Reminds me of a book I unearthed while unpacking my old paperbacks last night.
I ordered this from a Scholastic Book Club catalog when I was in third grade. I know I don't remember any of the stories in this book because I didn't read them. The picture on page 50 stopped me in my tracks.
In 1936, two photographers on assignment for Country Life magazine were taking photos of Raynham Hall in Norfolk, England. One of the photographers saw "a vapoury form gradually assuming the appearance of a woman" gliding down the staircase, and the photo of the "Brown Lady Ghost" was taken.
The first time I saw this picture I was eight years old and living in Inwood, Iowa. It was in the fall of 1977, and once a week instead of walking home from the bus stop, I'd walk to the laundromat and climb the steps of a dark stairwell to my Cub Scout meeting on the second floor.
Seeing an actual picture of a "real" ghost was frightening enough, but the stairs the ghost was floating above looked exactly like the stairs at the laundromat! It doesn't matter that the haunted stairway was half a world away, and it looked nothing like the laundromat's stairs; they were exactly the same! Oh my God! I'm never going to another Cub Scout meeting again!
But I couldn't miss the meetings. My mom was one of the den mothers, and she'd notice that I wasn't there. Moms are like that. The only way I was going to solve my problem was by facing my fears. And by "facing my fears", I mean shutting my eyes and sprinting up the steps as fast as I could. When the meetings were over, I'd survive the steps by challenging someone to race me down, or I'd simply yell, "Last one down's a booger head!" and bolt down the steps before my mom could grab my collar and make me walk.
By the time Christmas rolled around, I had the biggest calves in the troop.
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This was not a good mix.
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