Scary & Freaky stories: The Paranormal World

Ours

The new library on Rosebud Street in Grayson, Georgia couldn’t be opened to the public without its own ghost. In the 90′s, the city council built several libraries around town that didn’t have ghosts, following the general tide of the times away from the old superstitions. Those libraries were filled with rainbow colors, comfy chairs, little stuffed animals, smiling faces—all to attract visitors, as if a library was a cafe or coffee shop!

But the city council later regretted its errors. The visitors to those libraries complained that something important was missing: the cold finger that draws itself along one’s neck when one steps into the stacks, the mist of silence that veils the periodicals. Such feelings turn a book-filled room into a real library. At great expense, the city council rid itself of the rainbow colors and comfy chairs and tried to install in their place appropriate ghosts, but the atmosphere was never quite right. The shadows that should have played in the dark corners weren’t dark enough, and the footsteps that should have paced the empty corridors could hardly be heard.

Hoping to avoid another catastrophe, the city council hired me. I had been among the most vocal of the concerned citizens when the ghosts were omitted from the earlier libraries, and I knew the ghosts of our town better than anyone else. Only I could interview the various candidates and choose the most fitting for the new library on Rosebud Street. It was not only a matter of equipment, which I possessed—the tape recorders, magnetometers, and time-lapse cameras—but a matter of acclimation and expertise. I could keep my wits and therefore approach the task with the necessary dispassion.

The ghosts of our little American town are nothing like the ghost of the Old World. Our eldest spirits are from the 19th century. Compared to the dwellers among the English stones or German forests, 19th century ghosts are only children. It’s true that once, in the slice of land that our town now occupied, there were Native Americans with ten thousand years’ ancestral spirits, but the first settlers drove away the natives and the ghosts, expelling them to the mountains or to the western reservations. None of the old ghosts stayed behind, or if they did, they didn’t survive into the modern age. Anywhere they could have installed themselves was plowed down into cotton. This is a great misfortune; our little town could use more diversity to shake off our provincial prejudices.

More than half of our town’s ghosts are soldiers killed during the Civil War. They sit on their gravestones in the Old Cemetery and gamble on dice, or they complain about the hard tack and pine tea, or they play idle music on harmonicas and cheese hoop banjos. The ghostly soldiers rarely leave their earthly encampment, but they vigorously defend it against invaders. Once, a drunk wandered from the Hail Mary sports bar into the Old Cemetery. He had a mind to turn over some tombstones as a amusement. That, of course, was an aggression not to be tolerated, and the ghostly soldiers conspired to turn over a tombstone onto the drunk himself. It was a little menhir, a spire six feet tall that commemorated a particularly noble horse (who, I have discovered, is only partially buried in our town; his tail is here, but his limbs and head and other horseflesh is ten miles up the river). The toppled monument pinned the drunk’s leg against the cold earth, and the pitiable fellow spent the night crying out as the ghostly soldiers bounced long-rotted sunflower seeds off his wriggling form. None of the nearby inhabitants paid attention to the drunk’s pleas—they were accustomed to the generally debauched atmosphere among the soldiers in the Old Cemetery and gave the noises no special mind.

For my search for the Rosebud Library ghost, I set up a little office next to the historic courthouse and sent announcements along the usual spiritual channels. Applicants were requested to arrive during twilight hours for interviews. I was a little too old to make it to the witching hour, straight midnight, without falling asleep.

The first to visit was the ghost of Edward Owens, who lives in the abandoned train station in the valley. Edward was ten years old in 1885, when he put a fat metal screw on the railroad tracks. He wanted the train to flatten it; it would be a novelty. He’d seen others put out pennies on the tracks, but Edward did not have a penny to spare. The five o’clock express to Atlanta rushed past, and the fat screw became snarled in the wheel works. Sparks jumped forth and brakes engaged, but the momentum of the rear cars was too great. The train crumpled against itself, and the cars jumped the tracks. Six passengers and three cows died. A grain storehouse and two water towers were destroyed. The rail line was closed for ten days, postponing the delivery of tobacco, gravy, and beer that were the lifeblood of the local economy. For all this death and delay, and because Edward could never hope to repay what was lost, he was hanged outside of the train station. The gallows were normally built outside the courthouse, but this was a special occasion. As is customary, it was not the accidentally killed passengers that had their spirits imprinted on the land where the rusted smears of tracks are still visible. Instead, it was the little boy, suffering his own catastrophe of sudden guilt and untimely violence, whose spirit remained.