GHOSTBUSTERS

…If there’s something strange in your neighborhood, who you gonna call? If there’s something weird and it don’t look good, who you gonna call?…Ghostbusters.

In the middle of the night my wife, Karen, heard a loud bump. She awoke to see a ghostly figure of a man standing next to the staircase. He was wearing a biker’s outfit with a yellow bandanna wrapped around his head.

“Tom,” she shouted, waking me up.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“There is a man standing next to the stairs,” she gasped.

I jumped out of bed and grabbed the baseball bat I always keep next to the bed.

We live in a small Midwest town named Lake Waukomis. The town was established in 1947. It started out as a hunting, fishing, and poker-playing place for men to come and relax. It’s even said Harry Truman would visit to partake. Many stories have filtered down through the ages that can’t be confirmed. But, the story that comes from the house next to ours has witnesses to confirm that there may be a ghost wondering amongst us.

I bought the vacant lot from the daughter whose parents had passed away. Strange things started occuring as soon as I built my house and moved in. Her parents had purchased two lots when the lake development first started. They built their house on one of the lots and left the other vacant because they didn’t want anyone living next to them.

The lady of the house was an established artist interested in the Victorian style and she painted women in beautiful gowns and hats on her bedroom doors. Their son was killed in a motorcycle accident shortly thereafter. In remembrance of him, they made statues at the entrance to the lake and on the seawall by the walkway to their dock.

Since their passing, four families have bought and lived in the house. The first family removed the paintings from the doors. They would hear their two cats hissing at night and see them staring at the doors they had painted over. The statues on the seawall were soon destroyed by vandals. Stranger things continued to happen.

The second owners’ daughter several times saw a Victorian-looking apparition in the upstairs hallway at night. She didn’t look very happy and seemed upset. The daughter’s cat would hiss and then scat under her bed in fright.

“I don’t see anyone,” I said.

“He was right there,” Karen said, pointing to the top of the stairs.

I turned on the bedroom light and saw nothing. I searched most of the house and found nothing unusual.

“The noise seemed to come from our walk-in closet,” Karen said. I gripped the bat tightly as I slowly creeped into the closet, with Karen following and looking over my shoulder.

To our surprise there lay a large empty plastic storage container on the floor in the middle of the closet. The container had been stored on a upper shelf for a number of years. So why, all of a sudden, had it fallen to the floor in the middle of this night?

The next night Karen awoke as a loud bump again sounded in the middle of the night. Next to the stairs she saw him standing in the dim moonlight. This time he stood there wearing only the yellow bandanna. “Tom,” she shouts in fright. “He’s back.”

Good thing she didn’t know where I kept the gun or I would have probably died that night. Heaven forbid having another ghost wandering the neighborhood, especially one in the buff.

Excerpt from: “The Comeback Kid, The Memoirs of Thomas L. Hay” by Thomas L. Hay . Available on Author’s website: www.thomaslhay.com or on Amazon http://www.amzn.to/1bWV44N or get the latest edition in any ebook format at smashwords: http://www.bit.ly/17yuDiz.