I worked in a Funeral Home and at that home, in one of the storage areas we used to store the toys that people left at the graveside for their children. Each of the elements I describe here are some of the toys I remember seeing on one of the shelves together and I remember thinking it looked like a road. So I wrote about it.
This poem is actually a few years old, but I did some edits and decided to run it again:
“Ghost Road “
A baby wrapped in blanket with a box for a crib
a basket of kittens who stopped crying when they heard the wind
a dog with no collar, but he once had been called Finn.
all of them waiting to feel warm again.
Each of them placed with love and care
on this unmarked road under the stairs
then
reluctantly left where the ghosts of could have been
Back in the late 1960’s when I was little we lived just up the street from Greenlake in Seattle, Washington.
My Dad’s family used to love to tell stories about Greenlake- and at the age of 5 even I knew most of them were tall tales, but they were fun so I never said- ” No, really?”
Like there was a train at the bottom of the lake and it was down there so deep that they couldn’t get the bodies out and sometimes a hand or a foot or a part of the train would float up and if you saw anything like that on the shore don’t touch it because the story says everyone on the train died from some disease and NOBODY KNEW WHAT IT WAS but it was the reason the train crashed into the lake.
Oh and there was one about boat but nobody died on it.
What happened was everyone saw it appear during this wild thunder and lightening storm and it sat out there all night and in the morning it was gone but lo and behold there barrels full of whiskey were on the shore.
I may have missed chunks of that story because it sounds more like wishful thinking on the part of my family more then anything else. Besides at the time I didn’t know what whiskey was.
And then there was the one about the time Greenlake froze over and you could actually walk out onto it.
I actually called baloney on that story.
Barrels of whiskey dumped on shore by a ghost ship, I could understand. A train full of rabid or plague infested passengers who forced the train off the tracks into the lake- sure, I could see it
But I could not imagine Greenlake frozen over and that was that- until that is years later I saw pictures of it on the internet.
