A Ghost of a Chance

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If it hadn’t been for the rain and the pending decision of whether Heaven or Hell awaited the arrival of my soul, I might have embraced the last day of my connection with Planet Earth with a sense of joyful expectation. But although I know that it is the mother of all clichés, it was a dark and stormy day. That’s the best way it could be described.

It had been raining the proverbial cats and dogs off and on since about 3:30 a.m., which was five hours ago. The day dawned on one of those gray amorphous masses where the clouds are sucked down to the ground and the air is an ugly mixture of fog, hanging mist, and intermittent rain showers.

Looking outside through this soup revealed a vista of drab colors. The effect was like looking out through dirty lace curtains. The ugliness of the beautiful city was suddenly exposed. Every living and inanimate thing seemed like an apparition.

When I was a kid growing up in southern New Jersey, and hadn’t yet come to hate the rain, I would think of days like these as good days for hunkering down with a good book or watching old movies on television. Or, perhaps, for gathering a few friends in the gloom of the backyard clubhouse we had fashioned from an old rusty tool shed and telling stories while the rain drummed out a spooky cadence on the tin roof.

With the imagination of youth as our guide and the dreariness of a sputtering camp lantern as our inspiration, we would inevitably turn to ghost stories. Like the one I am about to tell you.