Opinion: Always ready to bring a ghost story to life

I can’t say as I’ve ever seen a ghost or had a paranormal experience. But I have managed to start or stir a few ghost stories in my time.

My wife and I have stayed at many of the historic hotels and ghost towns of the Southwest that are supposed to be haunted. I’ve been ready and willing to speak with a specter. I want to believe, really I do. Even just a glimpse would have been encouraging to the effort. But nothing has ever appeared.

Growing up we re-told the tale of Dead Man’s Bridge, where they supposedly found a man hanging from the bridge over the stormwater ditch to the local wastewater treatment plant. I didn’t come up with the tale but I spread it around.

One year at Halloween we flew a black bat kite out over the street with a plastic milk carton illuminated by a flashlight inside hanging beneath it. The light bobbing above the street, while we hid inside the garage giggling, really backed traffic up. Next day the newspaper headlines read: “Strange Lights Sighted Over South Ave. A.”

I also confess to conspiring with coworkers to hide a rather fierce looking stuffed badger in the dark hallway near the time clock late on Saturday nights at the newspaper. New mailroom employees often wet their pants when they saw the snarling beast in the dark at 2 a.m.

After I began working for the Chamber of Commerce, I teased a reporter interviewing me a little more than I probably should have. Yeah, before I could stop myself I had blurted out that the old hotel downtown was haunted. I don’t even remember the story I made up. Somehow, after the hotel was purchased I heard the new owner one day retelling that the hotel was haunted.

I nearly lost it but somehow managed not to give away my secret. That owner died before he finished remodeling so maybe there was a curse or something.

Perhaps my greatest effort at putting forth a haunting legend came while my wife was a patient in the Glenwood Springs, Colorado, hospital. It’s located right at the foot of the hill where Wild West legend Doc Holliday rests in the town’s version of Boot Hill. I reminded my wife of that fact one night before I left her in her room for the night.

The next morning, as I was having breakfast with my sweet, but impressionable wife, she began telling me she thought she had seen Doc’s ghost outside her room before daylight that morning. She was recovering from a really rough time so I was just politely listening to her story.

About that time the young woman with the hospital’s food services piped up and said: “Oh, that was just my dad out there walking the grounds where the new hospital wing is going in.”

Her dad was a county commissioner, consumed with the hospital expansion. He was also a Western gunfight re-enactor who always dressed the part everywhere he went, in hat, cowboy duster and tall boots with the pants tucked inside.

Even Doc Holliday can rise from the grave if the right suggestions are planted in a willing mind.

Karl Terry writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at: [email protected]