Ghost Hunters

400 years. That’s how long I’ve been here, since my most unfortunate death. 400 years, and I’ve never seen anything like it. That’s not to say that I haven’t seen some crazy things over the centuries. Starting with the scheming that went on over my estate, which I regret to say started while I was still very much alive. That’s part of why I stuck around – I was hoping for a chance to avenge my death. It’s too bad I didn’t get a handle on the whole ghost thing in time to do more than blow my murderer’s candle out every night while he was on his way to bed. It did get on his nerves, that. Especially since it happened on a different part of the stairs every time. The hours his servants spent trying to find the source of the draft...

Don’t know why he thought he’d last longer than I did once he’d set the precedent - that was the first of several poisonings that I witnessed. I’m surprised none of the victims stuck around, like I did, to get their revenge. The company would have been nice. Unless it was my cousin. Wouldn’t want to spend eternity with someone who put rat poison in my beer.

And of course the lady of the house was strangled in 1863. It was blamed on housebreakers, but I know it was my great-great-great – however many greats - grandnephew. I’m sorry Emma didn’t stick around after her murder. She was a pretty little thing. Reminded me of my own wife (who I did NOT murder. That was housebreakers).

And there were some people here in the 1890s who called themselves spiritualists. And some more of them in the 1970s who were frankly just a bit nuts. They all went through some really bizarre rituals trying to contact “the spirits in the house”. It’s just me, folks, and I’m not in the mood to forward messages from the shade of your long-dead gerbil.

But the people who are here now. My god. There are dozens of them. With cameras, and weird clicking machines. And the stories they’re telling about me are completely false. They’re repeating the lies that were spread by MY murderer, who wanted to deflect attention from the fact that perfectly healthy men don’t generally drop dead after half a tankard of beer. Then his son poisoned him three months after he took possession, because he wouldn’t increase the boy’s allowance. Serves the bastard right.

My darling wife was everything to me. True, she had produced half a dozen useless female children, without giving me the heir I so desperately needed in order to keep my vile cousin from inheriting. But I would never have harmed her just to marry someone else. That’s the story they’re telling to their cameras. They’re such liars (reminds me of some of my relatives, actually). Why, they’re even pretending that the four of them are here alone in the dark. There’s a whole damned crew. Cameramen. Directors. Stage Managers. They’ve set up a buffet meal in the kitchen, for god’s sake. But of course they’re not showing that in their shots. They’re spending all their time in the great hall trying to annoy me into doing something they can film.

Fortunately it’s kept all of them busy for the last two hours. Not being solid anymore, it takes me a lot longer to move things around. If they weren’t so busy calling on me to bang on the suit of armor in the great hall if I want to refute the claims against me, I definitely wouldn’t have had time to add all that arsenic to the buffet and then hide the container.

Maybe one of them will decide to stick around…