Asheville Scare (7/6/07)

In the almost one year I’ve been in Asheville, I’ve yet to be spooked, scared or even creeped out.

People keep telling me this is a haunted town, where ghosts wander the streets after dark and strange orbs appear in photographs. Being a skeptic, I would probably just assume that there were just some Eminem sightings and camera malfunctions. But I still want to get freaked out.

When I was in high school, a friend claimed there was a ghost living in his basement. The ghost even had a not-so-clever name that was given by his 5-year-old brother, “Ghosty.”

During the summer of 1999, a videotape surfaced of the spirit sitting at the bar in my friend’s basement, sipping on what was probably milk, but may have been ghost beer. Most of the stories he and his mother told about the ghost were fairly believable (if you were a believer) and had a decent storyline.

Apparently an antique car was purchased and sat in the family’s garage for years. The story behind the car was that it was owned by Depression-era bootleggers and was known to have a spirit following it from owner to owner. I heard stories of missing clothes, late-night conversations between the ghost and my friend’s kid brother and strange noises usually associated with ghosts (coughs, laughs, the occasional fart). I was convinced enough, mainly because I just wanted to be freaked out. Littleton, Colo., didn’t have much history. The oldest building was the strip mall that contained the liquor store, grocery store and Chinese restaurant (circa 1985).

So the videotape surfaced and I showed it to several people, some believing what they saw, some laughing in my face and then eating the last cheese pizza Hot Pocket in my parents’ freezer. But I tried my best to stay true to my belief in what I thought I saw. Plus, it was a pretty easy way to get girls to come over, get spooked and then crawl into your arms. Or so one would think.

Anyhow, I, like most other times in my life was wrong. The kid was a whiz with the camcorder and spliced a bunch of footage together of a dark room, his brother sipping on what was actually milk and putting it all together to make me look like a fool.

As I wrote before, I am skeptical about that kind of stuff. But I’m fascinated by its potential presence in the human world.

I recently saw the movie “1408,” which was an abomination and made me angry that I spent $8 that could have gone toward “Live Free or Die Hard.” In the movie, a surprisingly mild-tempered Samuel L. Jackson mentions that humans want to believe in ghosts because it gives them some sort of proof of an afterlife. That was the only semi-coherent sentiment from the movie because the rest of the time I was too depressed thinking about how poorly John Cusack, aka Lloyd Dobler, has aged.

I also hope what Jackson’s character said was true because I plan on giving ghost tours of my own haunted past. “And if you look over that way, you’ll see a spirit moving slowly away from us. It’s my dignity, circa 2002.”