Hey Pandas, What Is Your Go-To Ghost Story?

Well I’m pretty sure my mother and I were haunted at the vintage rec room at the Newagen Inn…

But the one I tell is of Old Man Gurney on Murder Island. Every summer kids would kayak out to the little island on the little-known lake in Maine. They’d party and trash the little cedar shack with the peeling red paint. One night, in 1960, Old Man Gurney had enough. While the young delinquents were passed out on the smooth rock that made up most of the tiny island, he went around and snatched them up. When the teens awoke the next day, the found some of their friends to be missing, kayaks floating upside down in the middle of the roiling lake. When they heard the wind keeping through Gurney’s rusted turbine ventilator, they knew what had happened. At least, they thought they did…
The teens believed their friends had drowned, kayaking drunk. But one kid had other ideas. She thought it strange that they didn’t hear their friends struggle. Didn’t hear anything. So she snuck her way onto Old Man Gurney’s fishing boat and decided to poke around while the creepy codger was on the mainland. She found his sink full of blood, but wasn’t too concerned. That was where he butchered his pescan catches. But she had a gut feeling… She leaned down into the sink and, suppressing a gag, nabbed something caught in the drain. She rinsed off the item and examined it.

It was a tooth.

A human tooth.

Before she could utter a single syllable of a scream, arms wrapped around her from behind, heavy rubber gloves covering her mouth. Her head was slammed into the sink.

Once. She saw red.

Twice. She saw black.

Thrice. She was dead.

They say you can still hear the children’s wails when the wind blows through that rusty ventilator on that decrepit crimson shack. And sometimes, when the sun hits the morning fog just right, you can see Old Man Gurney, cleaning his latest catch.

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So first of, the obligatory ‘I don’t believe in ghosts’ statement, because, well, I don’t!
My dad used to work for the local authorities driving around the elderly and people with disabilities. This meant he got free entry to a lot of places, air shows, museums, that sort of thing. If I was out of school (which happened a lot due to my behaviour) I’d get to tag along.
One Autumn he was tasked with taking a group of 80+ year olds to Ham House (allegedly the most haunted place in England).
While there we there I took plenty of pictures of the building, the grounds, the staff wearing period costumes.
When we developed the pictures (this was before digital cameras) there was not a single one that included the staff in period dress. I mean, the photos were there, but the staff were not in the pictures.
My dad didn’t believe in ghosts until we got to a photo of him posing for a picture with his arm around… nobody, it was just hanging in the air.

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