Happy Halloween!

Any good storyteller has a few ghost stories in the back pocket….”You won’t believe what happened to my friend’s co-worker’s dog walker when he and his brother were walking down a dirt road as teenagers…it was a really dark night…they were headed home from town and were told not to take the short-cut through woods by Old Man Miller’s house…The woods were haunted…That’s where they found poor Mary’s body 100 years ago and where she had been buried…today her grave was grown over and couldn’t be found. They say she wanders through the woods looking for her grave.  The brothers thought it was just a made up story when they were told Mary would cry to them for help and try following them home…until that night they took the short cut through the woods and heard footsteps running up behind them…and then a woman’s cried out…”

Ghost stories (and the closely related horror stories) are some of the most shared, and most loved stories told. Horror stories make millions at the box office. Charles Dickens used ghosts to show us the error of our ways. Ghost stories have been passed from generation to generation, around camp fires and on dark and stormy nights. Some have become such a part of society that they’ve been come folk-lore. Stories are the stuff legends are made from.

Our love, and fear, of the unknown provide fertile ground for our imaginations. Sucking us in. Demanding our attention and daring us to look away. You tell yourself it’s just a story but somehow it seems very, very real.

So tonight, sit back and listen to a good ghost story. Feel your pulse start to quicken. The hair on the back of your neck start to stand up. Was that a noise behind you? Couldn’t be, it’s just a story isn’t…..

Isn’t it….