New Jersey's Top Ghost Tours Reviewed and Rated: A Short Story of Tax Fraud, True Love, and Posthumous Unionizing

By Sarah Avery

Any day now, Bizarro Jersey Magazine will send a reviewer incognito to the ghost tour Jim Griggs runs in a scenic little Delaware River Valley town. The Halloween season is coming, and Jim has bills to pay. When his girlfriend gives him a haunted cabinet for his birthday, a spectral union agitator who died in the 1930s wreaks havoc in Jim's town

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sarah Avery
• Release date: Jun 19, 2021
• ISBN: 9780997414059

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Published in 2020 by

Sarah Avery

Copyright ©2009, 2020 Sarah Avery

The right of Sarah Avery to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

All rights reserved. No part of the publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

ISBN (epub) 978-0-9974140-5-9

ISBN (kindle) 978-1-7360275-0-9

Cover Design and Interior Layout by designforwriters.com

Contents

New Jersey’s Top Ghost Tours Rated and Reviewed

Acknowledgments

New Jersey’s Top Ghost Tours Rated and Reviewed

Jim Griggs clambered down mossy stones into the empty bed of the Delaware and Raritan Canal to retrieve the last of his rat traps. Full. Good. Damp seeped through denim where he knelt to pull the trap from its crevice. September’s first fallen leaves formed a thin layer of crackle over slow muck. His footsteps broke and squelched, broke and squelched, in counterpoint to the rat’s squeaking.

Nothing personal, Jim told the rat. He set the trap above him on the ledge so he could climb up to where his truck waited. The moment he set his feet on the towpath, the dozen rats in the flatbed of the pickup who had been his morning’s work squeaked along with the new one he set there to join them. Jim paused to wipe his hands down with sanitizer before taking the wheel.

Any day, the guys from Bizarro Jersey magazine would send a critic to review the ghost tour, and Jim meant to be ready. When the girl in Weehawken who channeled the spirit of Alexander Hamilton phoned him up, Jim let himself think everything might come together just right. He popped in his earpiece and picked up. Hey, Suzy.

Jim, we have two things to say.

We. So she was calling him from the site of Hamilton’s duel. Shoot, honey.

Very funny.

Showing me your hair-trigger temper?

Do you want to know what Mr. Hamilton says to tell you, or not?

All right, Suzy, all right. What is it?

She cracked her chewing gum before answering. Mr. Hamilton’s, like, sure he spotted the reviewer. It’s a short, balding guy, kind of pudgy, too old to have any subtlety about snapping pics with his cell phone. The guy’s not even from Jersey. Big thick Boston accent.

Boston? What happened to hometown pride?

Anonymity, impartiality, some shit like that, she said. "Bizarro Jersey had that thing last year. It doesn’t bother me that some people like their local ghosts best, but when money changes hands, it’s just not right. And if you want to stay on Mr. Hamilton’s good side, you won’t try that again." Suzy popped another big bubble with that goddamn gum.

How does anybody expect me to keep a business running? Jim said. People don’t drop money on ghost tours like they used to.

No reply. He could hear Suzy mumbling in troubled tones with her hand over the mic, arguing with someone. Jim had to wait through a few moments of that before she resumed as if she hadn’t even heard him. "And Mr. Hamilton says if you cheat on your taxes again this year, he washes his