The Ghost of Ernest Eagleton

by Douglas J. Eboch

Hear the story read by the author

In the town of Normal, Pennsylvania, there’s a little church at the corner of Wilson and Elm. The church has long been haunted by the ghost of Ernest Eagleton who died in 1924. Or so Pastor Henry O’Donnell would have his church secretary, Tammy Billings, believe. You see, Tammy is a bit superstitious and Henry is a bit of a prankster. And each year in the week before Halloween, the pastor creates an elaborate prank to scare Tammy.

Henry didn’t make up Ernest Eagleton. Ernest was an actual person who died a rather violent death on what is now church property. You see, the church was built in 1947 on the site of what had been a restaurant. And during the 1920’s when prohibition was in effect that restaurant had been a speakeasy. The original building was torn down to build the church, but one element was incorporated into the new structure: a cellar under the current social hall. The church used the cellar to store files and seasonal items. But during prohibition it had been used to store alcohol smuggled in from Canada. This cellar was where Ernest Eagleton met his demise.

Ernest was a jazz musician who played clarinet in the speakeasy band. He was popular among the patrons and managed his money wisely and was thus able to avoid trouble with the speakeasy’s rather unsavory owners.

That is, until he fell in love.

Not that the gangsters who ran the place had any complaint with love. But Ernest had the misfortune of falling in love with Mazie, the voluptuous wife of the speakeasy’s manager, Marco. Ernest and Mazie were very careful to keep their affair secret knowing that Marco kept a .38 in his jacket pocket which had been used on more than one person unwise or unfortunate enough to upset him. When Halloween rolled around, though, Mazie concocted a risky scheme. She bought two costumes - one a nurse’s outfit which she showed to Marco, and the other a gorilla costume which she hid in the ladies’ lavatory.

One of the reasons Mazie cheated on Marco was that whenever they went to the speakeasy he was always too busy running the place to pay any attention to her. (The other reason was that she had never really loved him and only married him for his money.) But Marco’s preoccupation with making all that money allowed her to easily slip away during the big Halloween party and change into her gorilla costume. She then left a note for Ernest - who was dressed as a baseball player - to meet her in the cellar during his break.

Unfortunately, Marco decided to use the cellar for a business meeting while Ernest and Mazie were having their tryst. Even more unfortunately, her plan with the Gorilla costume was undone by the fact that the mask was very hot and she had taken it off once she and Ernest were alone in the cellar. And as a result of that chain of events, Ernest met his demise.

That story, with various embellishments, was well known to anyone who attended the little church very long and it made a good basis for Henry’s annual Halloween prank on Tammy. Tammy typically worked late on Tuesday evenings because her husband Ralph played racquetball with a buddy. Ralph would pick Tammy up from the church after he was finished and the two would have a late dinner.

So at 6 pm on the Tuesday before Halloween, Henry told Tammy that he was going to do a home visit and left her alone in the office. He drove around the corner, parked his car and snuck back. Then he used his cell phone to call Tammy. He told her he was missing his sweater. When she couldn’t find it in his office, he asked her to check to see if he had left it in the cellar where he had been going through some old files that morning.

Tammy didn’t like going into the cellar by herself at night, but she was a grown woman and wasn’t about to admit her fears to Henry. She got her key chain, unlocked the social hall, and descended the wooden steps into the cellar.

The room was lit by a single, long overhead fluorescent light. The pipes and vents on the ceiling and crumbling boxes stacked along the walls left many pockets of dark shadow. Tammy looked around, trying not to let the ticking and clicking of the pipes and vents unnerve her. She spotted Henry’s sweater draped over an easel at the back of the room.

As she went to retrieve it, she heard another faint sound among the pipes - music.

She furrowed her brow. Nobody else was at the church that evening. Where was music coming from? Then she realized it was clarinet music and visions of Ernest Eagleton stabbed into her mind. She looked down and discovered two used highball glasses resting on a nearby box.

Tammy got out of that cellar as fast as she could.

The source of the music was not Ernest Eagleton’s ghost, of course. It came from a boom box Henry was playing near an air vent in the social hall. Sound traveled quite well through the vent system.

As Tammy bolted out of the cellar, she discovered Pastor O’Donnell doubled over in laughter. “You should see your face,” he gasped.

“That’s not funny,” Tammy responded and threw his sweater at him. She stomped back to the office.

Henry giggled to himself as he retrieved his boom box and started to lock the social hall up again. And then he heard a slow thunk-thunk-thunk sound coming from the cellar. It sounded like something had bounced down the stairs. Tammy must have knocked something over in her mad flight, he thought, and went to investigate.

He discovered a baseball resting on the cement floor at the bottom of the stairs. He picked it up. “Must belong to one of the scouts,” he thought.

And then he heard a rustling from the back of the cellar. He looked up…

There in the shadows was someone in a gorilla costume.

It was too dark to make out the eyes behind the slits in the mask, but there was definitely someone inside the cheap outfit. A muffled voice said one word: “Ernest?”

Henry made it up the stairs only falling once. The next thing he knew he was standing in the middle of the office panting, his shin throbbing from where he’d banged it when he fell, and his heart racing at an alarming rate.

“Tammy, someone in a gorilla costume is in the cellar!”

“Very funny.” Tammy responded.

“No, really!” Henry insisted.

The two of them went back and forth in the same vein for several minutes. Meanwhile, back in the cellar Ralph Billings took off the gorilla costume. It had been well worth the forty bucks he’d spent to rent it, though he felt bad he’d had to cancel racquetball. He shook his head at poor, predictable Henry O’Donnell. Every year Henry played his Halloween pranks on Tuesday when Tammy worked late. Ralph was surprised Tammy still didn’t see them coming. But he suspected perhaps Pastor O’Donnell would skip the prank on Tammy next year.

Ralph shoved the costume in the trunk of his car and went to pick up his wife. While she was gathering her things and Henry continued to try to convince them he’d seen Mazie’s ghost, Ralph slipped the spare social hall keys back in Tammy’s desk drawer.

And back in the cellar the ghosts of Ernest and Mazie were happy to have the place to themselves once again.

(c) 2007 Douglas J. Eboch