The Ghost That Saw Too Much

By S.M. Galloway

Glen becomes the only witness to the gruesome murder of a woman living in his house, but telling someone about it is nearly impossible since he’s a ghost. He finds himself reluctantly involved and desperately hoping he can silence the victim’s ghost, who just won’t stop haunting him.
The dead woman’s spirit becomes more volatile each day, and her hints about her killer’s identity are an ambiguous game of charades. Glen struggles to find ways to pass along her messages to keep the investigation moving forward. Unfortunately, it seems hardly a soul can hear his clues, except for one.

After forty years as a ghost, Glen is mysteriously yanked away from the peaceful house he’s always occupied. He suddenly finds himself surrounded by the living, and facing a very different world from the one he’d left long ago. He hopes that unraveling the truth behind the murdered woman will somehow lead him back to his proper place. As he races to put together pieces of the crime and find ways to communicate to the living, he begins to fear there might be an even darker place that lies beyond being dead.

• Language: English
• Publisher: S.M. Galloway
• Release date: Jan 22, 2012
• ISBN: 9781465994615

S.M. Galloway

The author has been a writer in many capacities over the years in advertising, script writing and journalism. Her interest in the paranormal was sparked after an unexplained experience she had one night while living in an 1800’s rural farm house. She began to swap stories with others who shared their experiences and then combined and revitalized several tales. The Ghost That Saw Too Much was created from a combination of a late-night dream and what she learned from neighbors about the house she resides in today.

Book preview

THE GHOST THAT SAW TOO MUCH

What happens when a ghost is suddenly haunted?

A PARANORMAL MYSTERY & A SUPERNATURAL THRILLER

By S.M. Galloway

Copyright 2012 S.M. Galloway

Smashwords Edition

Glen becomes the only witness to the gruesome murder of a woman living in his house, but telling someone about it is nearly impossible since he’s a ghost. He finds himself reluctantly involved and desperately hoping he can silence the victim’s ghost, who just won’t stop haunting him.

The dead woman’s spirit becomes more volatile each day, and her hints about her killer’s identity are an ambiguous game of charades. Glen struggles to find ways to pass along her messages to keep the investigation moving forward. Unfortunately, it seems hardly a soul can hear his clues, except for one.

After forty years as a ghost, Glen is mysteriously yanked away from the peaceful house he’s always occupied. He suddenly finds himself surrounded by the living, and facing a very different world from the one he’d left long ago. He hopes that unraveling the truth behind the murdered woman will somehow lead him back to his proper place. As he races to put together pieces of the crime and find ways to communicate to the living, he begins to fear there might be an even darker place that lies beyond being dead.

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Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 1

Glen had simply been minding his own business when it happened. He managed to witness a murder, a very messy one at that. All he could do was watch and wish it would stop, but it didn’t. When the whole gruesome event eventually ended, and after the murderer left the house, it was quiet. Glen could even hear the birds chirping outside the window. He couldn’t do a damn thing to stop the murder either, since Glen was a ghost and watching things was about all he could do.

It was a sunny day for a murder, and nice weather from what Glen could tell. He hadn’t left the house he was haunting for over forty years, and in that time very little had happened. He enjoyed a brief spell when the house had been vacant, and there was one awful year where the owners did some remodeling. Glen thought his world couldn’t get much worse than that, but the commotion settled down and things went back to normal. However, he really hated the trendy green paint on the kitchen walls. It was a small rural home, making it hard to accommodate any kids, and Glen liked that. This woman who had been living in Glen’s house didn’t even own a dog or a cat, and as far as haunting goes, Glen had it pretty good.

Glen never bothered the woman. He didn’t mind watching her take a shower now and then, but quite frankly, he liked her because she was like him—single. She rarely had anyone over to visit, and she was gone most of the time. Not once did she have a party or play loud music. She was the perfect roommate; he really hated to give her up.

Glen figured he had plenty of time to ponder what this situation meant. Not that it did him much good to dwell on the issue, but he’d finally gotten used to her. Now what? He dreaded the thought of some punk twenty-year old moving into his house. He had that situation once before, and thankfully the idiot couldn’t pay his rent and moved out in the middle of the night. Glen would have helped him pack if he could.

He hated seeing the murdered woman lying on the floor. Emma was her name, he thought. He checked the name on the water bill lying on the table. Yep, Emma Dubrowski—Polish. Anyhow, her eyes were wide open and it rather gave him the creeps. He wished he could toss a blanket over her, so he didn’t have to see her staring back at him. Her mouth was wide open too, like she’d just been startled by something, and Glen chuckled for a quick second, thinking maybe she’d seen a ghost.

He felt a little guilty about that. He knew he should feel sorrow or something. It’s just that it had been so long since he’d practiced any feelings. He really only focused on himself for the last few decades, and the social skills he once had, few as they were, had disappeared long ago with his human body. He did feel badly for Emma; he figured she probably had dreams and aspirations. She would sit in front of a rectangular screen that projected words, and her fingers tapped and clicked, so Glen figured she could have been working on a novel. Maybe she even hoped to meet someone and fall in love one day. She watched some sappy movies, so she probably didn’t embrace being alone like he did.

Her open eyes kept bothering him, as if she had been able to see him during the murder and begged him for help. He was distracted all day, wondering how long her corpse would be left there. He could hardly pick up the phone and report the incident. That was something Glen hated about being dead—no workable hands. He missed touching and moving things, even grabbing a pencil to write something down. If he wanted to remember something, he just had to try hard to remember it, which is hard without a brain or a body.

Besides, who could he actually tell? There’s Walter, milling around, but hell, he’s a ghost too, Glen said to himself. He’s not much of conversationalist anyhow. Walter had built the rustic little house that Glen haunted. Walter’s spirit was obsessed with maintaining things, and he still puttered around looking for things to fix that he couldn’t actually fix. Walter didn’t even know he was dead. But Glen knew he was dead, and he was very aware of what was going to happen next. All his peace and quiet would be gone in a flash.

Peace and quiet was the whole reason Glen had chosen to hang around the very house he once owned, placed strategically in the middle of a quiet country road. No traffic, few people—and now the door was tragically wide open, inviting investigators to scour the crime scene. Then the dead woman’s relatives would probably show up to clean the place out, or maybe move in. It had all turned into something so unsettling.

Glen looked up and noticed the world outside the window had grown darker and the woman was still lying on the floor frozen in terror. Blood had traveled down the grey carpet, turning it a strange dark purple. Just great, Glen thought, now there’ll be some remodeling for sure. Who actually owned the house now Glen didn’t know. In his mind it was still his house; he’d simply been grandfathered in to the point where he didn’t need to pay any rent. He rationalized that he wasn’t taking up any space, making a mess, or using utilities. He didn’t own anything, except for those few things in the attic, but no one even knew they were there.

The tricky thing about haunting was Glen knew he should always play it cool. Don’t over haunt, was his motto. No matter how much he wanted a person to move out of his space, he knew he shouldn’t push the issue. Despite having no body, there were still little things he could do to freak people out, and that was very temping. He could create a breeze if he moved quickly, or generate a cold spot if he lingered too long in one area. He did it once by accident to an old lady who had been living there. She managed to pass right through him and she really flipped out. Thankfully the old lady called a repair guy about her air conditioner instead of a priest, but she had a suspicion about Glen; she just desperately wanted some other explanation.

Even if the old lady had called a priest, it would have been pointless. Priests didn’t bother Glen with their mumbo jumbo, but they could be quite irritating. Glen wasn’t some demonic dark spirit, so religious relics and prayers were about as harmless to him as a throwing a marshmallow. Glen simply had one goal—be left alone, as much as possible. It wasn’t so much a mi casa es su casa thing as an agreement to ignore. He’d stick to hugging the walls, the attic, the cellar and grudgingly accept some changes. As long as he didn’t stir things up, his death life was steady and acceptable.

Quite frankly there was very little for Glen to do as a ghost, and he was okay with that. He didn’t need a hobby or want to contact the living. He’d watch a little TV when some shows would catch his interest, but he always found the flickering images to be a little confusing. The pictures moved too fast, people talked too fast, like it was in some other time zone, and he saw it all through the backside of a mirror.

Glen always tried to maintain a good distance from his cohabitants. If living folk thought spirits were hanging about, they’d start looking for ghosts in everything. A glass of milk gets spilled and the paranoid types jump to assume, the ghost did it; when in fact someone was simply clumsy. Glen remembered the paranoid old lady started hanging crucifixes all over the house and prayed herself silly when the repair guy she called told her nothing was broken. Glen kept solely to the attic for a couple years after that debacle. He came down from the attic one day and the old lady was gone. He had no idea what happened to her. Maybe she died; he smiled at the irony of her becoming a ghost. He had no idea why some people do the ghost thing and some people don’t.

Unfinished business wasn’t the case for Glen’s ghostliness; he had nothing to finish. He was content with things as they were. There was no reason for him to move on or embrace a light down a tunnel. He was about as placid as a picture hanging on the wall. In some ways, Glen never really touched much during his whole physical life, which was almost duplicate to the way things were in his death. Having a human body, or not, was of little difference to Glen. As far as he recalled, he was never an athlete. However, he did have a vague recollection he enjoyed eating Cracker Jacks, and he liked looking up at the stars. Glen didn’t hate people, but he didn’t like them either. If diagnosed by a psychologist, he would probably have had a form of Asperger’s—but without the genius.

Glen suddenly had another concern. What if this Emma woman was going to haunt his house too? Glen felt his house was quite small. Including him and occasional appearances by Walter, it was what he considered already crowded. He definitely didn’t want to share his space with another spook, or feel obliged to make polite conversation, and especially not with a woman on top of that. He never understood women when he was living, and death offered no epiphanies on the subject.

Glen had an idea of what over haunting could cause. A few years ago some obnoxious spirit had appeared at his house, and it was out of its mind, gibbering and panicking because where it had been was no more. From what Glen could tell, the spirit had been interacting with a living family. The people became so scared they abruptly left the house and never returned. The house sat empty until it finally fell into decay, and then a bulldozer flattened the place, but that wasn’t the worst part.

The spirit became a vagrant after its house was demolished. It acted like an abandoned puppy or a kid wandering around lost at a giant shopping mall. It just couldn’t seem to latch on to anything. It didn’t know where it was, and thankfully, it only briefly paused at Glen’s house before drifting off into the cornfield behind the house.

Glen felt bad for the spirit but figured that was a good lesson for him to remember. Don’t make yourself known and nothing will change, was a simple, but extremely crucial rule to uphold. Glen could keep on living as long as he allowed the living people to remain clueless. He was hanging around them like a ghost voyeur of sorts; he figured their ignorance was his bliss.

Just then the door to the house opened in the midst of Glen’s philosophizing. Someone must have noticed the woman was missing, but the person didn’t turn on the lights. Glen thought it was a man by the way he walked, but the hood of his jacket blocked his face. The figure carried in a jug of gasoline and started pouring. That’s when Glen realized things were far from over. Glen winced as the hooded figure poured accelerant all over the woman, splashing some in her wide-open mouth. Not my home! Glen thought. She’s already dead. Leave her body alone!

Glen tried hard to think of anything he could do to stop this. He had been helpless while the murder was taking place, and now he’d witness the end to himself and to everything he’d known. Glen was actually terrified now, more terrified of death than he ever was. What would happen to a ghost without a grounding place? Would he just float around aimlessly like a balloon traveling on the wind, or would he just cease to exist all together and would everything go black?

Glen had never felt such panic before. The murderer was walking down the hall, splashing drops of gasoline in random places. Glen wished he could manifest himself, enough to chase the guy off, but he was out of practice. He had tried that parlor trick of making himself visible just once, and it was years ago out of boredom. He found doing this manifestation to be exhausting and pointless. What the hell can I do, Glen thought.

If he could just create enough energy to appear for a moment, maybe he could resemble his old self, or at least a spooky blob big enough so the murderer could see him, feel scared and leave before striking a match. Well, shoot, Glen thought, he’s got a lighter! With gloved hands, the murderer repeatedly flicked open and closed the lid of a silvery ornate Zippo lighter. It appeared this arsonist was releasing some nervous energy. Glen could possibly manage to blow out a match or two, but his wimpy ghost breeze couldn’t compete against lighter fluid.

I’m doomed! Glen thought, Now, I know how that murdered woman must have felt realizing she was going to die at any second. Glen had a quick brush with empathy as he too felt helpless against the fear of succumbing to his own annihilation. Though Glen wouldn’t be drawing his last breath, it still felt like it to him. Witnessing the last few moments of your living existence is packed full of alarm, fright, dread, terror and hysteria. Personal oblivion is very hard to swallow, and even though Glen was already dead, he knew enough to imagine worse. Unbeknownst to the murderer, at any second, he was about to murder Glen too, with the simple roll of his thumb.

A wall-sized mirror hung at the end of the room. Glen could see everything around him reflected in the glass—everything except himself. If he could just manifest an arm, a hand, even a floating nose—could that be enough? The hooded assailant was quite occupied with the task of burning down the house. What if this violent lunatic didn’t even see Glen’s effort to be scary?

Glen was assuming this murderer/arsonist was a man, based on very large hands. However, Glen never had a good look at the murderer’s face when he had been thrashing about with Emma. Glen had come down from the attic toward the end of the ordeal, just in time to see the back of someone’s head and the expression on Emma’s face as she died away. Glen knew he was the only thing that could stop this maniac from burning down his home. He had no choice; he had to get involved and try to reveal himself. It was definitely a long shot, but if Glen didn’t do something, in a matter of seconds, he could be dead—forever.

Chapter 2

Glen hadn’t needed to concentrate for anything so crucial since he had been alive. His whole world was about to go up in flames, and he was suddenly forced to rely on his barely used memory. He was struggling just to recall the simple act of focusing. He needed to find some deeply buried moment in his life when something was this important. Think, think, Glen coaxed himself. Serves me right. I’ve had years to prepare for an emergency, and now the dam just broke!

Despite chastising himself, Glen finally managed to grab one recollection from his past, a time when he had been taking some exam. He could see himself staring down at a sheet of paper and trying to calculate something mathematical. There! Now he had a reference. It took him all that work just to remember how to focus. Unfortunately, Glen still had a way to go and barely minutes to make himself look like an all-terrifying, impressive ghost.

Glen tried to ignore the murderer, tried to ignore the flammable room, forget his present fear, and just pull everything he had into his center. It was like collecting energy from thin air. Glen wondered if he might have been a Boy Scout once; there was a quick flash of him laboring to start a campfire with two sticks. This present moment in his death life had become the most pivotal time in Glen’s whole existence. He would either explode on the scene like moonlight in the room, or he’d simply arrive like an insignificant puff of smoke.

The murderer was undistracted, traipsing around the house as Glen’s first attempt to spontaneously combust himself failed quickly and miserably. He just couldn’t seem to grab anything for fuel; it felt as if he were clinging to wax paper. The pressure of the situation made Glen rush to get results, and he hated that concentrating was taking so terribly long. At least the arsonist wasn’t in a hurry. The man appeared methodical, thoroughly examining the rooms and making sure he’d tied up all his loose ends. Then he threw some of his victim’s belongings into a large black duffle bag. Glen had to remind himself to quit watching the activity and focus on his half-assed plan.

Soon a whole minute went by, and Glen achieved nothing. He resembled some dying star, galaxies away, struggling to burn. He was losing time and opportunity and had to try harder and harder to focus even faster. Glen kept knotting and winding himself up as if trying to awaken and stimulate some ghost molecules that had long ago fallen asleep. Finally Glen achieved a glowing, but for only a second. He saw his result in the mirror on the wall. He looked much like a solitary bulb on a Christmas tree. That’s it? Glen thought. All that for twinkle?

The hooded man rummaged in the kitchen and threw open a few cabinets, then tossed some things on the floor. Maybe the culprit was looking for money, or possibly he wanted the crime scene to look like a robbery. What did that matter? Why stage it when he was going to burn it? Focus, Glen! he scolded himself. Don’t get distracted!

The murderer was standing right in front of Glen now, and the timing would be perfect if only Glen could just generate himself larger than a cotton ball. Actually Glen needed to be much bigger and resemble a creepy ghost in order to effectively set his plan in motion. Then hopefully, the murderer would look up in time to see Glen and be so scared he’d leave before setting the house on fire. This was a lot of wishful thinking, but Glen felt like he was getting closer to some form of an apparition. Come on, do it, he coaxed himself. Never had Glen been a cheerleader for anything before; this day was unchartered territory.

Glen suddenly realized years had gone by since he had last seen his own reflection. He was almost scared at what he might see—if he should see himself. Maybe he had aged or looked disturbingly creepy. Maybe he’d be naked. Glen had no idea what he last saw himself wearing. He hadn’t gone to his own funeral, so maybe he was wearing a suit. What if he’d been cremated? Ghost stories always talked about ghosts appearing in their most treasured clothing; for Glen that meant he would appear wearing his bathrobe.

Glen kept trying to do his manifestation thing, and his effort was all based on a few bored days from a few years back. At that time, his activity resulted in a transparent human-shaped blob for barely a second. This time he had distractions, but at least his emotional anxiety helped balance the scale, providing him a boost of energy. He began to see some results appear in the reflection of the large, wall-sized mirror. At first he was a hovering glow, no bigger than a firefly, but then he grew bigger and rounder, almost to the point of a mothball. At last Glen achieved a dim, golf ball-sized glowing orb, not much brighter than a child’s nightlight.

Unfortunately, Glen’s timing was terrible, for as soon as he had a sustainable presence, at almost the same moment the murderer turned on a flashlight. You’ve got to be kidding me! Glen wanted to shout. Murphy’s Law? Why now? The flashlight had a red beam, which shattered most of Glen’s hard-earned progress; it washed right over his pale glowing orb as if he wasn’t even there. Well, nuts! That’s just great! said Glen. What am I supposed to do? He can barely see me now. Glen looked in the mirror, and it was doubtful he’d cause anyone to run screaming from the house. He appeared more like traffic light fifty yards in the distance on a foggy night.

Even worse, the murderer turned around, making Glen’s ability to get noticed nearly impossible. For crying out loud! Glen was exasperated now. The arsonist pointed his flashlight beam at the dead woman’s body. Glen was still glowing, but now he had to reposition himself while the hooded man stared down at his victim. Just then the murderer crouched low and got very close to the corpse sprawled on the floor.

Eeew, Glen thought, "I hope he’s not going to kiss her! That would