IN LIKE A LION PART 1: CHAPTER 4
In Like a Lion
Maps, myths, and manifestations
(a memoir)
BROWSE CHAPTERS
CHAPTER 4
Ghost Stories
Soundtrack: Listen While You Read
“Closing up already?” I asked the bartender.
“Yep,” she said, loading the dishwasher.
“Got any good ghost stories around here?” I asked with a sloppy grin.
“Yep.” She answered immediately with furrowed brows. The question seemed to concern her.
“Really!” I sat up. “Damn. Gimme something. I’ve been cooped up in the city for too long.”
“Huh,” she said, furrowing her brows. “Like, my granddad for instance,” she said after a pause. “He was born around here and never left. He was always real mad, y’know, like, just an angry person? When he died, swear to God: a wolf came right up to our house. And we didn’t know he had died. But it turned out to be the exact same time. We saw it sneakin’ around, tryin’ to get in the dog kennel. That wolf wanted blood.”
“At the exact same time…” I echoed, wide-eyed.
“And now, whenever we try to visit his grave, you know, weird stuff happens, like, the animals act up, or one time, we almost got in a freak accident. Stuff like that, or whatever.”
“Damn!” I said, a little too loudly, eyebrows raised over a dumb smile.
“How about you,” she said politely.
“Not really. I mean, my fiancé has always seen red-tailed hawks everywhere she goes. Like, literally every time she leaves the house. Same with owls for me, sort of. But that’s about it. City life: what can I say,” I smiled sadly.
“Well, there’s lots of stuff up here. My husband and I had a bad breaker in our breaker box that made the hallway light keep coming off and on in the middle of the night. I still ain’t used to it. I always make him go down and flip the breaker off just to get it to stop, but that turns off the space heater, too.” She looked out the windows, expressionless, and rubbed her arms to stay warm. “I’m in other people’s houses a lot for my other job as a CNN. I don’t know. I just see a lot of stuff out here.”
“Damn,” I repeated, at a loss. “Must be tough to have two jobs.” She brought out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter.
“Three,” she corrected me. Three jobs...I felt overwhelmed by my own weakness. “I used to be a housekeeper here before I got bartender. Oh!” she exclaimed suddenly, stopping in her tracks. Her eyes lit up, “This one time, we were up around the bend working the cabins, and we saw shadow figures inside.”
“…Shadow figures?”
“Kind of...see-through. Just dark, black figures. They were, like, running through the cabin. Or moving really fuckin’ fast, at least. Back and forth, back and forth.” She traced their route with a long index finger. “Scared us pretty good. We took off, but we knew we’d have to go in there and clean eventually.”
“Damn,” I said, throat dry. I viscerally recalled that nameless weight pushing me back out the cabin door, back into the realm of the owls, back down the hill, as a sick chill grew deep within my intestines. “Um, I mean…well, I bet you feel better being down here now, right?”
“Kind of,” she shrugged, putting on her jacket. “I mean, we do get the Purple Lady here a lot.”
“The Purple Lady? Like, her skin is purple?” I grinned weakly through nausea.
“A lady in purple clothes,” she responded after laughing politely. “Like, an old purple dress. Threw a big-ass pot at the manager, one time.” The bartender, clearly weary in spite of her young age, exited out the patio door, leaned stiffly against the railing and lit her cigarette, facing the dusk laden wilderness like a statue mourning for the sun.
“Damn,” I said to nobody. I looked out the window and then down again at my last shot, an electric amber sacrament glowing red atop the wood grain tray.
“As I was writing down Kathy’s tales, another employee came into the shop.
Kathy introduced us to Larry Cox, one of the gift shop clerks, who had his own story to tell:
‘Back in the early 1990s, a new park manager, who was a naturalist, had come onboard.
When he started hearing these stories about the Purple Lady, he told everyone that he was a scientist,
and he did not believe in ghosts. Until one evening when he had a rather unnerving experience…’”
From Ghosthunting Kentucky by Patti Starr, Clerisy Press, 2010
Imagination, as a word, is overdue for an upgrade. It’s been associated with delusion, insanity and Saturday morning cartoons for so long that it cheapens almost any sentence containing it. “It’s all in your imagination.” Etymologically speaking, consider imagination as the machination of an imagining. What if, simply by believing in the Purple Lady, her porcelain mask clashing harshly with the orange light of the overhead bulb, I summoned her forth, standing quietly in my room, watching me in my bed while I slept? What if the bartender had used my innocent, arable mind to conjure a fantastic entity…a psychospiritual creation…an…imachination…
*****
I dragged the heavy metal door to my room open over the cement floor looking warily at the large, floor-to-ceiling mirror on the wall facing the bed. I kicked off my shoes, got in bed and began phone-scrolling to try and settle in, subconsciously imagining the ghost of a woman wearing a purple evening gown, gliding phantasmagorically through the mirror at the strike of three o’clock.
I flipped on the TV. Die Hard 4.0 was on TBS. It was impossible to see what waited within the wilderness right outside the window beyond the tungsten sheen of the dusty porch, so I closed the curtains, grabbing a “might as well” beer while I was up. An hour passed. Bruce Willis persevered on the other side of the screen, despite his age. Defeated, I no longer even slightly aspired to his level of health. I think I’ll just get fatter and relax the rest of my life, I thought. This is nice…
The room hummed along with the wall-furnace. There were no signs of life or anything otherwise. I looked back at the floor-to-ceiling mirror and, thankfully, felt nothing. Turning off the television, I noticed the soft glow of my laptop’s power cable and sadly remembered my novel’s lack of progress before finally closing my eyes and spiraling down a black, barren well.
*****
I woke up with the dawn and went on a mad, five-hour writing spree to make up for lost time, pounding coffee and nursing my head. After packing the car, I decided to walk a trail I found at the edge of the parking lot as far as my knee would allow. I was surprised when the trail soon led to the same narrow, winding road I had driven to reach the the weird cabin the day before, revealing that by escaping to the lodge, I hadn’t actually avoided the area at all—everything was on the same exact hill.
I checked out at the desk, distracted by a low pain in my chest. I visualized my fiancé in our house without me, struggling to tame our son’s animal heart, wondering when I’d finally be home. I considered how I had selfishly abandoned them to go chase ghosts, only to run away when I found them, with nothing to show for it but a hangover, an incomplete manuscript, and an even sorer knee than when I first left.
“Enough,” I thought aloud, darting into the gift shop to grab a couple of souvenirs. I refused to return empty-handed. “Time to get my head out of the clouds. Be a better parent. Get a promotion. Love my partner.” I bought a stuffed horse, a stone owl carving, a yellow coffee mug and a set of local artisan wind chimes.
“I’m headed towards London: what do you think about taking the 11 through Beattyville for a scenic drive?” I asked the clerk.
“Sure, you could do that,” she posited inquisitively. “It’s a lot faster now that construction is done.”
I was off again. The narrow highway slithered into view as I turned right out of the parking lot into the wilderness. One more slice of freedom before reality. A smile slowly crept across my face. I felt alive again out in those old woods, under the shadows of those ancient rocks—albeit sheltered in the confines of the driver's seat. Maybe, despite the cowardice and everything else, this wasn’t a total waste of time.
CLOSING CREDITS
SHARE YOUR STORIES
Share your own stories in the comment section or via the contact form.
Writing prompts:
Share an original ghost story.
Is there a difference between everyone believing a place is haunted, versus only one or two people believing a place is haunted?
Elaborate on the fine line between fear and thrill.