Revenge G(HO)sts
or: Petty Ghosts And Where To Find Them
All of us have a little petty in us. But do some of us have enough pettiness to literally animate us from beyond the grave to perpetrate ghostly acts of shade? Definitely. Buckle up and get ready to bear witness to some acts of supernatural pettiness.
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In 1790s West Virginia, a man named Livingston took a strange boarder into his home, because that's what people did in old times. Before long the boarder took ill and asked Livingston to find him a Catholic priest to perform last rites. Unfortunately for the boarder, Livingston was very into Lutheranism and told the boarder that he, his priest, and his whole denomination could kiss Livingston's piss. The boarder died, because it was the 1700s, and almost immediately life got noticeably worse around the Livingston household. Candles left burning in the room with the boarder's body would immediately go out and Livingston was kept up all night by a bunch of horse ruckus outside, despite there being no sign of horses. Later Livingston's barn burned down, all his cattle died, and all of his crockery smashed itself.
It was at this point that the ghost really found his brand. Members of the household started hearing a pair of gigantic scissors snipping, and soon weird shaped holes were found in all of Livingston's blankets, sheets, boots, shoes, and clothing. The ghost would cut little half-moon shapes out of absolutely anything it could find. At one point a Presbyterian woman came to investigate. She was smart enough to tuck her new silk cap in her pocket to keep it safe, but by the time she left the house she found that the ghost had absolutely gone to town on it.
The ghostly scissor attacks continued for months, pretty much ruining Livingston's peace of mind along with every cuttable thing he owned. The man even hired three separate conjurers to expunge the spirit but none of them could stop the snipper from snipping. The ghost continued doing his thing until Livingston had a vision of a man in robes. Eventually he found the man who turned out to be a Catholic priest. The priest performed a Catholic mass in Livingston's terribly haunted home and the phantom finally stopped cutting holes in all his shit. The name of the town where Livingston got snipped was known for years as The Wizard Clip because of all the scissor crimes that occurred there.
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I'm About Two Things, Baby: Wearing a Fuckton of Lace and Making You Put Up Pictures Of Me Around Your New Wife
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Around 1670, a gentleman named Robert Stuart fell in love with a girl named Jeanne while he was studying in Paris. Everything was going well until Robert got bored and decided to return to his estate in Scotland. He tried to quietly sneak away in a full horse and carriage but for some reason this didn't work and Jeanne ran out to try and stop him. She went full beast mode, trying to climb onto the front of the carriage while shouting "if you marry any woman but me, I will come between you to the end of your days!" Robert decided this really wasn't his problem anymore and told his driver to drive on. Jeanne fell under the carriage and was crushed. Her last words to Robert were "I'll reach Allanbank before you." When Robert arrived at home, he was greeted by a vision of Jeanne, with bloodied head and shoulders, sitting on top of the arched gateway to his house. Absolutely devoted to the grudge, Jeanne made herself at home in Allanbank, slamming doors and making ghostly footsteps and cold drafts. The staff would always know she was coming by the rustling of the pearlin lace she always wore in life. No amount of priestly intervention could make Jeanne leave.
Eventually, when Robert did take a wife and hung her portrait on a wall next to his, Jeanne kicked it up about a thousand notches and began absolutely destroying the place. Out of desperation, Robert commissioned a portrait of "Pearlin Jean" herself and placed it between the ones of himself and his wife. Jeanne immediately settled down. Each time Jeanne's portrait was moved, Jeanne would start rampaging again until it was put back. Even after the Stuarts left Allanbank for good Pearlin Jean stayed on, rustling away in her lacey things and making sure everyone knew that no one runs over Pearlin Jean and gets away with it.
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The Ghost Dick Cop Of Golden Gate Park
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There have been numerous reports out of the Bay Area of a pretty specific legal quandry. Motorists speeding through Golden Gate Park will find themselves pulled over by a police officer and given a ticket, but when they go to court to process it, they are told that the issuing officer doesn't exist. If they dig any deeper they find that the issuing officer does exist, but he is currently very deceased by a matter of ten years or so.
This specific ghost has devoted his afterlife to waiting around in his car (which is apparently also a ghost? a ghost car? is that anything?) to pull over teens and give them a hard time. Common advice for the area is that if you ever find yourself tailed by a police car in Golden Gate Park, wait until you're out of the park to pull over. Almost always the cop will vanish at the border of the park, off to spend more of his unlimited time and access to a spectral Crown Vic to ruin someone else's night.
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A Cautionary Tale About Dressing Like A Total Dingus; Or, The Fanciest Boy Who Ever Lived: A Memoir
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In 1806 at the age of 16, Joseph Thomas decided that he would become a traveling preacher, which was a job because it was the 1800s. To really drive home what a good preacher he was, he insisted on wearing all white everything everywhere he went, from his hat to his boots to his horse and saddlebags. Shockingly, Joseph Thomas appears to have been kind of a dildo. He was known for his flamboyance and his dramatic speeches; at one point he declared that he was renaming a town from Hainesburg to "Sodom" because of how gross he thought it was.
I guess all that dressing in white was no substitute for good old fashioned hygiene, because Joseph contracted smallpox and died in 1835 while traveling through New Jersey. Some members of the clergy who maybe thought Thomas was being a little much with all the white shit declined to bury his “contaminated corpse” in the Christian cemetery. Instead they dumped it in the less prestigious but much cooler named Dark Of The Moon Cemetery nearby. Apparently Joseph Thomas felt he had been snubbed, burial-wise, and for years could be sighted as a ghost, riding around the cemetery on a ghostly horse and making a big deal out of everything. Eventually in 1846 the town elders acquiesced to move Joseph's body over to the Christian cemetery and even built him a little monument in the hopes that it would shut him up, and apparently it worked!
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I'm Gonna Kill You Ray "John Bell" Romano
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In 1817 a Tennessee farmer named John Bell saw a weird dog on his property and, of course, tried to shoot it. This turns out not to have been the best decision, as John and his family quickly became the center of a lot more weirdness. John's son saw an impossibly big bird perched on their fence. John's daughter Betsy saw a vision of a girl in a green dress hanging from a tree. The whole family started hearing knocking on the door and walls, gnawing on beds, chains dragging, and invisible dogfights. Soon the presence also started snatching sheets off of the Bell children while they slept and pulling their hair. The spirit was particularly focused on Betsy, who was scratched and pinched and stuck with pins.
The Bells and their friends decided that the apparition was the witch of Kate Batts, a woman John Bell had frequent business disagreements with. The witch was specifically horrible to John and Betsy, but she loved John's wife Lucy, whom she called "the most perfect woman to ever walk the face of the earth." The witch would even sing for Lucy and bring her fruit and hazelnuts when she was under the weather.
The witch's presence was so extreme that President Andrew Jackson himself heard about it and came to investigate, bringing along a man who had told Jackson he was a very good witch tamer. When the witch refused to show herself to Jackson and his friends, Jackson began to get grumpy. The witch tamer, who was apparently feeling pretty good about himself at this point, loudly dared the witch to show herself. Almost immediately he leapt out of his chair, declaring that a thousand pins were sticking him. The witch called out in a disembodied voice just in front of the tamer, daring him to shoot. The man found that his gun had jammed, and it was at this point that the witch did her best to pull the man's nose off of his head. By the time Jackson got back to Nashville, he told his friends "I'd rather fight the entire British army than deal with this torment they call the Bell Witch!"
At no point did the witch lighten up on John, whom she called "Old Jack" and regularly abused verbally and physically. When John fell sick and was put on bedrest, the witch devoted her attention to poking and prodding him, making sure he never got a second of rest. She constantly told John that she was going to kill him. One day the family found John dead, his tongue blackened and a vial of black poison found nearby. The witch immediately claimed the credit for his poisoning, and even attended John's funeral for the sole purpose of loudly singing drinking songs toward the back. A class act all the way.
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Happy Spooky Month!
G. Host
Editor-In-Chief
The Ghost Hole
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We've Invaded The Mainstream!
If you enjoyed reading about these ghosts but are curious about what their fashion taste is, check out this absolutely insane thing I can't believe I was allowed to write for StyleCaster!
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Ghosts in the Cast
Do you want to learn about hauntings but despise the thought of reading and processing words? We got you! Follow us to The GhostCast, where we discuss everything from bullying teen ghosts to Google Reviews of Satan's house!
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Moar Ghost?
With SpookyTimes upon us, you're gonna need your spooky tank on full. Sprint (or jog, if you've had a long week) over to The Ghost Hole for more spooky tales!
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References for Issue 5: Revenge G(HO)sts
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