By BRUCE D. CALLANDER
My home town had a village idiot, several town drunks and a poet laureate, but, as far as I can remember, it never had any ghosts.
That is strange, I think, for a small, somewhat isolated community. There were a number of large Victorian mansions that would have been perfect for haunting and there were plenty of people with suggestible imaginations who should have seen ghosts if there had been any about.
We also had a number of deaths under violent circumstances. That is supposed to make for conditions under which ghosts appear. At least that's what they say in the novels. The people die violently and come back to haunt the people who killed them or just to haunt the town in general.
The case I remember best involved two of my sister's friends. They were in love, but for some reason, probably involving religious differences, their parents were against their marriage. Seeing no hope for them, they entered a suicide pact. The boy shot the girl and then himself under a railroad bridge.
There was no way either of them could come back and plague the perpetrator, but you would have thought they would hang around at least long enough to see how the town took their deaths. But there were no reports of seeing them near the bridge or anywhere else. The only lasting result of the affair was that a whole generations of mothers cited it in warning their daughters of the dangers of taking up with the wrong kind of men.
There was another particularly gruesome murder in town. It happened in the early morning when an old man was opening his shop on main street. He did little business, but was known to keep what money he had in an old cigar box. A young boy came in, demanded the cash and when the old man refused, bludgeoned him to death with a hammer. He took the box, which was said to contain something like $2.
The boy got off with a light sentence because of his age and the town was outraged. If ever there was a case for the victim's returning to haunt the place, this was it. At least the store ought to have been cursed. But there was nothing. The blood was cleaned up and the old man's stuff taken away and, within a month, the building was rented again, this time to a bakery. I never heard of anybody's feeling so much as a chill going in there although if there ever was a case for somebody's returning to the scene of the crime, that would have seemed to be it.
Then , there was the case of the boy who should have been a war hero. He was a star quarterback on the high school football team and when World War II came along, he naturally joined up. He won his pilot wings and was home on graduation leave, due to report to fighter pilot training when he went back.
The boy got to celebrating on his last night home. A police man caught him driving erratically and took his keys away from him. His father appealed to the chief of police that the boy was going off to war an ought to be allowed a little slack. The chief gave him back his keys and, within an hour, the boy had wrecked his car and was in the hospital.
He didn't die, but he was hurt badly enough to be discharged from the Army. He carried the scars of the mishap for the rest of his life. As it turned out, that wasn't long. A few years later, he went hunting with some friends and was fatally shot.
The boy's family lived in one of those dark Victorian mansions and if there ever was a cause for coming back to haunt the scene of a tragic life, I would have thought that was it. As far as I know, he as never heard from again.
On the other hand, we lived in an old, rambling house in which there was one spot where a cold chill came over you. It may just have been a draft.
Bruce D. Callander spent 33 years writing and editing for Air Force Times. He now is a freelance writer who lives in Cheboygan.
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