotting yellow teeth, searching for innocent children as his next victims.

“Did you hear that?” I would ask from beneath the covers.

“No!” would answer my brother, a little too loudly.

“Yes, you did!”

“It wasn’t nothin’! Go to sleep. Ooo! There it is again.”

“He’s comin’ up! I know it!”

“One of us has to go and throw somethin’ down there an’ knock him back down ‘fore he gits out.”

Fred always had a plan. Rarely did it involve him.

“O.K. You go.”

“No! You!”

“No, I’m too skeered.”

“Well, if you don’t go, he might git us and he might not. But if you don’t go, I’m gonna hurt your face. Ain’t no ‘might’ about it!”

There are terrible consequences to being born three years late.

I crept through the kitchen to the back door and eased it open, dreading with each step a sudden attack from the rank, decomposed, dripping Farley.

I could practically feel the icy plunge of his terrible, ooze-coated blade ripping through the soft flannel of my pajamas as the door yielded to my timid touch. I leaned frozen across the sill.

No Farley.

But I knew he was down there, perhaps inches from the top of the cistern ready to leap from ambush once I stepped onto the porch.

“What are doin’?”

“AH-H-H-H-H!” I screamed and dashed back to the bed, running headlong into a dark figure that I knew must be Farley, knocking it sprawling to the floor as I scrambled back to the uncertain safety of the covers.

“Git out there!” growled Fred, getting up from the floor.

“You skeered the far outa me!” I said, peeking from beneath the quilt.

“I’m goan do more’n skeer you if you don’t git out there an’ knock that ghost back down in that cistern,” he spit through clinched teeth.

“But what’ll I throw?” I pleaded. “If we throw anything we got, mother or daddy’ll miss it, an’ they ain’t goan believe there was no ghost in that cistern.”

“Yeah, you’re right. O.K. Throw something from the Marshes’ side of the porch.”

“Plumb t’other side of th’ porch? That’s too far. ‘Sides, won’t they miss it?

“They won’t care. They’re nice folks. ’Sides, they’d let you if they’d knowed it was to git rid of a ghost! Now go on.”

This new plan meant that twice I had to risk exposure to Farley’s dread realm.

I had to pass the cistern on the way to find some missile, then actually approach the opening, the very yawning maw from which he might spring at any moment, upon my return to hurl it down at him.

The porch was a moonlit blue realm of unnatural shapes and shadows. My bare feet on the worn planks released a cacophony creaks and groans as I tiptoed across what seemed miles until I passed the cistern. Then something, who knew what, made a scritching, wet plop far in its depths. I dashed to the Marsh’s side, looking frantically for a weapon. A rusted toolbox. Maybe it would do. It was heavy. My fingers slipped on the dust-covered rust. I could only lift one end, but there was no time to find something else. I managed to hoist one end and drag it to the cistern. I more pushed than lifted it up the barely sloping sides, got my weight under it and, sprawling across the brick face of the cistern, worried it over the edge.

I never heard the splash.

There was half a porch, 15 feet of kitchen floor linoleum, a bedroom door, two quilts and a sheet between me and the cistern ere that toolbox hit water.

“Didja git ‘im?” Fred asked, sticking his head under the edge of my bedclothes shelter.

“I don’ know.”

“Whatcha mean, ‘You don’t know?’ Didja hit ‘im ‘r not? Maybe you better go back an’ see . . .”

“NO! I got ‘im! Busted ‘im smack dab in th’ face. He won’t be back no more!”

True to my word, we heard no more from Farley that night, nor did we for the next few evenings.

But eventually, his dank stirrings began again.

And again I hitched up my courage and my pajama bottoms to make my trepidatious journey across the back porch haunts. Each time I would fling another object down the cistern and dash Farley back into his tormented lair.

Once or twice, Fred actually made the journey himself.

Farley no longer ruled our lives, and we had a lot more play room on the back porch.

Meanwhile, all over Avery Elementary School, we gained the reputation as fearless ghost hunters. Every recess would find the Fisher boys out under the big sweetgum, regaling our peers with the latest skirmish with the dreaded Farley ghost, ending, of course, in another hair’s breadth victory.

Life was good again.

Until one day I came home from school and saw Mr. Marsh and my father standing out in the front yard, then overheard their conversation as I stood half concealed trying to look inconspicuous, invisible if I could have managed it, behind a corner of the house. A dread more terrible than any Farley inspired crept along my spine.

“I tell you, Mr. Fisher, I’ve never seen or heard of a burglar like this. He never takes anything valuable. An old toolbox I kept some window weights in. A singletree. Busted lawn chair, things like that. And you haven’t missed anything?”

My father recognized guilt even out of the corner of his eye.

“Son, do you know anything about this?”

I was caught like a fly in lard.

It would have done no good to lie.

I was never very good at it, especially to my father.

I blurted out the whole terrible Farley saga, now made truly terrible by virtue of our discovery. My father’s knowledge swiftly killed the Farley ghost, finally and irrevocably, there in our front yard.

Farley was no longer frightening.

Now he was just silly.

I thought Mr. Marsh was going to have a heart attack, laughing like that. Years later, even after I was grown, he would see me on the street and burst into fits of mirth, regaling any passerby within 20 yards with the story of that dull-witted Fisher boy and the ghost in his cistern.

I don’t remember whether my father spanked me.

I doubt it. My spankings were rare, but memorable events.

But I do remember what he told me.

Farley wasn’t worth much when he was alive.

Certainly less after he was dead.

His troubles were of his own making and his fate was sealed by his failure to deal with his misfortunes.

But I had made of him in death much more than he had ever hoped to be in life.

I had extended Farley’s troubles beyond the grave where they should have lain rotting and forgotten with him.

There are no such things as ghosts, he said, until people decide to make them real.

Ghosts are like toys.

We can take them out and play with them in fun. Left out and in the way, they are at best annoying and at worst, dangerous.

When we trouble others with our superstitions, we plague the world with our own foolishness.

And the fears of a fool are to be feared far more than any ghost.