As a writer, you become pretty attached to your pieces. Your article is like your baby, and your sources are like your relatives.
Some are like your cool Aunt Kat, with her stylish new Prada bag and her exciting stories about her glamorous job. Some sources are like your quirky Uncle Jimmy, who refuses to shaves his mustache or get a cell phone, but hey, no one has better dinnertime stories.
We ran into so many interesting people that we now have completed our dysfunctional family.
Writing our spooky stories feature was a fun filled challenge. We got pretty into it, and we kept hoping that maybe this experience would be just like a cheesy Disney Halloween movie, and we would encounter a ghost ourselves and go on a magical, mystical adventure of our own.
With one of our birthday’s being on Oct. 31, we just think it’s wrong that we aren’t haunted by any ghosts.
We were at least hoping to meet Casper.
The truth is, a lot of people think the super natural world is kind of crazy. But after a couple of days of research and countless pages of notes, the two of us were convinced it was all true.
Maybe it was because there’s something spooky in the air in October, or maybe because we were spending more time on the phone with psychics then we were on our homework (which wasn’t necessarily beneficial to our chemistry grades).
Call us crazy, but when writing ‘The Doctor and the Tramp’ for our “Spooky Sites” article, we were a little concerned Mrs. Darby (we don’t even know her first name!), the ghost that, according to our sources, haunts the Westport Historical Society building, would be slightly annoyed we were calling her a slut.
We went down to the Historical Society to get some pictures of her coveted couch, and we made sure to whisper on the way in, “We don’t really think your slutty. We were just joking. You knew that, right? We respect you and your couch.”
Then there was our phone interview with a psychic. She had invited us to her house for the interview, but maybe it’s just because we were a little apprehensive, or complete chickens, but we opted for a phone interview instead.
Midway through her describing her first psychic experience, we heard a high-pitched screeching. Imagine a cross between a screaming baby and a bullhorn, that’s what it sounded like.
That’s all it took, and the two of us were off the walls with thrill, scribbling down all the adjectives we could think of that described the noise. We started whispering to each other, “Yes! She’s going into a trance! This is priceless. We should have gone to her house after all.”
We even considered running downstairs to get the priest that was having dinner with our parents.
Talk about a story, right? But, sadly, no such luck. There was no trance involved; just four of her pet chickens screeching in the living room that she thought were hungry. Oh well, that’s good material too…
Throughout all of our getting carried away, our expectations for peoples anecdotes became bigger and wilder.
We started to become easily annoyed by a bad story. “She thinks a ghost touched her? Please, she probably just had a cramp!”
We were hunched over our notebooks, trying to capture every little detail about these stories that we thought were going to have amazing climaxes, but all too quickly we found ourselves ripping out these pages, crumbling them up, and throwing them in the trash.
The most we got from these stories were back problems.
Interviews and sources came and went but we sifted out all but the best of the best.
Near sightings and old legends were no longer good enough, we wanted real hard evidence of supernatural encounters—the more sinister, the better. We had quickly gone from asking around for spooky campfire stories to trying to hunt down paranormal tales that more closely resemble horror movies more than anything else.
We kind of forgot that, unfortunately, we still lived in the real world.
Once we had all of our stories, the article was born. Each tale was different and new. While multiple late nights and a few all-nighters in front of the computer screen may have caused us to be a little delusional and, perhaps, less than charming in the morning, they were some of the funniest nights we have had.
All of this makes a great story that we can share with our kooky, yet lovable journalism family for years to come.
