Good morning. 👻🧙‍♂️🦇

22 October 2025

Back in the place I called home during my teenage years, there was an urban legend about a Lady in White. They said she could be seen if you drove out along the canal banks at night. I suspect every community has its own version of a Lady in White—retold, reshaped, and passed along like a ceremonial whisper. The story behind her was never quite clear. No one ever explained why she supposedly roamed the night. I never met anyone who claimed to have seen her firsthand—only people who knew someone who knew someone who said they had. That’s the way of urban legends: always one degree removed, always just out of reach.

Still, my friends and I, restless and looking for something to do, would sometimes head out to the canal banks after dark, hoping for a glimpse. This was in the San Joaquin Valley, where certain times of year the fog rolled in thick and heavy, making it a challenge to navigate the narrow access roads that ran alongside the canals. But we did it anyway. The fog had a way of distorting the landscape, creating illusions that made the improbable feel just barely plausible. Even then, I knew better. Ghosts are the stuff of imagination and superstition. My head’s always been fairly level—even in my worst moments.

There was also an old, abandoned house on the edge of town, wrapped in its own ghost stories. It was purported to be haunted. We all knew it was nonsense, but still—when the fog crept in and the house loomed out of the mist—we got the heebie-jeebies just the same.

I think we wanted to believe. Because sometimes, believing makes things exciting.

“We need ghost stories because we, in fact, are the ghosts.” — Stephen King

“I do not believe in ghosts. I believe in ghost stories.” — John Robert Colombo

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