A Spook Story of Sprightly Adventure
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF
A BLUE GHOST
THIS is a message from the Beyond, sketching my brief experience as a blue ghost, and nowhere have I dyed any of the plain sober gray stuff of actual events in the bright hues of my own vivid imagination, for I hold that those things which are set down exactly as they took place are the most valuable of human transcriptions. They leave the mind free to judge for itself, without prejudice or bias, except its own prejudice and bias, which is the highest freedom and truth.
Names, dates, events, herein are all genuine, and my tombstone in Greenwood Cemetery is a silent yet sure witness that I died. A bill of seventeen dollars and eighty cents still standing against the stone testifies that, though dead, my credit yet lives. And that I am alive as a ghost can not be disputed by any reasonable mind, since there are things set down here too ghostly to have been set down by any hand but that of a ghost. I leave it to an unprejudiced jury of six men and six ghosts.
Enter at the main gate of Greenwood Cemetery, pace off fifty-four steps to the north, turn west seven steps, vault the fence here and pace twenty steps north, and read on my tombstone
"Sacred to the memory of
Robert Jay Tuffley
Born April first, 1880
Died April first, 1919
Rest in peace."
But I didn't rest in peace very long, for the ghost of a man named Edwin X. Benjamin came along shortly after my funeral, and almost on the heels of my last mourner, a little tailor from lower Fifth Street, and kicking with his ghostly feet on my brand-new tombstone shouted for me to "come out of it" and pay him the ten dollars that I had honestly forgotten I owed him.
Besides, he didn't need the money, while several others to whom I honestly owed more than ten dollars did need their money. I called back for him to fetch me out of it, for it was the first time I had died in quite a while and I couldn't recall just how to resurrect myself from the paper mache coffin in which my loving friends had buried me, and I was afraid unless I was very careful that I might resurrect myself wrong and there would be the devil to pay.
He shouted down some directions, which I followed, and soon my ghost was standing beside Benjamin's ghost. He was a blue ghost too, only bluer than myself, and looked kind of fuzzy around the edges, like a raveled ghost, but more like a hazy transparent silhouette of his former self, I could look right through him and see several tombstones beyond.
I stared about the quiet graveyard, then exclaimed: "Why, I'm not dead! This isn't hell!"
The ghost of Benjamin, that I will call Ben for brevity's sake, gave a short nasty laugh, as he replied: "No, not yet; you haven't been here long enough."
I felt quite weak, being only just born as a ghost, and taking a few steps I sat down on a stone and stared at a tombstone. Suddenly I gave a gasp, for on the tombstone were the words:
"Ching Lung Hi
Born January ninth, 1882
Died July seventh, 1916"
"It's a Chinaman's grave!" I yelled. "And my grave next door to it!"
Ben yawned. "Sure! This is the Chinese addition to Greenwood."
"There's going to be a lawsuit over burying me in a chink graveyard," I scowled."
"There was a lawsuit," said Ben. "The Chinese company who owns this section of the cemetery got a judgment of two hundred dollars and costs against your undertaker for burying you here."
I looked hard at Ben and saw he meant it, so I decided to drop my lawsuit and start something else rolling to bring me in a few dollars.
"How did you get here?" I asked Ben, looking about and seeing no Ford, and wishing for something on wheels that would spare me the trouble of traveling afoot, for I did not propose to spend the balance of my ghostly existence in a Chinese graveyard.
Ben brought a hazy-looking bicycle from behind a tombstone. "On my bike, of course."
"Can a ghost ride a bike?" I asked.
"Ghost bikes," replied Ben, "This is the mechanical ghost of my old bike, and it's all right except its make and action and a puncture in the back tire. I was coming across the path there when I punctured it on the tooth of a dead Chinaman that had worked out of the ground. Just my blame blue luck!"
For twenty years, while alive as boy and man, Ben had ridden the same bike, with a racing saddle about the size of a parcel post stamp, and now his ghost was riding the ghost of that bike. This is what I would call habit wedded to economy, but flirting with parsimony.
"Any room for me on the handle bars?" I asked.
Ben looked hurt and, getting on the bike, started off. I ran after him and begged him to give me a few tips about ghostland, to put me wise to the tricks that are ghostly and the wiles that are beyond the grave.
"Anyway, tell me, am I here to stay?" I asked.
"Did you bring your nerve along?" he demanded.
"Sure," I replied.
"Then, we'll never shake you." With this, he rode away and left my young ghost standing in the center of that Chinese graveyard.
I was a blue ghost, and I felt it. I looked myself over and found I was blame poor stuff. I stuck a finger through myself sideways and pulled it out, and nothing came out of myself but my finger. It didn't hurt either, except for a brief pain in my finger. All there was to me was a kind of hazy blue outline and the consciousness of my identity as Robert Jay Tuffley. I seemed to be just identity—just Bob
