Lehe: A post-Halloween medley of ghoulish tales

The Story of the Ghost Story.

Last year I took a graduate course in game theory. I failed the midterm so I had to study hard for the final. I cooped myself up for about a week in the kitchen copying solutions to problems and then trying to solve the problems myself. Pretty soon my kitchen table was piled high with papers covered in cryptic Greek letters.

Then one night, there was a thunderstorm. Suddenly, a crash of thunder shook the whole house, and a gust of cold air extinguished my old whale oil lamp. When I finally lit a candle, I noticed something was awry with my papers. The Greek letters were drifting about on the page. At first, I thought that a ghost was making corrections, but the Greek letters turned out to block up in paragraphs. The Greek, of course, was Greek to me, so I took the pages over to my neighbor Old Dame Kalopolis, to whom it was also Greek but nevertheless readable, because she knows Greek.

Old Dame Kalopolis, reading by the dance of candlelight, voice straining over the din of thunderclaps, translated the ghost’s message. It was a story, albeit not a very good one. It was hard to follow and the scenes were not rendered vividly. About halfway through we put it down.

“I’ve got to wrap up studying,” I said.

“Yeah. And I was gonna watch ‘Golden Girls’,” Old Dame Kalopolis said.

Sometimes I wish I remembered the story better. The next day Old Dame Kalopolis died of self-inflicted strangulation and then my house burned down, so the ghost’s story was lost. If I can’t remember, though, maybe it just goes to show how forgettable the story was — at least the first half.

Ghost Cell Phones.

Have you ever had a phone die while you were roaming? Well, death is just the beginning for that cell phone, just a gateway. The cell phone is destined to roam across the land.

You know how, when you’re around speakers and the cell phone rings it makes that weird sound in the speakers? Well, have you ever heard the weird sound, but then your cell phone didn’t ring? That’s a ghost getting a phone call on a ghost cell phone. And later on, you’ll find some discrepancies in the phone bill, and if you call the phone company, they’ll give you the run around. They’re in on it with the ghosts, I tell you.

Ghost of Girlfriends Past.

This is also the title of a popular ghost porno movie.

Ghost of the Ghosts.

One time I lived in a haunted house on Meyran Avenue. It was so lousy with ghosts that I got a priest to come in and exorcise the joint. But he was only an Episcopal priest, so he only got one of the ghosts.

Some days later, I was eating some cereal and I lifted my spoon to my mouth, but much to my chagrin it was full of blood. I spat and knocked over my cereal bowl. The milk in the bowl had turned to blood, as well. It was blood galore everywhere. The spilled blood spelled out, “Help me.” I started to cry over the spilled blood, which was, I would like to point out, not spilled milk anymore. Then it said, “I’m a ghost.” I said, “Duh!” Then it said, “The one ghost you exorcised is haunting the sh*t out of us.” I told the ghost that now he knew firsthand what it felt like to be haunted by a ghost, but later on I was nice and I got a zombie priest to come in and exorcise the ghost of the ghost. Afterward, the zombie priest and I watched “The Exorcist,” but I had to turn it off cause he kept snorting and saying, “This is so unrealistic!”

Ghost of Roommates Past.

Dimitri was a good friend. A week after he was gone, I put up a plaque on his door that said, “In memoriam, Dimitri Gouldov.” But the plaque only emphasized how empty the room seemed without him.

Empty … until one day it was abuzz with activity. The lights would turn on and off. On a warm evening, we would find the window open. Dimitri’s bed would be unmade at night, but then every morning made neatly, with the signature geometry that our old friend used to bring to the task. And as a final declaration that Dimitri was, in a sinister way, still with us, one night a dreadful creaking roused us all to find the memorial plaque turned around on the door. The black backside faced out, denying any change had come.

That was it. I didn’t want to hurt Dimitri, but how would the wounds heal with the restless haunt settled ever more cozily? So, I called up Dimitri. I said, “I know you’re busy in Memphis at Teach for America, but you gotta come back here and take care your damn ghost. It’s not paying rent, and we can’t get someone to sublet.”

Dimitri came home and chatted up the ghost. He explained that Memphis has new friends and new bars and new adventures waiting. Life is more than fun, Dimitri said. It’s also about giving others the opportunities, like college, that we enjoyed so much. The ghost moved on.

After that, Dimitri and I had a talk about the plaque, which he found much weirder than the ghost.

E-mail Lewis at ljl10@pitt.edu.