Ghost stories

This week was the perfect time to spend a lot longer than I'd intended on reading random web pages. One day during a couple of Halloween shows and later over the course of a fairly dull 1940s movie I managed to read a few “top 15” type lists with descriptions of the best family Halloween movies followed by a long collection of ghost stories. The lists I found while searching for ideas for movies to project on the side of the house for Halloween and most of them mentioned movies I thought we had, “Coraline” and “The Nightmare Before Christmas”, as well as the Sponge Bob and Peanuts specials. While we were watching the black and white movie that was on after a decent but forgettable ghost story movie, I looked up some ghost stories that had to be better than the one on TV. Some of the more interesting things I read were about haunted sites in Kansas such as Atchinson and Stull. I read more about the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park Colorado that “The Shining” was written about and wish I'd known about that when I was in Estes Park; now I want to go back there for a weekend trip. One website was having a contest for true ghost stories, and I noticed that 16 of the 23 entries were stories either people remembered from childhood or experienced with their kids or grandkids. A few of the stories even described the same type of red-eyed shadow figure as had been on an episode of “Ghost Hunters” this week. I didn't think about it at the time, but after writing about how so many children were the focus of these ghost stories, it made me wonder what would happen if these children happened to mention their experiences at school. How would the teacher react to a child's unwavering belief that he or she had experienced something supernatural?