The Invisible Third Party

Buying a haunted house is one of the biggest mistakes first-time homebuyers make when getting on the property ladder. Not only do you need replace the kitchen cabinets and bathroom fixtures, you have to deal with the apparition of a headless nobleman floating through the wall you've just repainted. And what about are those creepy grinning skulls that suddenly appear behind you in the bathroom mirror while you're trying to trim your nose hair. It's no fun to find out that a jilted Victorian bride killed herself in what you thought was your cozy living room, and now is now a wispy grey lady who weeps and wails by the television every night while you're trying to watch reruns of The Newlywed Game

Fortunately, these typical restless spirits are easy to deal with. Most ghosts, especially disembodied phantoms draped in a white sheet, can be quickly and easily banished by pointing a three-speed rotary fan in their direction. Full power will blow them back to the tomb in no time at all. If the ghost is merely a cold, damp spot on the floor, buy a space heater and melt them into oblivion. I've employed both methods with great success in my own home, an isolated nineteenth-century vicarage overlooking an abandoned graveyard in East Grimsby. 

But if you live in a modern house built on sacred Indian tribal lands, and I know many of you do, then things might be a little more complicated than just a trip to the local hardware store to stock up o ghost-busting appliances. You will probably need an old fashioned Latin Exorcism, but it's not the demon that will make your spin like Linda Blair's in the famous Hollywood movie, it's the bill you receive from the Catholic Church two weeks later.

An exorcism can be spine-chillingly expensive for many ordinary households. On average, a gallon of holy water costs about $250 per gallon, more if it's freshly blessed, and a variety pack of votive candles can really push the price up. Most Catholic dioceses will throw in the priest for free, but you're still looking at over $500 per ceremony just to expel the restless spirit of a former occupant, who may or may not have been murdered in your master bedroom.

The same is true of booking a seance with a qualified medium. The full 'is there anybody there?' experience is not cheap, especially if you're seeking to communicate with the departed across the Vale of Death. I once worked in an office haunted by a former employee who died before he could update an important spreadsheet with new data. His mournful apparition appeared at his desk each working day, attempting to finish this task he had not completed in life. The only solution was to posthumously fire him via seance. His astral severance package was naming the conference room in his memory, a small price to pay considering the seance cost two thousand bucks, which did not include janitorial overtime fees for mopping up all the ectoplasm.

Such unexpected and nightmarish expenses are why I'm incorporating my new Ghost Insurance Company, featuring a special introductory offer just for you. For affordable monthly payments in the Crypto currency of your choice, GIC will cover all the exorcism and clairvoyant costs if your home or business becomes infested by unwanted spooks, wraiths, demons or poltergeists. So apply now, you know it makes sense.

Young Adult Fiction

Like millions of curious children around the world, Colin Hippo was disappointed to find no gateway to Narnia at the back of the old wardrobe in his bedroom. There was, however, a very pungent portal to Hell at the bottom of the young man's laundry basket. It took the form of two sacrilegious socks, worn for five days straight during a misguided hike through Stinky Hollow, a muck and filth flooded valley in the nearby Brown Mountains. Although Colin's hands were proverbially idle, his trail-walking feet were certainly not, yet the Devil had apparently still found a lot of work for them to do. And all of it smelled real bad. Just take a whiff for yourself.

Before selling their soles to Satan, Colin's socks were unremarkable grey-green poly-cotton socks with yellow reinforced toes. Colin had bought them at his local outdoor sports emporium, Mad Sherpa, famous for its cautionary mountaineering motto: "If you get lost climbing Everest, you won't freeze to death in our latest range of thermal fashions." Stinky Hollow wasn't Everest, sure, but what it lacked in formidable peaks it compensated for with unbearable stench. As soon as an intrepid hiker set foot in Stinky Hollow he'd be immediately knee-deep in fetid swamp. Consequently, specialist sweat-wicking socks were an expedition must, no matter how expensive they were. And that's where Colin left the beaten path before even taking his first step: with his tiny allowance, Colin could only afford a single pair of socks to last him the entire week. So what was initially a simple hike in the woods had turned into a rambling Black Mass.

Clearly, some sort of 'wash and fold Exorcism' was necessary to restore Colin's accursed laundry basket to its former God-fearing state as a convenient receptacle for dirty clothes, and not remain the Stygian pit of eternal and very rancid damnation it had become. But the Exorcist would require detailed washing instructions instead of a Bible, a bottle of concentrated bleach rather than a sprinkling of holy water, and obviously an industrial strength oxygen mask, not to mention a pair of long-handled tongs for wrenching the socks away from Satan's clutches. In this case, the Exorcist was known as "mom," and she had plenty of experience of struggling withe the Dark Side, so everything ended Happily Ever After.

The moral of this story is: if your route takes you across odiferous terrain called 'Stinky Hollow' in the Brown Mountains, perhaps choose a different route. And always pack at least two spare pairs of clean socks, even your route fortuitously passes through an area known as Relaxing Foot Bath Spa in the Dazzling White Mountains.