Ghost Stories

            The following stories are absolutely true.

            My old school was haunted.

            It was a lot like this school, where we are right now, in that the main building used to be a house. It had a big staircase that went up one flight of stairs before coming to a wide landing, where the music teacher’s desk resided, and splitting into two staircases that both led to the second floor. The third floor of the building was accessible only by a cramped, narrow back staircase that wound around from the first floor up. Only the teachers were allowed to use the main stairway for some reason.

            The landing with the music teacher’s desk used to house an organ. Not a body part, the kind that you play in a church. It was a good spot for one, since the grand doors of the school opened directly in front of it. In the old days, when the Scripps family actually lived there, you would have walked in and immediately seen the organ, if no one was playing it. If someone was playing it, you would have heard it before you even got into the building.

            That organ could be heard from halfway down the block, apparently.

            At least, that’s what the neighbors said.

            Not the neighbors who lived there when the Scrippses were alive. No, these were the neighbors who habitually complained about their driveways being blocked by parents’ cars, the neighbors who walked past the sign saying Pasadena Waldorf School every day. The neighbors who still live there now.

            One of the staff members was dealing with a nieghbor issue one summer day (when school was not in session) when a woman whose backyard was just over the school’s fence commented on the music. “By the way, who is it playing the organ over there? I always hear them around three o’clock when I’m gardening.”

            The staff member was puzzled. “We don’t have an organ anymore…”

            But the late Mr. Scripps had always practiced at three o’clock.

            My eight-grade teacher told us that story once, simply to make us shiver. But my mother was the administrator of the school for several years, and she has ghost stories of her own to tell. For instance, once she and another staff member—a woman named Mrs. Ward—were in the Finance office on the third floor. They could hear a voice from the adjacent office outside, very clearly, although they couldn’t actually distinguish the words. The voice was definitely audible, but when Mom and Mrs. Ward went to see who was there…they realized that they were quite alone.

            Or rather, they were the only living people there.

            The neighbors weren’t even the only people to hear the organ. Mr. Baier, one of the sports teachers and a member of the administrative staff, heard it when he was down in the basement of the school, clear as anything.

            But the most frightening supernatural event? That occurred at night, when the school             was being readied for the coming day.

            The cleaning crew always worked at night. I can’t remember ever actually seeing them; they simply weren’t there during the day. But after that night, my mother had to find someone else to clean the building, because they weren’t coming back.

            They were in the main house, vacuuming, dusting, polishing, doing whatever they needed to do before heading home, when one of the men went into the handwork room to dust the windowsills.

            The handwork room sat at the front of the building. The windows overlooked the lawn, and yellow shafts of light cut patterns across the darkened carpet. It had once been a bedroom, but now it was used to teach students how to sew and knit. A shelf of half-finished stuffed animals perched above a shelf of half-finished cloth dolls, casting weird, twisted shadows in what little yellow light there was.

            And in the room…stood a figure.

            It seemed male, the maintenance man was sure of that. It was tall, and dark, and he felt a distinct aura drifting from it. It wasn’t a nice aura like you’d get off of a kind, gentle person. No, this aura was…malevolent. Evil. Cruel.

            The cleaning crew left so fast that no one bothered to turn out the lights. The doors were left unlocked in their haste to get away, the gate unbolted. It was lucky that nobody chose that night to break into the school, because they would have had an easy time of it. 

            The whole affair was kept rather quiet. I would not have heard about it if it wasn’t for my mother. But that cleaning crew…they never, ever came back. 

The Hitchhiker's Tale

            It was just my luck that my car broke down on a deserted rural road in the middle of the night. Moreover, my cell phone was absolutely drained, preventing me from calling a cab. Fortunately it was a warm night, but that didn’t change the fact that I was squarely in between Danville, where my plane had landed, and Littlestown, where the mythology conference was. I was to present a paper on the symbolism behind Loki’s imprisonment the next morning, and I could not be late.

            That was what prompted me to stick my thumb out when the headlights snaked down the road ten minutes later. Inadvisable, I know, but I was desperate. It was almost thirty miles to Littlestown.

            The headlights turned out not to belong to a car, but a pickup truck. It pulled over and the driver, a ginger-haired boy in maybe his late teens or early twenties, leaned out of the window. “Hey, you want a ride?” he called amiably.

            “Thanks.” I got into the front seat, settling my briefcase under my knees. The car was, I had noticed, badly dented and scraped in several places.

            “Where are you headed?” asked the boy, pulling back onto the road and glancing at me curiously. I must have been quite an atypical hitchhiker: a thin man with academic glasses and a briefcase, wandering the empty roads at midnight.

            “Littlestown,” I told him. “I’m on my way to an academic conference on mythology. I specialize in the Prose Edda, you know.”

            “Oh yeah? I haven’t heard of that,” said the boy, a smile tugging on the corner of his mouth. “I don’t get out much, though.”

            “What about you?” I asked. “What brings you to this stretch of road so late at night?”

            “Me?” He shrugged. “I just like driving.”

            A thought struck me and I chuckled. “This is like something out of an urban legend. When I get to Littlestown and describe you, someone will tell me that you died ten years ago and still keep driving around picking up hitchhikers.”

            “Twenty-three, actually,” said the boy, turning the wheel slightly as the road curved.

            I frowned. “Twenty-three what?”

            “It was twenty-three years ago,” he explained, “not ten.” He glanced at me, deadpan.

            I laughed and after a moment his mouth quirked upwards and he laughed with me. “Nah, I kid,” he said, checking the rearview mirror. “So tell me—what do you do for fun?”

            The drive took less than half an hour, and the boy, who introduced himself as Asa Baker, let me out beside the hotel. I walked into the lobby and called in my reservation, planning to rescue my car the next day (or rather, that afternoon—it was one-forty-five a.m. when I got to the hotel).

            After I presented my paper, I got a ride from one of my colleagues, a woman who taught creative writing at Littlestown University and had presented a paper on story tropes. When I told her where my car was, she stared at me in confusion and said, “How on earth did you get all the way here in time for the conference?”

            I told her that a young man called Asa Baker had picked me up and brought me to the hotel, and she looked at me with half-lowered eyelids.

            “My students put you up to this, didn’t they,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

            “What do you mean?”

            “Asa Baker. He’s one of the more popular urban legends around here. He was a nineteen-year-old farm worker who died in a freak road accident twenty-something years ago. People say he drives around in his pickup truck and offers hitchhikers rides. My students are always joking about meeting him on a dark road in the middle of the night.”

            I stared at her. “You’re kidding.”

            “Nope.” She raised an eyebrow. “So how’d you really get here?”

            “But…” I shook my head. “My God, he wasn’t joking. He actually wasn’t joking.”

            “Who wasn’t joking?”

            “Asa Baker. It really was twenty-three years!”