by James Coplin

Created on: September 13, 2009

THE QUICK AND THE DEAD AND THE SIX O'CLOCK NEWS

By now you've read the papers and all those New York City magazines, all having a good laugh over Granite Cove. The Great Granite Cove Ghost Hoax is what most of them call it. We're not pleased to be made out a town of cheats and swindlers yet the fact is, we get along right well with our ghosts and hard as things were on us, for them it was a proper horror.

No one in Granite Cove claims to know just what it is that makes our town so homey to the dead and departed. Whatever the reason,Granite Cove has haunts thicker then flies at the fish market, There's so many and mostly so well behaved that unless you've lived here a spell it's hard to tell some from the living and breathing.

Not that there aren't some Roarers among them. Whenever it storms it seems to blow old Captain Ansel Mason up from the sea bed, shouting and banging on doors and generally being a nuisance. Almost as bad is Art Bellow's great-great grandfather Miles Bellows. He'll sit in broad daylight atop Higgins Wall, just grinning and tipping his hat to the Ladies. Then, for no reason at all, he'll take his hat off with his head still inside it. Everybody agrees it a real heart stopper the first time you see it.

Most are like sad old Heinrick Von Kemple, still banging away at his blacksmith's anvil even though his shop burned down with him in it in 1903 and the Granite Cove Rexall sits smack over the ashes. Or Gladys Nunn, died of the Pox back in 1856 and still trying to join in at choir. There hasn't been a hymn sung in church for one hundred fifty three years without her ghost whisper floating all off-key and a full beat behind the congregations. The balance of them glide about silently, fading in and out of the moonlight and minding their own affairs. It's a shame some people don't follow their example.

Ed Warner's a fellow like that. Being editor and owner of the "Granite Cove Spokesman" and head of the Chamber of Commerce besides, I suppose he can't help it. Yet you've never seen such a body for knowing all the township's business and having an opinion about it.

For years Ed has had it in his bonnet to make Granite Cove some fashion of high end tourist town. One of the things Ed's always wanted to do is have a big town festival; sort of like Havingport's Lobster Days I reckon. Only Ed wants to promote our ghosts and advertise the town as the most haunted one in the country.

It's so outlandish a notion that not one of us took him seriously

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