My name is Lucille. I am a ghost and I don’t like it one little bit. I have just gone around for a lifetime haunting the house I lived in as a child and where I died.

It must have been twenty or thirty years after I died that I learned that I could be heard by residents of the house. I have scared a lot of them a lot through the years. I learned that if I scream as loud as I can, I can break through some barrier between the truly dead and people like me who are stuck in sort of a limbo land. It is not pleasant.

Once in a while a person can get a flash of me as I go around a corner of my house. That flash is enough to cause several people through the years to sell my house and move far away.

I suppose I could tell you a little about me. It was always said that I died of influenza in 1918. I know the truth but it took me a long time to find out about it and get even with my brother who really poisoned me with a poison apple.

My father was very wealthy and built a very large house in a very small town on the Milk River in Montana. The town was called Bullhook but then the name was changed to Havre.

I don’t want you to know who I am because I don’t want ghost hunters to come looking for me. It was bad enough that Mr. Lucke found me and is getting this information. That is very bad!

I will give you a clue, though. In one of the windows in the house, my brother etched his initials in the glass. Those initials are there to this day. The initials are L. G.

When my brother was born, my parents had wanted a girl. So they did not treat my brother all that well. Then I came along and I was just what they wanted so I got everything and my brother was very jealous. I remember one time he tried to drown me in the bath tub. Another time he left me in the hay loft of the barn and lit the barn on fire. I should have died both of those times but I did not. When, in 1918 it was thought that I had influenza but was a poisoned apple, I died and my brother lived and lived a better life now that he had gotten rid of me.

Why I didn’t go to heaven I will never know but instead I was destined to spend all of eternity moaning and groaning around this big old house and properly scaring people as much as possible.

This thing about scaring people is that it is not what it is cracked up to be. I get tired of making people frightened. I remember one Halloween when I was still very young, I hung myself through a noose on the front porch and then waited until people got a quick look at me. Enough of a look to scream and run far away. But even that gets old quickly and I feel as if I need to really die myself.

My house has changed owners so often (probably due to me among other things) that I do not know if any of my brothers and sisters are alive yet but I doubt it. I know my parents died as I heard people talking about it in the house.

I ask you this once again. Why me? Why am I a ghost and have to haunt this house forever? Why am I not in heaven or even in hell for that matter? What did I do to be half with the human race and half with the dead?

Why can I just be seen once in a while and at that just a flash of me appears?

I remember one time I was sitting in the living room watching television with the family who was living in my house then. Suddenly I got up and showed myself to the whole family for just a moment as I got up from the chair I was sitting in. I think the house was sold right after that episode as well.

What people do not understand is that even though I am a ghost, I am harmless other than my screams and letting myself be seen every once in a while. I don’t like it here and want to go somewhere else. I am hoping that Mr. Lucke can help me along.

Epilogue from Robert Lucke

I had heard about Lucille for a good many years and that she tried her best to scare people out of her family home and usually was quite successful. When she told my her story, I realized how lonely she was and how she wanted to move on to anywhere else than haunting her family home.

I got an idea that we should dig her up, perform an autopsy which would prove if she was poisoned or not and that might put her to rest for evermore.

We did that and her death certificate was changed to say that she was poisoned and did not die of influenza.

That was maybe twenty years ago now and no one has every haunted anyone in that big old house ever again. Lucille has moved on and is happy wherever she went.

Happy Halloween!