The Greatest Ghost Story Ever Told

I am in a bit of a story telling mood. Recently, Sarah and I had dinner at the new pad of Angela and Raymond, friends of hers, and I am happy to think now friends of mine, from the Islands. We got to talking about a movie, The Blair Witch Project, and how I have a friend in Lubbock (I won’t use your name Mike Stephens…..Damn!) who thinks its the worst movie ever made. It scared the bejeezus out of Angela. Even talking about it in the warm well lit dining room of her lovely new house gave her goose bumps. I was telling her and her friend Tater (sorry, I can’t remember her real name) about the running argument my nameless friend and I have about Blair Witch (See Mike, I did it that ti….. aww crap.). I’ve tried to explain to him that it’s not high art, but that the filmmaker’s essentially got together on camera and told the world a really great campfire ghost story. It works ’cause we’re all sitting in the dark at the time, and can’t get up to turn on the lights. If you ever went camping as a kid and got spooked by a good ghost story, you know the feeling of seeing Blair Witch the first time. It doesn’t work on a second screening because someone can only go “Boo!” once. After that the spell is sort of broken. I remember hearing a story about a guy who went to see a matinee of Blair Witch during all the hype of it’s first week on the theatre, then went again in the evening. He sat in the back of the theatre, and near the end, when the lost students find the house of the Witch and are very near meeting their end, this guy stands up in the back and yells out in a half comical voice, “Are you fucking KIDDING ME? DON’T GO IN THE HOUSE!!!!!” Instantly, the spell was broken and all the little kids around the cmapfire became grown-ups again, most of them laughing hysterically.

All this put me in a story telling mood that day, and I am still in it now, so I want to tell The Greatest Ghost Story Ever Told. Don’t worry, It’s not really scary.

When I was younger, I used to go backpacking every summer at a high adventure camp called Philmont, just outside of Cimmarron, New Mexico. Those trips are still some of the greatest weeks of my life. On one trip, my first, I was tent mates with a guy named Paul that I went to church with. He was a really funny, smart little chubby kid, a great friend who always had a smile and a snide but good natured comment, like me. We began in base camp, and hiked from campsite to campsite every morning, carrying in our packs everything we would need to live for two weeks. Each campsite had something of interest to see or do once you reached your destination each day. About a week into our trip, we stopped at a campsite that was near a large cliff face, not far from the base of Baldy Mountain. Our campsite was along the base of the cliff to the south, on the edge of a large field that ran about 400 yards to a treeline off to the north. In the trees were several old cabins where a mining community had lived years before, and we learned that the cliff was in fact artificial, created out of a hill by a mining process that utilized high powered water hoses to essentially force-erode the hill away and get to the copper underneath. (Anyone who has seen the Clint Eastwood film Pale Rider has seen a recreation of this technique, used in the later days of the expansion west.) Near the west end of our campsite, in a small grove of trees near the base of the cliff, was something rather unnerving. The mining settlement had lived in this area for about 15 years, we later learned, and during that time, in the harsh conditions and dangerous work environment, naturally some members of the community had passed away. Their tiny cemetery remained, a few heavy wooden headstones, one or two actually carved from rock, mostly faded and unreadable, surrounded by a rickety old picket fence, it sat there right at the edge of where we were pitching tents to spend the night. We were almost literally sleeping in a graveyard.

After setting up camp, we met the few members of permanent staff at the site, who told us the story of the area, and took us to see the cabins, which were now a small museum about mining in the area, containing relics of the miners and the frontier lives. Later that night, sitting around our campsite as it was getting dark, they told us another story. (This version is a recreation of a story told to me about 15 years ago, but it’s pretty close.)

Sometime in the the early 1890’s, almost 100 years before our time there, a young miner and his pretty bride lived in this community. They were newlyweds who had fled their Eastern hometown because their parents disapproved of the marriage, and had headed West to start new lives together. They lived happily in their new communtiy, becoming a part of the mining company and making many new friends. They hoped to one day have children and move farther West, to California. One day, however, tragedy struck. While working near the top of the cliff face during the mining process, the young husband fell off a loose ledge into the incredible pressure of the hoses, several hundred feet to the rock and mud below. He was killed instantly. His young bride was a grief stricken wreck. Her husband had died very near the end of the warm weather, and with winter coming, his bride could not travel back East. She remained in camp, mourning him constantly, weeping and tending his grave dialy. She ate little, and grew so despondent that many worried she would die of heartbreak. The young bride was not willing to wait that long. Wracked with grief and longing to be with her true love, one night she left the shelter of her cabin in the trees, and after placing a flower at the grave of her husband, climbed to the top of the cliff, and threw herself off.

Sadly, she was not to be reunited with her husband. According to local legend, and perpetuated by the staff at the campsite who claimed to have known someone who had witnessed it a few years earlier, the young bride’s ghost still haunted the area. The stories said that she had not been allowed to move on to heaven and be with her husband because she had committed suicide, an unforgiveable sin. Her ghost was therefore cursed to live forever in the tiny mining camp, emerging sometimes at night to cross the field and tend the grave of her husband, weeping all the while at her eternal seperation from him. The staff said that a few campers had claimed to have seen her crossing the field in a glowing white dress, and that others had found old wilted flowers on one specific grave site. They removed them, only to find new ones there the next morning.

Needless to say, we were pretty spooked. It was a good story to tell a 14 year old kid who’d been in the woods for a whole week, especially with the grave site so close by. No matter what we did for the rest of the evening as we prepared for bed, the graveyard was always right there, kind of in the back of our minds even when we couldn’t see it. Paul and I talked about it after we had gone to bed, whispering in our tent the way that kids do, pretending we weren’t rattled by the story.

Later that night, Paul woke me up, shaking me and telling me to be quiet. On the far wall of our tent, the one that faced the field, I could see a dull glow. I was immediately terrified, and I could tell Paul was too. Slowly, we crawled to the door of our tent and looked out.

In the middle of the field was the shape of a woman in a long glowing white dress. She was walking silently across the field almost directly toward us. We sat there in terror watching as she walked right up to the little grave site, through the gate, and knelt at one of the graves. I don’t rememeber what I was thinking at the time, but I do remember I was shaking, and Paul was gripping the tent flap so hard he was bending the tent poles.

Suddenly, the figure in the graveyard began to SHRIEK. LOUDLY. Ungodly wailing noises, high pitched and awful.

That’s when Paul bolted.

For 14, Paul was a big kid. I bet he was pushing 170, and only about 5 feet tall. But I have never in my life seen a fat kid run so fast. He took off across the field in the opposite direction as fast as his legs would carry him as though the Devil himself were chasing him, with Paul making this wierd wheezing half moaning sound. Barry Sanders couldn’t have outrun him. Only a moment after he did it did I hear the laughter. All the tents around us were laughing, everyone was awake and watching. Apparently the camp staff pulled this gag on first year campers a lot. They had an old dress and some kind of blue flashlight underneath it. They had done a great job of setting us up, and to this day I don’t know how I didn’t end up running off myself. I am sure glad I didn’t though.

It took us over an hour to find Paul, and I don’t think he ever forgave us.