Humans are really interesting creatures, are they not? I suppose I was one once, but I can’t say I remember. At any rate, it’s fun to mess with them, since they’re so scared of anything that’s not like them, especially of us ghosts. But once in awhile I like to do something nice for a human; it shakes things up. After all, doing anything often enough gets boring; variety is the spice of life, or whatever.
Anyway, that is what I was doing this last week. As I wandered along the road I saw a man walking towards me. Now, something told me that while this man wasn’t especially good, he also wasn’t a bad man. He was neutral, if you would. He led an ordinary life, and was just traveling along the road to get to the next place he could find work.
Just to mess with him, as soon as we met each other in the road I flipped around and started walking alongside him. I like to do this a lot; usually what happens involves screaming, running, and a great deal of amusement (for me anyway). But this man didn’t do any of that. He kept walking as if this was an everyday occurrence That was rather interesting, since no one else had ever done that before. I decided to keep walking with him and see what happened.
Shortly after I joined him, we came to a river where we had to swim to cross it to the other side (I think there’s a joke in there). Obviously, I didn’t make any noise at all (most things just pass through me if I choose to let them), but I swear the man was making more noise than was reasonable. So I asked him why on earth he was making so much noise when he swam. I admit, I wasn’t expecting him to lie and say that he was a ghost and could do whatever he wanted. But I admired his boldness in doing so. So I told him that in that case, one ghost to another, we should become friends and come to each other’s aid if we ever needed to. Not that I expected to require a human’s help. But I decided that my first impression of him being a decent man was correct, and this would serve as my good deed to humans for the decade.
So as we walked, I mused on a way to conduct my good deed. Eventually I asked the man if there was anything he feared. Obviously lying, the man said he didn’t fear anything. Then he asked me the same question. I told him that I was afraid of the wind blowing through a field of barley. It was the dumbest thing I could think of, and I knew the town we were walking toward grew barley in its outskirts. I figured the man was smart enough to lie to try to get away from me.
Sure enough, when we came to the city, I asked the man if he wanted to go into town with me. The man said he was tired and was going to lie down in the field of barley to rest. I walked away and continued into town. While this might have been my good deed for one human, that didn’t mean I couldn’t have some fun with others. So I did my usual tricks of scaring people, destroying things, etc. For my grand finale, I made my way into the palace and stole the soul of the king’s son. He was a brat anyway, and a near-death experience is good for the soul (heh, get it?). I bound up the soul in a yak-hair bag and left the city. I dropped it at the edge of the field where the man was sleeping (gotta keep up pretenses after all), and told him to watch the sack for me, since I had business elsewhere to attend to.
Obviously I never went back. I had a feeling the man would know what to do. And sure enough, about a week later, I heard some gossip between a couple human females while they were washing their clothes. They said that the king’s son had fallen gravely ill, but had been cured by a begging holy man who walked into town earlier in the day. The king had been so grateful for the man’s help that he had given the man half of everything he owned, both riches and land. That made me smile a little, before I made myself solid enough to move one of the bed sheets the women had hung up. It may be a stereotype, but it is fun to run around under a sheet to scare people.
Author’s note: this is a retelling of The Man and the Ghost, from a collection of Tibetan Folk Tales by A. L. Shelton. The original story is told from a 3rd person point of view, and we only learn the thoughts and feelings of the man, not the ghost. The end of the story specifically mentions that the ghost never came back to the man again, leaving the man to assume that this is customary behavior between a man and a ghost. I thought it would be interesting to look at the ghost’s reason for causing such havoc and walking away, and figure that maybe he wanted to be nice for a change (the alternative that I could come up with was that he was very scatterbrained, but I like the idea I went with more than that).
