This will take a little while to set out. Please be patient.
Pepper Mill and MilliCal, my wife and daughter, are big fans of those TV “Ghost Hunter” and “Haunted Location” shows that seem to be proliferating – they’re on SciFi and Discovery and the Travel Channel. After watching a marathon of Ghost Hunters, al wrapped up in the covers and snuggled in next to her mother, MilliCal will run off to the bathroom, switching on all the lights as she goes (normally, MilliCal is a budding environmentalist, and shuts unused lights off. After watching Ghost Hunters, she puts on lights that are otherwise never left on)
we also go on Ghost Tours ourselves when on vacation, or near home (Salem, Massachusetts has at least three competing ghost tours).
Skeptic that I am, I don’t buy into this, and suspect thast the Ghost Hunter crew is arranging a few of their own manifestations. I leave the lights out, because I’m sure there are no ghosts (although I’m still agnostic on the subject of Basement Monsters). But I admire the Ghost Tours as a stealth method of teaching history. It’s fun to walk a city at night and learn about its past under the guise of looking for specters.
The problem is that there aren’t enough – or at least enough well-known – legends associated with the ghosts of the Founding Fathers or other key characters from American History that we can capitalize on in making such tours. I’ve been trying to think of a few.
– And to this day, if you visit the Franklin house on a rainy nighht, you can see a ghostly figure folding a kite and a key.
— And every time Someone tries to plant a cherry tree at Mount Vernon, it dies!!
–If you stay alone in the Adams Library , late at night you can hear footsteps walking down the hall, and a voice faintly saying “inalienable…unalienable…inalienable…”
