A Ghost Story

Dumb Ways to Die (An Introduction of My Death)

There are valiant ways to die: fighting for your country, or chasing a dangerous, armed criminal, or running into a burning house to save someone else's life. You can die for someone else, or you can die  fighting until the end.

There are slow deaths. Cancer. Old age. Heart disease. Those are the stupidest deaths--can't stop 'em, can't fight 'em. Just watch them.

There are all sorts of deaths. Gruesome ones (murderers or psychopaths). Possibly-I-knew-what-was-coming-deaths (going to the Amazon and expecting to get poisoned or eaten or something). Suicides. Ladder-falling incidents. Suddenly being allergic to bees. You can die from pretty much anything.

My death falls into the 'unfortunate deaths' category, along with the falling off a ladder or being allergic to bees. Because, no matter what anyone says, being crushed by a falling bookcase isn't brave or valiant in any way at all.

I died in an old, Victorian-style mansion in the middle of nowhere. It wasn't really as great as it sounds. I was looking after it while its owners, an old couple in their early seventies, went on vacation to Jamaica or something. Anyways, the house wasn't in very good shape in the first place, with peeling paint and rusty pipes and bad electricity. Not to mention, no cell phone service.

Long story short, I was dusting in the library. The bookcases were unstable in the first place, so when I pushed one a little too hard, it rocked back. Onto me.

And then I died.

It was a shortish kind of death--the bookcase landed on my head, breaking my neck. It didn't even hurt that much. That didn't confuse me. What did confuse me was why I was still on Earth.

I mean, okay, I'd never been all that religious--I went to Sunday school as a kid, and every once in awhile, I would attend the morning service at church. But I'd expected some type of afterlife; at least somewhere I'd go, someplace other than in that musty old library.

But that was where I woke up (can I call it waking up? All I know is that I was just kind of...there). In the musty old library.

At first I was confused. I thought I'd survived the accident, or I'd stepped out of the way of the falling bookcase somehow. Then who's that, lying under the shelves...? I knelt down, peering into the shadows under the little alcove between the floor and the scattered books. It looked like a girl. About sixteen. She kind of looks like me...

It was me.

After that, I kind of freaked out a little. Like any relatively normal person would. Seeing your cold, dead, lifeless eyes staring back at you is kind of unnerving. I backed up quickly, tripping over my own feet in my desperation to get out of that room, into the fresh, clean air. To prove I was still alive.

That all stopped as soon as I burst through the library doors. I mean it literally--through the doors. They were closed, but, in my panicked state, I ran straight into them. And then right through them. I stopped suddenly directly outside of the library doors, glancing back. "What the..." I pressed my fingers against it, gently. There was a slight resistence, then my hand went straight through the old wood.

I screamed.

Dashing down the halls, I gasped for breath--except I wasn't breathing. How does that even work? I guess my lungs kept on sucking imaginary gulps of oxygen, even though they didn't need any. Maybe they didn't quite believe I was dead, either.

Down the halls, stumble down the wide staircase, then I was in the large lobby-sort-area. It was beautiful, with a huge crystal chandelier hanging from the ceiling and faded red carpet rolled over dark wood. Then again, all I cared about was getting out.