Ghost Brother

I once saw a ghost. Really. My wife Darla and I were staying at an outdoor writer friend's cabin in Maine. My friend and I had been getting up early to watch the sun rise while bass fishing on a nearby "pond," Maine's term for a small lake. I woke before dawn, turned on a bedside lamp, and checked my watch. Before I lay back down, I saw Darla rise from the bed and walk out the door. Then I looked back at her side of the bed. She was still lying there! Later that day as we were fishing,...
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I once saw a ghost. Really. My wife Darla and I were staying at an outdoor writer friend's cabin in Maine. My friend and I had been getting up early to watch the sun rise while bass fishing on a nearby "pond," Maine's term for a small lake. I woke before dawn, turned on a bedside lamp, and checked my watch. Before I lay back down, I saw Darla rise from the bed and walk out the door. Then I looked back at her side of the bed. She was still lying there! Later that day as we were fishing, I asked my friend John if he had ever seen anything strange in the cabin. "Did you see Cousin Agnes?" he countered. I went on to relate my encounter with the apparition. "Yes, that was Cousin Agnes. I've seen here a few times myself. She's friendly, however." John went on to tell me how his cousin had bought the cabin and lived there with a friend for many years after retiring from teaching. John had spent many summers there and upon Agnes's death had purchased the property from her estate. He added one chilling detail: Cousin Agnes had died in the room, and bed, where Darla and I had been staying. We left the next day, never to see Agnes again. But she had planted a seed in my slightly warped mind. I transferred the haunted cabin from Maine to south central Pennsylvania. I transformed an old maid schoolteacher into a crusty old ridge runner and her much younger cousin into an old man, the ghost's slightly younger brother. I based the characters on my father and some of his friends. I based the incidents on actual occurrences and the brothers' reminiscences on tales gleaned from years of listening to older outdoorsmen. My first story in the series was an immediate hit with my readers. It also copped a pair of excellence-in-craft awards from the Pennsylvania Outdoor Writers Association (POWA) and the Mason-Dixon Outdoor Writers Association (MDOWA). It was followed by further adventures of the pair and more awards, culminating in four POWA awards one year, at the time tying the record for a single writer. I knew I was onto something good that people would like to read, so it was only natural that my first foray into book writing would be a collection of these tales.