The Night Bride

The Past

Traveling by thumb can be dreadfully dull. You stand waiting and put out your hand, your thumb raised, then traffic passes, and passes, and passes. Then, when boredom passes into tedium, you start walking. You walk after a while because you begin to think that the place you are standing is not optimal for getting a ride. Or when it gets dark enough, and the shadows make you frightened, the location may seem cursed.

In that situation, the car lights twist the shadows, the wind scurries the dry leaves, and you feel like you are not alone.

Passing the old graveyard, I realized that I was not alone. Some of the idiots from the nearby town had decided to have a “kegger” in the cemetery, and the local police were clearing them out. What goes better together in a small town than local teenage jerks, a keg of beer, a cemetery, and Halloween? I laughed; while the local Officer Opie was busy with the kids, they couldn’t be harassing a Pius Itinerant like myself.

“What are you laughing about?” I heard the soft female voice from the other side of the stone wall separating the graveyard from the highway. She was pretty, about my age, and didn’t look like the type to get into a high school keg party. I walked over and set down my pack and guitar. ” I was just enjoying the sight of the police chasing a bunch of high school kids through the gravestones.” She smiled, ” It’s All Hallows Eve. The antics of the living amuse the dead. It reminds them of the times when they partied and enjoyed life.” This started a conversation about Halloween, which she thought of reverently, and I disparaged. At some point, I climbed over the stonewall, grabbed the pack and guitar, and followed her to a grassy knoll with a gravestone.

We talked, and eventually, she asked me for songs. Pulling my guitar from the case, I started with the numbers I was practicing for my next gig. She seemed like a likely audience to try them on. The conversation went on for hours before I finally made my moves. She flowed into my arms and laughed. “We have until dawn, lover. Let’s make it worthwhile.” Her name was Margie, and I learned her story as the night passed. She had died only feet away five years before when her car slid out of control on an icy evening. She tended to haunt that spot on the stonewall because it was there that her car had plowed into the wall.

We spent the hours until dawn talking, loving, and singing songs. When the light grew great enough to see the inscription on the stone we had used to support ourselves, I read Marjorie Dunham, our beloved daughter. She gently kissed me. ” Until next All Hallows Eve, love.”

Feeling bereft, I walked through the graveyard, past the church, and into the small town. As soon as the library opened, I was in the microfilm section searching for her, and I found her in the obituaries on October 31, 1962. I then went to a local cafe for breakfast. All the conversation was about the keg party. The entire football team was in custody, and the “reputation of half the women in the senior class was ruined.”

I found out that the person next to me was driving into Portland, and I was able to make a connection for a ride. It was Margie’s Dad.

Riding with Harry Dunham was interesting. It didn’t take much to get him talking about his daughter. Margie had been the class valedictorian, received a scholarship to the state university in Orono, and been the light of his and Emma’s ( his wife) lives. Her death in a car accident had robbed them of much of the joy they found in life. I encouraged him to talk about Margie’s life. He let me off where I could get a good ride the rest of the way into the center of Portland. 

Over the following months, I was occupied with my life, not thinking about a ghost woman on All Hallows Eve. But as the year ran past September and into October, I found myself thinking of how to get to a particular locale on a specific night. Eventually, I did something I had never done before. I saved my limited income and rented a car. My friends were amazed at this. I never saved, and I rarely used my driver’s license. Sure that a woman was involved, they probed for details. The most I would give them was that she was otherworldly.

After that, I spent All Hallows Eve quietly with Margie. I moved to town and regularly placed flowers on her grave every month.

The Present

Entanglement with a ghostly girlfriend has meant a particular involvement with her family. Breakfast with Harry and Emma on November 1 has become an annual tradition. Over the past decades, they’ve spent enough time with me that they’ve come to assume that I had a close relationship with their daughter in life. I don’t dissuade them from this belief. And it was enforced when I bought the adjacent plot in the cemetery for myself.

Eventually, it seemed as though I had never been “From Away.” I served three terms on the Board of Selectmen and grew grey serving on the cemetery committee. When it came time, I ensured that Harry and Emma were buried alongside Margie. It was just a larger family group that gathered on Halloween. I passed not too long after. Passing through the veil of life meant leaving a tired body behind and being renewed.

The Future

Haunting the annual kegger party has become a family tradition these past ten years since I passed myself. I was the one who suggested the exploding keg, the car horn going off suddenly, and the ghost fire in the trees. The sight of me gliding through the trees, singing of doom and retribution on the guitar has developed a following. I was always good at drama. Margie is particularly graceful at soulful moans, and her parents love chain rattling. Last year, we made the Chamber of Commerce’s Fall Flyer for events along our part of the Mid-Coast.

This year, we are expecting some professional ghost hunters. We’ll see who hunts who. Fun and games!