It was just supposed to be a short getaway from the city, five days to recover from the rigors of keeping the American economy thriving. We weren't expecting anything more exciting than a one-way conversation with an inbred small-town convenience store clerk. Wrong again.
I'd never believed in ghosts before but I do now. The bed and breakfast we stayed in the first night turned out to be haunted. Thankfully, this wasn't a mean ghost, just one who liked to tease. The door to the porch kept swinging open even though it was latched shut. It never opened when we were looking, but if my wife and I let our gaze slip it would open again. We soon got used to it and stopped being amazed. Then it would close and latch itself when we weren't looking.
The books in the room had not been in the possession of the original owners, they'd been bought used as evidenced by penciled fifty-cent and dollar prices in the front. One was a real estate prospectus from 1919 for the sale of sixty thousand acres in southern Alabama. Only eighty years had passed but the booklet seemed as if it were from another eon or maybe another planet. One picture showed a field of cotton which had apparently been cleared by the slash-and-burn technique that we now chastise developing countries for employing. Charred remains of trees poked out from the rows of white.
There was a photo of a field of corn next to one of a sharecropper family with eight kids. The caption read "Two Dependable Crops: Corn and Negroes." Eighty years ago some copywriter probably thought it was a catchy phrase; what passed for normal behavior in one generation is seen as an abomination by another. What are we doing that our children or grandchildren will recoil from in horror?
When I turned the page, I almost dropped the book.
"Pam....there's a picture of you in here."
She laughed at me and then turned pale as I handed it to her.
"No there isn't Nathan, but there is one of you."
When we both looked at the page, there were two people dressed in their Sunday best who didn't look anything like us at all.
We didn't sleep very well that night even though the ghost refrained from any high jinks. Maybe it got bored and went to play with guests down the hall.
As we drove out of town the next day, we talked about what had happened but couldn't decide whether we'd had a brush with the supernatural or had hallucinated, but either way, the odometer was running backwards until we reached the interstate.
© Copyright Erik Kosberg 1997, 2007
