Boo!

Michele is starting in on ghost stories for the season.

Let me add one that I've always liked: Feathertop by Nathaniel Hawthorne. It's not especially scary in the vampires-feasting-on-human-souls/don't-go-to-the-lakeside-camping-ground-kids manner. But its exploration of morality by way of the occult has always given me the chills.

I was put on to this story by my college English-major advisor. He was a portly man with a deep bass-baritone voice. To this day, whenever I read Hawthorne, I still think of him, together with the smell of dank sky, dank leaves and woodsmoke and the sound of wind, crows and distant churchbells.

This professor also used to give readings of Edgar Allen Poe at my fraternity on Halloween. If you were in the right frame of mind, he could scare the absolute bejeesus out of you.