ghost stories

today in m5 conversation class, a handful of us were sitting on the floor.

"nicki, have you ever met a ghost?"
"have i ever seen a ghost? ohhhhh...well..."

you know me. i friggin LOVE ghost stuff. anytime there's a ghost-related show on tv, i watch. i've spent many a night seeking out haunted places around the bay area. the ghost of niles canyon story is one of my favorites. gravity hills are my thing. there's an especially creepy one off 580 as you're going toward stockton, off vasco road. you have to drive pretty far along this country road in the complete darkness before you get to this bend in the road. if you put your car in neutral at the beginning of the turn, it goes around the turn completely by itself.

rumor has it that a school bus full of children crashed off the side of the road at that exact turn many years ago. the accident killed all the school kids and the driver. ever since then, the kids have stayed around as ghosts, helping cars around the bend. they say if you put flour on the back bumper of your car, you can see little hand prints left behind.

i told the kids this story, which inspired their own. our school is supposedly haunted. someone died on the second floor of building 11 (the foreign language building, aka ours). there's also one over by building three, next to the basketball court. the boy in the group told us how one time, he was playing basketball and the ball rolled away. he went to get it and when he looked up, he saw a woman in white standing there...headless. he looked away for a second and when he looked back, she wasn't there anymore.

when maddy and i (oh, yeah, maddy was there, too...combined convo class today) suggested hey, maybe we should all go ghost hunting at night, the kids sort of freaked out and told us helllllllll no (in so many words).

the students went on to tell us about thai folklore that says no building is truly complete until someone dies during construction.

"wait...you mean that every time they make a building, someone dies?"
"yep."

DO YOU GUYS KNOW WHAT'S GOING ON RIGHT OUTSIDE MY WINDOW RIGHT NOW?