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2002-10-08
I'm a dork and a coward.

I am a dork.

Most of y'all knew this already, but I figured I'd say it again.

Today, I am a dork because, again, I get teary-eyed over the carbon freezing chamber scene in The Empire Strikes Back.

"I love you."
"I know."
*sniff*

 

What you might not know is that I am also a coward.

Yeah, I swagger and sway and talk tough and everything, but when it comes down to it...

Coward.

So utterly a coward.

And you know what scares me the most?

"Real-life" ghost stories.

 

Tell me they really happened, show me photographs of "real life ghosts," give me tales of the bizarre and scary, and, yeah, I'm going to obsessively read it, and then stay up late convinced that every single little sound I hear (even the ones I make) are ghosts throwing things right and left.

God help me if I ever actually meet one. I will promptly be wetting my pants and screaming.

So, of course, what do I do today? I spend a fair portion of it reading HP Lovecraft and real-life ghost stories from the States.

Bad. Idea.

Yes, Kate, that chilled feeling is not because it's actually October in England and it's bloody cold, it's a ghost! That sound that might be a monitor hum because you're surrounded by computers isn't a monitor hum, it's a ghost! Those people you see around you -- they're not real people, they're ghosts!

And what did I do yesterday? Oh yeah, looked at more ghost websites!

 

It's a sick fascination of mine. Ghosts terrify me, but I have to read about them. And this goes back to when I was around 8 or so and obsessively reading my dad's issues of Fate magazine. Dead children, psychic phenomena, wartime heroes...oh yeah, I read it all.

Moved up (or is it down) to true-life ghost accounts written for the young adult set, and a couple of horror anthologies meant for kids. Got so terrified by one once that I ended up having to sleep in my mother's bed just to make myself calm down.

It didn't work very well, though, because I was petrified from a story I read where a girl was putting together a jigsaw puzzle that turned out to look just like her and her house but there was something in the window and my mother's bedroom had huge glass patio doors.

Yep. Genius idea there. I'm scared of a face in the window, and I move into my mother's room with the giant windows.

But, hey, I was 10. What do you expect from me?

 

The ghost thing is so messed up, though. I kinda believe, just because that's the kind of person I am -- tendency to believe anything, and then it just messes with my head.

Like, okay, the Queen Mary. In Long Beach. Went to it plenty of times, because, dude, it's what you do when you're a kid living in Long Beach. And in the engine room, there's this spot where one of the mechanics was crushed by a watertight door.

And it's supposed to be haunted. Like seriously haunted.

And the little tour goes right through it.So I can't go through it.

The last time I went, I was lucky, and they were setting up the engine room for Halloween and everything, so they weren't letting people in, but the husband and my dad snuck down there via the "up" escalator (turned off, thankfully) and went through it.

And, dude, I stayed away. And I felt cold, and sick, and just freaked out and I wasn't even near the spot.

So me. Coward. Big. Freakin'. Coward.

Mock me.

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