SOME HALLOWEEN/ REAL GHOST STORIES

A Ghost Story

by Kathryn Meyer Griffith

Because most of us are terrified of dying and death, of losing all we know so well in this mortal plane, we want to know: is there life after death? Do ghosts walk the earth? Vengeful or benevolent spirits? Immortals such as vampires and werewolves? Does good always win against evil? As human beings we’d love the answers to these questions and if we can’t find them, prove them, well, then we’ll invent, create, worlds where we can.

Now I must say that I can’t be considered a true skeptic when it comes to the supernatural because at the tender age of sixteen I saw a ghost, or what I believed was a ghost. My great Aunt Mary had died two days before. Not unexpectedly. She was old, had been in a nursing home for months, and we knew it was coming. Before the nursing home, though, she’d lived ten years with my maternal grandmother, whose name was also Mary, and had been happy there. The night before the funeral I’d been sleeping in my bed and something – to this day I don’t know what it was – woke me and I wandered down the dim hallway to use the bathroom.

And there was my dead Great Aunt Mary standing at the end of the hall in an eerie pulsating ball of light. She looked so real, as if I could reach out and touch her and my fingers would feel flesh. She was gesturing excitedly to me and rattling off a string of words that had to be German because I couldn’t understand a word of it. The old woman had been an immigrant who’d never learned our language, which is one of the reasons she’d been so content living with my grandmother; they’d both spoken German. The only word I could understand was Mary as she kept repeating the word over and over. I assumed my aunt was calling for my grandmother, as if my aunt were lost, and looking for her favorite niece. It’s the only explanation I have for the visitation.

Why she appeared to me, I’ll never know, but she did. I remember thinking: It’s Aunt Mary. Oh my God! But she’s dead. Dead. When it finally hit me, I was so frightened I turned and scurried back to my bedroom and dived beneath my bed covers. To this day, my mind swears I didn’t see what I thought I saw…Aunt Mary’s spirit…but my heart and my senses chide me and say, yes, you did. You saw a ghost. A real ghost. So there.

Since that day I’ve never been able to laugh at the possibility of the paranormal existing. The thing is, because I consider myself a down-to-earth realistic person (even though I’m considered basically a horror writer even with the other genres I write) , if someone asks me if I believe in ghosts and such I often as not hesitate before I admit that I might have seen one. Might. No one wants to be thought of as unbalanced. Seeing spirits is only one step above seeing little green men or pink elephants.

I want to be taken seriously. I mean, I’m a writer, not a nutcase.

All toll I’ve been a writer of paranormal fiction for forty years and proud of it. I’ve written about spirits, benevolent and malevolent; ghosts; angels; demons and all manner of vampires and unexplained creatures; and even, once, a possessed gun, and a woods haunted by an entity that was an eternal killer. Can’t get more spooky than that, can you?

Happy Halloween!

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A Halloween Story

By author Kathryn Meyer Griffith

Since I was a child Halloween has always been one of my favorite holidays. No one loved horror movies or scary stories more than I did. As a poor child in a family of six other siblings I haunted the musty smelling libraries searching out books about ghosts, vampires, spooky houses and witches. I was addicted to supernatural or monster movies. Dracula. The Lady in White. Ghost Story. The Werewolf. Godzilla. The Mummy. Or any film that dealt with the supernatural in any way, shape, or form. My heart would beat hard whenever I opened a new book about a demon or a monster in a lake or when the lights would fade down in a theater and I knew the coming movie was a thriller.

Well, why and how did I become such a lover of Halloween? I’ll tell you.

My grandmother, Mary Fehrt, had been an immigrant from 1930’s war-torn Austria and was a born storyteller. And she loved scary stories. I first remember hearing a ghost story from her lips when I was barely six years old. One of the most disturbing, I recall, was about a rich little girl in her old country who’d died young, had been buried – and in those days, my grandmother had whispered in the candle’s flickering glow in her spooky basement where my siblings and I had gathered, bodies weren’t embalmed – but because some money-desperate peasant dug her up and cut her finger off for her diamond ring she sat up in her coffin, still alive. It scared the peasant nearly witless and, screaming, he’d scurried off. “Sleeping sickness, that’s what it’d been,” my grandmother had muttered. “The child hadn’t been dead at all but had been buried…alive.” Ugh! Funny how some details of those stories eventually found their way years later into mine. Or, once, my grandmother told us the story about her mother who saw her dead husband out in the garden after he’d died, walking around between the tomatoes, and waving at her…who then dematerialized in front of her eyes into a puff of smoke. Yikes. Let me tell you those eerie stories left their mark. They dried my mouth and made me shiver. Probably why I became a horror writer. I wanted to make people shiver in the same way.

Oh, yes, my grandmother adored Halloween.  She’d decorate her home like a haunted house, filling it with puff-paper pumpkins, cats, skeletons, and tacking up paper witches everywhere.  Cloth ghosts hung from the tree limbs in her front yard and when the wind blew they’d wave like tattered white banners. She’d hobble up to our door on Halloween night dressed as a witch and dare us to guess who it was. We always did, though, because her childish glee and familiar eyes, her mischievous smile would always give her away. Besides, her witch laugh sounded like her regular laugh, only scarier. The neighborhood kids loved going to her house because she always gave them special homemade treats; not only prepackaged candy so prevalent now days. She made the best chocolate chip cookies, caramel apples, and popcorn balls in town.

So, no wonder, I grew up loving Halloween.    

When that dark night rolls around every year I still get excited. These days, because very few treat-or-treaters find their way along our street (don’t know why…perhaps because the older people around us don’t turn on their lights and open their homes…afraid of being robbed); after we leave a bowl of candy on the front porch  just in case someone would come by, my husband and I walk hand in hand to our small town’s City Hall where they have a town get-to-together  with a pumpkin decorating contest for the kids, free hot-dogs, hot cider or hot cocoa with tiny marshmallows,  and lots of little dressed-up goblins for us to exclaim over. A safe Halloween. Then we go home and watch scary movies the rest of the night and eat the candy still left in the bowl. I like the Paydays and Milky Ways.

It’s a far cry from my 1950’s childhood where my six siblings and I would dress in spooky homemade costumes, sheet ghosts with cut-out eyes or gypsies dripping with mom’s jewelry, and clutching our brown grocery bags, would trudge from one porch lit and decorated house to another gathering those large (not those measly ones they give out now) candy bars or homemade treats. I can still hear the laughter and leaves whispering on the chilly autumn air as we gathered our treats. As I remember, most of those nights had been rainy, dark, and chilly. But that never stopped us candy monsters. We always went out and came home with a huge bag of goodies…which our mother would promptly take away from us and ration out sparingly over the next few weeks. So we wouldn’t get sick. Yeah, sure. I always suspected my parents pillaged from our bags themselves and stole our treats. Never could prove that, though.

But I still love Halloween, no matter what. It’s the night that the misty wall between the worlds of the living and dead is the weakest, or so the witches say…and, watch out, maybe a ghost or a demon might slip through and land on your doorstep. That’s why I never answer the door without peeking out the window first.

Because…hey, you never know.  *****