Ghost Stories
I spend a fair amount of time on Twitter. I used to avoid it, mostly because 140 characters didn’t seem like enough room to say anything worthwhile. As I’ve come to use it more and pay more attention to what others are tweeting, though, I’ve come to agree with Alexander Pope that brevity is the soul of wit (though sometimes it’s also the soul of vapidity and total unintelligibility).
When I heard this week that Mashable Reads and Penguin Teen had invited Twitter users to tweet ghost stories using the hashtag #TwitterGhostStory, I was intrigued at what people would come up with. After all, 140 characters (minus 17 for the hashtag) isn’t a lot of room to put a plot together. As it happens, though, while there were plenty of overcompressed variations of “I was alone in the house and I heard a noise,” there were also quite a few that made it into Creepytown despite the limitations.
(I participated, too, by the way: here’s what I think was my best effort, which I put in verse:
Man in the forest said:
“Next week you will be dead.”
I took the offered deal;
My lover died instead.
#TwitterGhostStory
— Douglas Gibson (@dougibson) October 28, 2015)
So here are my top five favorites from among the entries—you’ve got until next Hallowe’en to come up with your own!
5. There were a lot of tweets based on the speaker being confused about his or her death, but I think this one takes the cake:
#TwitterGhostStory “You aren’t real,” I told the dead person in the mirror. “Neither are you,” he said as he reached out and shattered me.
— David Lubar (@davidlubar) October 30, 2015
4. Naturally, a lot of entries were meant to be humorous, but I think this one managed to blend the funny and the macabre pretty nicely:
#TwitterGhostStory Housesitting: “Any problems?” he asks. “Nah, though your giant stuffed bunny scared me,” I say. “We don’t have a bunny.”
— TJ Anderson (@andersonteejay) October 28, 2015
3. In a similar vein, there’s this one:
“They say you are what you wear,” said the cannibal, fiddling with his dry, yellow mask. “In which case I’m your sister.” #TwitterGhostStory
— Stefan Bachmann (@Stefan_Bachmann) October 26, 2015
2. As I mentioned, a lot of people wrote tweets in which someone heard a noise at night even though they were alone, or saw something out their window when nothing could be there, or came across a person who should have been dead but apparently wasn’t. This one, however, is unsurpassed for sheer shock value:
@PenguinTeen I woke to Ma cooking bacon, only remembering she had died when part of her face fell in the pan #TwitterGhostStory #sweepstakes
— Alicia S. (@NinjaMomAllie) October 26, 2015
1. Given that the contest happened on Twitter, I was surprised that people didn’t depict more modern methods of haunting. For that reason, I think this one wins the prize:
#twitterghoststory I once got an email
Subject: help
Body: where are you?
When I Googled the sender’s email address, I got a memorial page.
— MadelineScare (@madelineclaire_) October 26, 2015
Finally, I’ll leave you with this, from one of Asheville’s home town heroes, author Megan Shepherd (and if you don’t get the reference, you should have a look at this Wikipedia article):
#TwitterGhostStory Turn the lights off. Look into the mirror. Say “black blood” three times. This will appear: https://t.co/jiAM9fd5Bm
— Megan Shepherd (@megan_shepherd) October 26, 2015
