Well, It’s Halloween Week

So Obviously We Need To Talk About Ghosts

And how they just don’t want to hang out with me.

You read that right.

Ghosts don’t want to hang out with me. In fact, I’m surrounded by people who ghosts love to shoot the dead breeze with, but when it comes to myself—you guessed it—I’m ghosted.

And hey, it’s not for lack of trying.

Every new city I go to, I drag my husband into doing a late-night ghost tour. Oh, and I have been to some exhaustively terrifying places, my friends. Are some spots more haunted than others? Sure. But when I’m literally standing in the bowels of New Orleans’ French Quarter at midnight, and no one wants to say boo? When I’m sitting on sawdust-laden floor where Wild Bill got shot to death in Deadwood, sipping on bad whiskey after closing time, and I can’t even get a phantom cling of a shotgun shell on the floor behind me? When I’m traipsing around Dracula’s castle in Transylvania in the middle of the night, yet no shadow figures wanna take a dance across the 2+ thousand-year-old stones?

You better believe I take this personally.

What kind of live person is a ghost looking for to chill with? There’s got to be criteria, and if any of the ghosts out there in the world are on the internet, please get back to me at the email below with a succinct list of terms.

You can also subscribe while you’re at it, thanks.

Now, I’m not trying to get any portals to the damned open, or Dante’s entire club scene reopened. Nah, none of that dark stuff, nobody wants that. I’m also not looking to be the next Long Island Medium. I just want to sit at the big kids ghost table. Keep it rated G at Casper-type run-ins. Everybody else is doin it.

And I know I’d probably regret it if I posted this and tonight while I’m waiting for my melatonin gummies to set in, a spooky spirit pops up just in time to keep me up until dawn.

But still. You guys, I just want to feel cool at parties.

Put me in a group with all my friends and family and ask everyone if they’ve ever had a supernatural experience. They all have stories. Some small, some really creepy, and some still ongoing (my best friend, Eloise, is a literal ghost magnet)

I can’t even get out an honest story about a “chill” or a “feeling”. I can’t even pretend to become theatrically horrified by some random pocket of cold air like Zak Bagans. I’ve been irrevocably hot and sweaty since I got pregnant, let’s be real.  

Maybe it’s because I try too hard, and ghosts just don’t wanna be chased. I amp the spook level up not just during the Halloween season, but all year long. I watch and rewatch the scariest of horror movies and TV. I read the most disturbing, something-is-definitely-in-the-corner-of-your-bedroom books. Hell, as an author, I’ve even written a handful of horror fiction beauties. Which, by the way, I wrote in 100+ year-old houses because I have lived in 2 of those.

I PAINT MY NAILS BLACK AND LISTEN TO MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE, WHAT MORE DO YOU SPOOKIES WANT FROM ME?!

Even if, let’s say, ghosts aren’t real, my imagination runs wild enough that I am constantly scaring myself. Open closet doors, under the bed hollows, and dark shadows in the quiet of 3 a.m.’s still give me the heebie jeebies like I’m 8 years old. That should be enough fraught energy that a poltergeist shows up every now and then to calm me back down to reality, right?

“Tab, you’re going to bring on something you don’t want, be careful what you wish for—”

Okay, relax, Monkey’s Paw.

I don’t want to be haunted. And if I’m honest with myself, I probably really don’t want to see or feel any kind of ghost.

It just hurts that no wispy woman in white or old gnarly headless sea captain even asks. They won’t even give me the opportunity to say, “Hey, no thanks” and put 50 bucks worth of sage to good use. No one will ever walk into my house with an instant nose wrinkle-up and a short gag, professing, “Tab, what on earth is that smell?”

“Oh, that’s sage,” I’d say in this pipe dream. “And boy, have I got a story for you.”

Thank you for coming to my Tab Talk. Don’t miss the next session, in which I will cover all the ways I believe that vampires are real and that garlic is a useless monster tool.

Happy hump day, mellocremes.