MY BLOG HAS BEEN HIJACKED BY MY HUSBAND.

 Guest teller of hair-raising tales, Steve Gaal is trying to scare us with a little Halloween story. Sit back and relax but I'd keep the lights on....

Visualize a dark forest, with  autumn leaves whispering in the wind. In the middle of this forest, embraced by a winding river, is a small village, not far from Transylvania. The time is the turn of the nineteenth century. The modest homes have thatched roofs, and the inhabitants are hardworking peasants brimming with superstition.

On the evening of Halloween, a group of the local young men gather at the village pub. Trying to outdo each other with increasingly tall and unbelievable stories of bravado, the conversation flows along with the local  red wine.

Soon the subject turns to the local cemetery. It is a scary place even when the sun bakes the graves in a golden glow, but at night, people go out of their way to avoid going near it. One of the fellows, wearing a  loose fitting shirt outside of his trousers, is especially boisterous. He stands up and declares in a drunken stupor that he is not at all afraid of visiting the cemetery, even at the forbidding hour of midnight. A great shouting match ensues: it seems like the entire group rises to rebut him. But he, almost in exact proportion with the increasing volume of wine that passes between his lips, loudly proposes a bet: He will go to the cemetery, and bring the wooden grave marker from his mother’s grave back to the pub and show it to everyone.

The terms of the bet are settled and the fellow leaves the pub for the cemetery. In less than one half hour, he is back, having pulled the grave marker from the earth at his mother’s final resting place. He triumphantly waves it around and demands to be paid in accordance with the bet he had just won. The others tell him that all is fine, but before he can collect on the bet, he has to return it to the grave.

He leaves, and the others wait. And wait, and wait. After a couple of hours, the innkeeper tells them that he is closing  for the night. There is courage in numbers, and the group finds a couple of torches, with which they head out to find their friend. At the cemetery, they find his dead body sprawled over his mother’s grave. His hands are clutching the grave marker that is halfway re-inserted into the soil, with his shirttail caught in the pointed tip of the marker. The harder he was pushing it back into the ground, the harder it  pulled him into the cold earth. He died of a heart attack, thinking his mother was pulling him into the grave.


Scary huh? Though I don't really want to encourage him, he'd love to hear your comments.