Maiden Voyage, January 6, 2012

Everyday ghost stories have been a guilty pleasure of mine
for years. In 2004 I started doing ghost tours in the French Quarter. I met a
lot of people from all over. As we chatted some shared their own ghost stories
with me. I think simply to share such a story with someone who would not think
they were crazy. Well, I’ve been collecting them over the years, and I fear I’m
becoming something of a hoarder, so I’ve started this blog to share my own
guilty pleasure with whomever is as curious as myself.

This is the story that got me started. I’m afraid it wasn’t in the French Quarter but during a Garden District ghost tour. Just as the tour was wrapping up one of the participants offered up his own ghost story. If I remember correctly he was from Ohio and in the landscaping business. His brother married a girl from China, right off the boat as it were: she knew little of America
and nothing of his family. One night she woke up and saw a man standing at the
foot of the bed. She screamed and woke his brother, made him search the house
top to bottom. No one. It must be a ghost she said, it’s a warning, be careful.
Well a few days later he was waiting at a traffic light and when the light
turned green he hesitated. A spilt second later a Mac truck blew through the
red light. He would have been killed. It got his attention, but it was still
something he could rationalize away. Well months later it was Thanksgiving, his
new wife’s fist Thanksgiving with his family, and she was meeting everyone for
the first time. His mother sat her on the couch and gave her a family album to
look through. Moments later she called to her husband, “This is him. This is
the man I saw at the foot of the bed.” She pointed to a picture of one of his
cousins, a young man who’d been killed in a car accident over four years before
his wife had arrived in America.