You can hear three young men screaming. You can hear one old man laughing.

For some uncertain reason, I have been thinking fondly of ghost stories this morning. WHen I would sleep over at my grandmother's, my youngest Aunt (who is a year and a half older than me) and I would get under a blanket and she would illuminate her face with a flashlight. She would tell me such "gotcha" classics where some disgruntled spirit would haunt their wrongdoers with such chants as "Bloody Bones and Dirty Diapers" and my personal favorite "Where's my Golden Arm?". Along with those she would tell those very questionable true fable stories as "The Crossett Light" and things that happen at The Myrtles.

Even though it was good clean scary fun, I find it strange that my family had this tradition of telling ghost stories. When my grandmother's kids were constipated, she would often sit in the doorway of the outhouse and tell ghost stories to her kids. Was she trying to literary scare the shit out of them? Maybe it was her version of reading the newspaper to them, since there wasn't a light in the outhouse and once the sun went down, it was pitch black out there.

My god, I forgot how dark it was out there. When I was little I was so scared of the dark and scared of my grandmother's Pekingese which looked like snorting ball of tangles with bugged eyes. Thankfully, I didn't spend the night at my grandparent's house that was way out in the country very often and they moved to town to a house with a real bathroom when I was about 4 or 5. I was getting too old to be too scared to get out the bed in that deep darkness and worrying about that stupid dog getting me or falling into outhouse pit. It was very deep hole, or just seemed really so at the time. I was young enough to get away with wetting the bed when my grandparents lived in that house that was located on what seemed like the edge of the earth. The same place where my uncle told me not to go out into the woods because there was savage Indians that lived out there that liked to boil little girls alive and eat them for supper. Heck yeah, I was going to wet the bed. Savage Indians and scary dogs lurcking in the shadows of the blacker than black night. I remember feeling comforted when I get did the occasional sight of my grandmother's apache nose when she lit a cigarette while laying in bed.

I'm so weird.