After last night I needed something a little (a lot) lighter. This is like the Diet Coke of ghost stories!

Dale just finished scaring his third family out of the house he inhabited, but it had been a rough one. Family of four, and the father steadfastly didn’t believe in ghosts. So, naturally he focused on the kids. But the two boys were cut from the same cloth as their father. Truth me told, Dale might have been more afraid of them than they of him – at least initially. The mom, then, would be the weak link. But she had some psychic ability and was convinced she could help him cross over.

“Man, Mitch, if I heard her say ‘go towards the light!’ one more time I was going to hang myself.”

“You know you’re already dead, right?” the other ghost said as they both stood in the upstairs bedroom and watched the Uhaul roar away from the house with abandon.

“Yeah, yeah, metaphorically hang myself…”

“Ah, of course…” Mitch nodded. “Seriously, though, that was a tough one – how’d you do it? I mean, the dad didn’t believe, the kids were terrors of their own…”

“The pets!”

“The pets?”

“Started with the cat, then moved on to the dogs… once the pets were scared and jumping at everything, Dad and kiddos start thinking, ‘hey, maybe something is up’ and that little opening was all I needed. After that, a few late night scare sessions, some flickering lights,  before you know it they were packing!”

“Gotta say, Dale, when you became a ghost just last year and were assigned to my block I thought for sure you’d take a lot longer to get up to speed. But you’re a natural! It’s like you live to be dead!”

“Love what you do and you never work a day in your death!”

“True that,” they fist bumped.

“Hey, Mitch, that reminds me… how does a ghost, you know… get a little time off.”

“Time off?”

“Yeah, this family took a lot out of me…”

“Sure did, I can see right through you!”

Dale laughed at the obvious joke. “Seriously, though, I’m pretty wiped out,” he said. “How do I go about taking a little vacation?”

“Uh… just stop haunting.”

“It can’t be that simple,” Dale said. “I mean, who’s going to watch this place while I’m gone?”

“No one. You just pick up where you left off when you get back.”

“But… aren’t there back ups for something like this? Like some ghost to, I don’t know, foster this haunted house? Like AirGnH? Air Ghost and Haunting?”

“What are you even talking about?”

“How about cross-trained ghosts?”

“You mean like lifting truck tires and waving heavy ropes?”

“No, that’s Cross-fit. Cross-trained, like another ghost trained to haunt this house in addition to their own?”

“Why… why would we do that?”

“Better ghost coverage! What happens if I take, say, a week off and a family moves in here – there’s no one to haunt them?”

“Yeah. When you get back you start haunting them.”

“But that’s haunting time wasted!”

“’Haunting time wasted’? Dale, what are you talking about?”

“Quantifying scares – seriously, hasn’t anyone ever sat down and did some real-time scream per scare analysis?”

“Dale,” Mitch shook his head, “You’ve barely been dead a year…”

“So? That just means I’m better positioned to scare outside the box!”

“How did you die?”

“I was in the office working late on a report…”

“Okay, this is making more sense…”

“And I was carrying some files to the mailing room when I tripped on the stairs…”

“Got it. Dale, you spent too much time alive in the office. You’re right, you need a vacation.”

“But, when I’m gone…?”

“Right now, Dale, you’re scaring me.”

Dale took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Everything will be okay while I’m gone?”

“Just fine.”

“Okay…. Okay. I think I’ll go then…”

“Where are you going to go?”

“Oh, well, there’s this amazing accounting class I always meant to take…”

“Oh lord…”