The Haunted Traveler Vol. 1 Issue 1

50
gave a huge feast in the Great Hall - we knocked through a
couple of old parlours, and put in a fake marbled fireplace -
and waited for the ghost. It was dead nice in the hall by firelight,
looked just right - sort of gloomy but exciting.
Well one young lad, the idiot, had decided that this would
be the ideal time to propose to his girlfriend, who was ghost
crazy. So after the pumpkin pie and parkin and blood red
wine and cups of coffin (I came up with that, though it’s
always a pain pretending that you’ve heard the joke for the
first time when someone asks for ‘de-coffin-ated’ and laughs
themselves silly), the lad gets down on one knee.
“Darling Tina,” he says, clutching her hand, “I love you so
much.”
At this point we heard a rich chuckle, though we thought
it might be one of the other guests. You know, nervous laughter.
Anyway, the lad carries on.
“I will never be happy without you, and I beg you to do me
the honour of becoming my wife.”
She looks shocked, and so do the rest of us, because there’s
the jester. He’s not like the photo on the website; he’s a little
fella about five foot high, very thin, in red and white. bells
jingling. His face is all lit up with a fiendish glee, and he’s
laughing like a drain. He has a little black beard like, I dunno,
Pan or the Devil, and he says, “He loves you! That’s rich!
That’s rich? Honour of being his wife? The honour would be
all yours; a rich jest. Very rich! I’ve found you out!”
It turned out that the girlfriend had money and the lad
didn’t, and he had ‘borrowed’ considerable sums from her.
Hence the word ‘rich’ used over and over.
Well, she looked at him sadly and drooped, and he stormed
and swore and threatened to sue, and they left that night.
The other guests were thrilled to have seen a ghost, though
many of them didn’t believe it, and thought it was a computer
image of some kind. I always let the sceptics examine the
place, but of course they didn’t find anything.
Anyway, the guests were saying what an awful thing it was