Work Text:
Statement of Rose Weston regarding the peculiarities of her hometown in Illinois, United States. Statement originally given April 3rd, two-thousand and five. Reading by Jonathan Sims, head archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.
Statement begins.
I grew up in Amity Park, you see, and it wasn't always the way it is now. In fact, up until about a year ago, it was a perfectly normal, mid-sized, Midwest town. When I was young, the most notable thing about it was... well... nothing, really. Maybe the local Tasty Burger rebranding to Nasty Burger because of their signs being repeatedly defaced, but even that was only really interesting with context. It was hardly a tourist destination.
Its tallest building was nothing compared the to sky-scrapers of Chicago or New York. It didn't have any major industries or exports that drew tourists in like Napa Valley or Hollywood. In fact, until the Fenton family moved into town, Amity Park had nothing unique or interesting to speak of—and even then, it was just a pair of relatively harmless oddballs living in an old broadcast building that had been re-zoned into residential housing.
That was why, growing up, I'd always wanted to leave, and why I pursued my current career as a flight attendant. I work the Chicago to London route for United, usually only once a day, but around the holidays I'll sometimes be on the flight both ways. I don't see much of Amity Park except on my days off, since my family still lives there, but the plane passes right over the town and sometimes I look out the windows and try to pick out the few meager landmarks I can find.
From 30,000 feet, the town looks even more unremarkable.
About a year ago, though, things started to change. I don't know when or why exactly, but there was no denying it.
One day, I went to catch my flight in Chicago, and then when I came home it was to my youngest ranting about ghosts—oh, I have three kids, by the way, all sons, and a wonderful husband who does his best to care for them when I'm away. My youngest is named Wes (Wesley Weston), and his whole life he's tended to be completely entrenched in a new and different interest when I come home for my time off than he did when I left for work.
Some of them stick, some don't, but he's always excited about something new, so when that something was ghosts, I didn't think much of it at first. Kyle, Wes' older twin, was quick to dismiss his ghost talk as flights of fancy, but my husband, Walter, acted strangely about this new interest. More... invested?Almost afraid, really.
I'd never known my husband to be particularly superstitious, at least, not when it came to anything frightening or morbid like ghosts and curses. He'd still toss a penny into the occasional fountain and knock on wood, but it wasn't like he believed in Bigfoot or aliens, so I was surprised when he seemed to take Wes' ghost talk so seriously.
Still, though that was a bit odd, It didn't seem like anything to worry about.
But it wasn't just my own family. When I went out the next day to run some errands, it was like the whole town was suddenly on a ghost kick. The Fentons, Jack and Maddie, of course, had always been obsessed with ghosts, but the rest of the town had always seen them as kooks because of it.
Certainly there had never been this much chatter about ghosts before, even with Jack Fenton parading around town in his hideous orange jumpsuit with a bullhorn and a Ghostbusters backpack shouting about the dangers of 'ecto-entities', as he put it. People had certainly never sounded so serious about it.
Even so, I did nothing more than furrow my brows and shrug at the lot of them, assuming it was just some local fad I was too out-of-the-loop to understand.
But each time I returned, the ghost mania was even greater than the last. The organic fruit stand I like to buy pears from switch from displaying their wares in cardboard boxes to woven baskets, and when I remarked on the change, the proprietor explained, without a hint of irony, that he had to move away from boxes because a ghost kept stealing them and leaving his fresh fruits behind all battered and bruised.
When I got the chance to go to the local flea market one weekend, there were dozens of booths and tables of people trying to sell things to repel ghosts. They had everything, from incense and crystals, to futuristic looking 'anti-ghost' ray guns they claimed had the 'Fenton seal of approval'. I couldn't conceive of any reason why someone might want that, especially for anything resembling a weapon.
There was a brief moment I wondered if my family had organized all these people just to string me along for the sake of a prank. After all, I was only ever in town for a few days at a time, it wouldn't be hard to pull off an act like this for short stints like that. The fact of the matter, however, is that neither my husband, nor any of my kids are sociable or determined enough to pull off such a thing.
That left me to conclude that my entire home town was, indeed, going insane.
Either that or I was.
Oh, but maybe I was. Maybe I am. Because I absolutely swear I saw one, last time I went home.
I saw a ghost.
It was... Tuesday. On the rare occasions when I get a day off, it's usually in the middle of the week. Weekends are busier for passenger airlines. I got in from Chicago, and I was going to surprise my boys by picking them up from school. They go to my Alma Mater, Casper High.
When I got there, the school parking lot was empty. School gets out at 3:30pm, and I thought maybe I'd come too early or too late—because of the nature of my work, my sense of time is all out of wack. Jet lag is a constant in my life, but I wear a watch synced to Central Time so that I can make sure it's a reasonable hour back home when I call my family. My watch said it was three, and I knew it couldn't be in the AM because it was sunny.
But the lot—or I guess over here you call it a car park—was completely empty, except for me and my husband's beat-up brown station wagon. No teachers or students there at all. Maybe it was a half-day? I thought. I went to the building, and it was unlocked, so I thought perhaps I could ask at the administration office, so I started down the hall.
You know how it feels to go back to your old school as an adult. That mix of nostalgia and déja vu? How it feels like nothing's changed, but at the same time, everything looks a little smaller, a little older. That was how I felt when I entered. But... the further I went down those halls, the more that feeling shifted from fond to... unsettling, I guess would be the best word.
I was wandering for several minutes down halls I should have known like the back of my hand, and I swore I should have reached the administration office much faster than that. Thinking that maybe I'd passed it, I turned around to retrace my steps, but I found that I couldn't remember what turns I'd taken. I found myself in a part of the school that I recognized, but couldn't remember, like I'd only seen it in pictures.
Just was I was starting to think I'd gotten myself completely lost, perhaps in a wing of the school that had been built after I graduated, I finally saw someone. Well... I saw the back of a white shirt, turning a corner.
It was the first living thing I'd seen since I'd parked my car, or so I thought. So I followed after it, calling out, you know. "Excuse me! It's seems I've gotten a little turned around. Could you help me? Excuse me!"
I followed around the corner, only to see that back retreating around another at the end of a long, locker-lined hallway. I kept chasing. My footsteps speeding up, high-heels echoing in the empty corridors. Finally, I reached a dead-end. Another wall, lined with lockers. It was then that I realized the color had all drained away, and the school I remembered, adorned with bright red spirit banners, and snot green lockers, was completely gray-scale. I don't know when it happened, but suddenly, even I was in black-and white.
I was barely beginning to process the change, and hadn't even begun to consider what was even happening, when I heard a voice behind me.
"How'd you get here?" it said, nasally and squeaky, like a boy in the middle of puberty.
When I turned, that was what I saw. A boy, monochrome, just like my surroundings, with buck teeth, acne, and huge, round glasses.
"I... I don't know," I said. "I think I'm very lost." I tried to laugh it off, but the boy tilted his head, confused.
"You don't belong here," he said.
Then, in the blink of an eye, everything snapped back into color. I was no longer standing at a dead end, but in the familiar hallways of my old school, right outside my senior English classroom. I could see students through the window.
I looked back at the boy, wide-eyed, but he looked different now.
"What's wrong, ma'am?" he asked, laughingly, as his still monochrome form became gradually more translucent until he disappeared, his nasally voice echoing, "You look like you've seen a ghost."
I hurried out of the school as fast as I could, past full classrooms and into the packed parking lot where I found my husband's car. I pulled out of the lot and decided to pull it into the line of other parent's cars in front of the school and just honk when I saw one of my sons.
When Wes went on about ghosts, as had become the norm with him, I found myself listening more closely than usual, even as a shiver ran down my spine the more in-depth he got. I tried to rationalize, to convince myself that it had been something mundane, or even a hallucination, but nothing like that had every happened to me before, and it hasn't since.
Still, I find myself waiting for it. Wondering when I'll walk down an aisle with my beverage cart and find the plane completely empty, or step out of the elevator into one of the hotels I've stayed in a thousand times and suddenly have no idea how to navigate it. It was no hallucination, nor was it confusion, or a mistake. I know that boy was a ghost. I just... I'm still not sure what he did to me... or why.
Statement Ends.
Mrs. Weston's story appears to describe a textbook encounter with the spiral. I am, of course, curious as to the identity of this supposed ghost, she mentioned. I had my assistants look into it, but all Martin could find by researching "Casper High School" and "Ghost" were a series of children's movies and what appeared to be someone's fictionalized journalism blog, containing numerous articles about ghosts supposedly attacking a school of the same name.
The others were equally unable to find any concrete evidence to corroborate this statement.