The Haunted Traveler Vol 1 Issue 2

34
Various Versions
Have Been Told...
Bryan Nickelberry
Much to my surprise, it turns out the story
about my wife is one that’s been told before. There
seem to be two primary versions, although I’ve
heard multiple minor variations on each. In the west
they say that the man opened the door on some sort
of half-serpent: fully serpent from the waist down,
fully woman from the waist up, endowed with claws,
wings, and fangs. The stories vary as to who ran: the
husband or the wife. If my wife had been something
that mundane, I doubt I would’ve run.
“In the east,” an inmate told me, “the woman
was a swan plucking out her own feathers.” Had that
been the horrible truth she was keeping from me, I
would have gladly spent the rest of my life searching
for her to apologize. I wondered after I heard the first
story whether one of the neighbors had seen something
and if this story was the “Weekly World Star”
version. Then I heard the second one and found that
these two stories go centuries farther back than my