Preventive medicine
Personally, I don’t believe in ghosts. I take Paul at his word when he said, “To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.” Or, as Daddy so eloquently put it, “We know ghosts aren’t real cause nobody would leave Heaven and everybody would leave Hell if they could.” No, I don’t think that an old Confederate is roaming what used to be a battlefield and no one’s Aunt Gurtrude is stuck in a cycle of cooking potato salad forever in the afterlife. I do, however, believe in folklore and placebo effects, so in case you do believe in ghosts, I thought I’d share some things you can do to protect yourself.
One way is to hang glass bottles from a tree outside and, legend has it, any spirits coming to visit will get trapped in the bottles. Why they go in the bottles I’ll never know, and why they can’t get back out is an even greater mystery.
If you’ve got a porch, paint the ceiling blue because, according to the experts, ghosts can’t cross water and they get confused. Maybe that’s why they can’t find their way out of this world; if they can’t tell the ground from the sky, how could they find their way to peaceful rest?
If you put a bowl of rice by the door the ghosts will have to stop and count the grains and if you put newspapers on the wall they’ll stop and read the articles, they say, which again feels like part of the problem; maybe they can’t move on because they’re too busy counting random things.
They say open windows for them to escape, but we didn’t that once when a bird got into Nana’s house and it took a lot longer than you’d expect for the bird to find its way out.
Hopefully these tricks will help you in this spooky season; maybe some of these things will be some comfort to you in the long cold nights that will be before long. And if they don’t, don’t blame me; I don’t believe in ghosts anyway.
Just in case, though, y’all leave the hall light on before you leave.
