“Alright, let’s come up with a name…” Edward said, writing down “Name:” on the yellow notepad on the table.

“George…” Lizzie suggested.

“No, Clarence!” Mary countered.

“Oh, I like that better!” Lizzie said.

Edward wrote “Clarence” down then asked, “Middle name?”

“Spencer,” Dan suggested. “No, Clifford.”

“Clarence Clifford?” Mary asked quizzically.

“We’re looking for something that no one would actually name someone, aren’t we?” Dan said.

“Okay, Clarence Clifford what?” Edward said writing down the middle name. “Last name? Annie, you’re being quiet.”

“Because I think this is a bad idea,” Annie said, crossing her arms.

“You think we’re going to summon some demon or something, right?” Mary said.

“I just don’t think we should play around with this,” Annie said.

“I understand your concerns, Annie,” Edward said. “The whole point here is to prove that Ouija is just drawing on our collective subconscious.”

“I know what we’re doing, Ed,” Annie said. “I just don’t think we should play with Ouija.”

“O’Donnell!” Lizzie said. “Clarence Clifford O’Donnell!”

“I like it,” Mary agreed.

Edward finished the name on the notepad and underlined it. “Okay, where was Clarence born?”

Over the next 45 minutes they hashed out an entire history for Clarence Clifford O’Donnell: born in Cork, Ireland in 1820 and left Ireland for America in 1848 because of the great potato famine, though Mary thought that was a little cliché. Dan suggested that Clarence landed in New York harbor before making his way out west to look for gold.

“He’s a 49er?” Lizzie asked.”

“Why not?” Dan asked.

“Well, that would probably play into his death, right?” Edward scribbled notes.

“Yes, yes, yes,” Mary said. “Killed in a squabble over a claim!”

“Not killed in a shootout!” Dan suggested.

“What about just like, I don’t know, he got run over by a horse or something?” Mary asked.

They finally decided on the squabble over a claim and filled in the rest of his life story – the wife and son he left behind in Angel’s Camp, California. Edward jotted down all the details about Clarence Clifford O’Donnell’s life and death.

Finally, he said, “Okay, I think we’ve got a good idea about who this fictitious person is. Ready to see if we can contact him?”

“Let’s do it,” Dan agreed. “Annie, are you going to help?”

Annie rolled her eyes, “I guess, yeah…”

They cleared the table and took the cardboard Ouija board and plastic planchet out of the box. Edward dimmed the lights, and everyone gathered close and made sure their hands were touching the planchette.

“Are there any spirits who would like to communicate with us?” Edward asked.

Nothing happened. Everyone exchanged glances.

“We would like to communicate with a spirit. Is there anyone out there who would like to communicate with us?”

The planchette moved slowly from the middle of the board up to the upper left and stopped on “Yes.”

“That’s a good sign,” Dan said.

“Shh,” Mary hissed.

“What is your name?” Edward asked.

The planchette moved smoothly to “C,” then “L,” “A,” “R,” “E,” “N,” “C,” and stopped on “E.”

Edward nodded smugly.

“Do you have a Last name?”

O-D-O-N-N-E-L-L.

Quietly, Annie took her hand from the planchette and moved away from the table.

“Annie, what’s up?” Dan asked quietly.

“I just don’t feel comfortable. I’m sorry.”

“Let’s keep going,” Mary said to Dan.

“Can we continue?” Edward asked. When everyone still around the table nodded, he asked, “Where were you born, Clarence?”

Annie went to the living room of Edward and Lizzie’s house and sat heavily on their couch. She pulled out her phone and decided to Google “Clarence Clifford O’Donnell” just out of curiosity. Her eyes widened as Google returned several mentions of a Clarence Clifford O’Donnell. One was a story in the San Francisco Morning Call with a byline by none other than Samuel Clemens. Preceding the images of micro-fiched stories was a description of the Call as an “inexpensive paper aimed at working-class Irish – the ‘washerwoman’s paper.” She scanned through the different images of Clemens’ clippings and finally found the piece mentioning O’Donnell. It was a colorful description of a shootout above Angel’s Camp in Calaveras County between “a scurrilous cur, and degenerate cheat, one Clarence Clifford O’Donnell” and an unknown miner. Clemens went into great detail about O’Donnell having immigrated from Cork, Ireland to escape the famine only to lie, cheat, and steal his way across the county. The last line in the article made Annie’s blood run cold: “While O’Donnell’s body lies cold, if his life has been any indication it’s certain his death will be not be peaceful and I wouldn’t be surprised if he lied and cheated from beyond the veil.”

Annie leapt from the couch and ran back to the other room.

“Do we invite you?” Edward read the question the planchette had just spelled out. “Yes, of course we invite you to communicate with–”

“Wait!” Annie yelled. “Clarence Clifford O’Donnell is real, he existed!”

“Annie,” Dan said, “We made him up. You were here!”

“Look!” she showed Dan the phone and everyone gathered around.

“Holy shit,” Lizzie said.

The room fell into heavy silence as they all strained to read the grainy story on the phone themselves.

“But we made him up?” Edward said.

A scraping of plastic on cardboard drew attention to the abandoned planchette on the Ouija board. With no one touching it, the planchette started spelling something out”

T-H-A-N-K-Y-O-U-F-O-R-T-H-E-I-N-V-I-T-A-T-I-O-N.

The planchette stopped on the final “N” and all the lights in the house went out.

“Janice, did you see the message on Facebook?”

“I did. I haven’t had a chance to call their help line yet.”

“I thought you shut down the account.”

“I did, Karen. They ‘memorialized’ it, which supposedly freezes it so no one can access it–“

“Except someone is accessing it.”

“Yes, apparently so. I’ll take care of it.”

—

“Dude, did you see the meme your grandmother tweeted?”

“My grandmother is dead but thank you for bringing that still-fresh pain up to the surface.”

“Jesus, who pissed in your Cornflakes? I don’t know, man, she may be dead, but that is a straight burn on Trump.”

“Wait, what? Here, let me see. Huh. I have so many questions…”

“Oh, see, the cat’s butthole…”

“No, not about the meme. My Nan never accessed her twitter account. I created that for her and tweeted on her behalf. I don’t think she even knew the password. And she wouldn’t even know what a meme is. But, I mean, she’s dead…”

“DM her. See if whoever it is responds.”

“Good call.”

—

“Andrew, two questions.”

“Taylor, go.”

“No, three questions…”

“Okay.”

“One, your grandmother is dead, right?”

“Yes.”

“Two, she had an Instagram account, right?”

“Yes, @sunlovinggranny. I created it for her so she could put up her pictures from her last trip to Hawaii. That was… Jesus, ten years ago? I don’t know. My sister had me shut it down when she died.”

“Huh… Three, is this sunset picture posted 54 minutes ago by @sunlovinggranny in Fiji? Isn’t that by where we honeymooned? Huh, she’s got 33 likes already…”

“Holy shit, I think it is. What the hell?”

—

“Janice, I thought you said you were going to contact Facebook?”

“Karen, I did…”

“Well, whoever is using mom’s account posted again – did you see this? The video of the woodchuck eating lettuce?”

“It was a beaver eating cabbage.”

“I don’t give a shit if it’s Sasquatch, Janice! I thought you said you were going to contact them? They clearly haven’t done anything…”

“As I was trying to say, Karen, I did contact them. They said the account is set to ‘memorialize’ and no one can log in–”

“How do you explain the goddamn woodchuck.”

“It’s a fucking beaver, Karen… ahem… I’ve already got a call into them. Clearly something is going on. We’ll figure it out.”

—

“Oh my God, she replied to my DM.”

“Dude! What’d she say? Did you ask her about the afterlife?”

“No, asshole. Let me read this… oh… wow… wow…”

“Dude, are you crying? What she say?”

“She said ‘Augie, it’s Nan. I can’t explain this, but I hope you go have a cream soda and think of me.’ That was our thing. Cream soda. Oh my God.”

—

“Taylor, I have a Direct Message from @sunlovinggranny.”

“What’s it say?”

“I haven’t looked at it.”

“Well… look at it.”

“…”

“Andrew?”

“It says, ‘I can see why you two honeymooned here. It’s amazing. Give Taylor my love, Nan.’”

“She died before we got married.”

“She did. Who the hell is doing this?”

“Crazy theory?”

“Yes?”

“What if it’s really her?”

—

“The asshole posted a video about voting, Janice. Doesn’t look like a memorial page to me? Can’t you handle this?”

“Karen, shut it.”

“What?! I thought you said you were handling this? You’re the executor, not me, in case you forgot.”

“I got a message from mom…”

“Like from a psychic?”

“A Facebook message, Karen.”

“You mean from the asshole using her account.”

“No, Karen. From mom. It was about Tiddly Whiskers. She wrote about when we had to put her down.”

“Your cat growing up?”

“Yeah. She mentioned things only mom and I talked about.”

“Social engineering, Janice. It’s probably general stuff and you’re reading into this. Jesus, this is exactly what these scammers  want.”

“Karen, stop. It’s not general. It’s word for fucking word. It’s mom.

—

“Dude, Augie, are you okay, man?”

“…Yeah, sorry.”

“What’d she say this time?”

“She had to go, but to keep an eye out from time to time. Heh… she called me muffin head.”

“Because of that time in fourth grade! Ha! Even your dead grandmother won’t let you live that down!”

“Yeah… damn I miss her. Again.”

“But it was good to hear from her, right?”

“Yeah.”

—

“New Direct Message, Taylor.”

“And?”

“I need your support.”

“Okay, let’s open it…. Oh my God. Oh my God. Andrew… that’s…”

“Yeah it is…”

“…our house. The sun set, what? Fifteen minutes ago? That was fifteen minutes ago? Andrew, that was fifteen minutes ago.”

“Did you see the message?”

“’I’ll always watch the sunsets with you, Pinkie. Love, Nan’? Who’s Pinkie?”

“I was a particularly hairless newborn. Apparently everyone referred to me as ‘Pinkie’ at least for the first couple of weeks. Nan always called me that – and only Nan.”

“It’s Nan?”

“It is… there’s still some light on the horizon.”

“Sure is.”

“They say his body was never found…” the boy around the campfire said in his best spooky voice. He’s right – they never found my body.

“…And on nights like this, with foggy conditions like the night he disappeared he still haunts these woods.” Oh yes, boy, he does…

I mean, that’s my cue right there. “…He still haunts these woods.” Come on! You don’t get a better line than that. Poof, show up – I mean fully show my ghostly self, or even shake a tent, or make the fire roar. Hell, just yell “boo!” at that point and they’re all pissing themselves. These are the moments I live for. Well, these are the moments I died for – not that I intended to die, of course. But a ghost has to have some fun when he’s forced to aimlessly roam this mortal plain for all of blah blah blah.

Yeah, so I was all ready to scare the crap out of them (literally in the case of that one kid who clearly was all-in on this haunted woods thing when the forest lights up like an enormous sun ignited above us. But it wasn’t a sun. It was a beam from a big craft. A frickin’ flying saucer. And their damn beam was focused right. On. Me. What the hell?

The beam turned blue and I could see by some of pine needles and rocks around me drifting upwards that they were expecting me to get sucked up into their machine.

“Holy crap, there’s the ghost!” one of the kids yelled, they all turned and looked at me, shrieked and started running.

“Is that a flying saucer, too?!” One of the fleeing kids yelled.

As a ghost, being seen when you don’t want to be seen is like that dream where you show up to school without your clothes on. Dear reader, in that moment in the blue beam with pine needles and stick and crap floating upwards past me I might as well have been buck naked. (for the record, I wasn’t literally naked. I want to make that clear before you think some pervert ghost was going to expose himself to those campers. You know, you’ve got a really sick mind, Reader. You should be ashamed of yourself!)

The kids were gone. Ship is hoovering the forest floor – is this what Trump thinks the Finns do to their forest? Anyway, they eventually realize I’m not getting sucked up – duh – and the light winks out and the craft starts to drift away.

No, no, no, they’re not getting away that easily. So maybe they’re not going to suck me into their probe-palace, but I can certainly materialize on their flying saucer.

Which is exactly what I do.

I’d like to say, “You should have seen the look on their faces,” but their faces didn’t change from those big black almond eyes on their giant gray heads. One jumped. Another literally fell out of its chair – that was pretty funny. But there was no screaming and when there’s no screaming… what’s the point?

“What do you guys think you’re doing trying to abduct me? I’m a ghost!”

Yes, one of the grays (not the jumper or the chair-faller) said. Well, didn’t say. Its lips didn’t move, but the words appeared in my brain. I mean, ectoplasm? Whatever, you get the idea. We wanted to try to understand this human phenomenon of a “Ghost.” That is why we must subdue you.

He stepped aside and another gray guy behind him had this thing that – swear to God – looked like some 50’s sci-fi ray gun. He shot me. Okay, he tried to shoot me. The beam went right through me and tagged a gray behind me who dropped like a sack of potatoes.

“That’s your plan?” I said. “You travel millions of light years in an interstellar-capable craft and your best idea after your transport beam failed was to shoot me with a different ray? I mean, that guy’s going to have a hell of a headache,” I nodded to the gray on the floor twitching.

We were hoping it would not come to this. We have no other choice, the lead gray said as two other grays rushed me holding what looked like cattle prods. They jabbed them at me… no, they jabbed them through me. To zero effect.

I looked at my watch impatiently as the two grays circled me jabbing through my incorporeal-ness. They kept going like maybe one of them would jab just the right spot. I sighed loudly. “Look Marvin,” I said to the head gray. “Are you done yet?”

Why are you not susceptible to our energy weapons? It asked.

“I’m going to say this slowly so it might sink in. I. Am. A. Ghoooooooooost.”

Yes but….

“No buts, Marvin. Ghost! Not solid. Of the spirit world. Why don’t you study your own ghosts?”

We do not have ghosts.

“You’re kidding me,” I said.

We do not have ghosts, he repeated.

I stared at him in disbelief then I looked around the bridge at the dozen or so grays at consoles studying screens, or moving levers and pressing buttons – it was all very deck-of-Star-Trek looking. Then I saw what I was looking for. Behind one of the grays sitting in a chair (it was a cute little chair for the little guy!) stood another gray… that looked a little… not solid, shall we say. As if it felt me looking at it, it turned and its big black eyes really did bulge in shock. I paced over to the gray ghost and grabbed it by its scrawny neck. That I was able to grab it – actually get a grip on the thing – confirmed it was just as much a ghost as me. As my fingers closed around its neck it must have appeared like I did – now it was feeling just as naked as I felt when those kids viewed me against my will. Wait, that doesn’t sound right…

Marvin jumped back as he stared at the now-visible gray ghost.

Boo? The gray ghost thought-spoke.

I laughed, “You’re not a bad ghost, Casper the gray,” I said to him. Then to Marvin, “You don’t have ghosts?!” I put my arm around Casper’s shoulders. I mean, I had to stoop to do it, but it was worth it.

What? I do not understand! He sounded legitimately flummoxed. Boom! Mind: blown!

“You’re welcome, Marvin,” I said walking away. “You can ask Casper the gray here about how many other ghosts are around. But given someone on board might know this guy personally, you might want to ex-nay on the whole probing thing.”

I didn’t wait for a thank you.

I stood by the campfire. “You shouldn’t leave a campfire unattended!” I yelled in the direction the boys fled. “Didn’t Smokey teach you anything?” I sat down on a log next to the fire and picked up a stick and a marshmallow from a bag left behind when they fled. “Ooh, smores!”