Ghost Stories: Crystal Cave

  I love my new job at Crystal Cave and have another chapter to add to Ghost Stories by Dana Lee that should be available soon. It began with a dream. I dreamed that my best friend, Theresa, and I were having supper in the cave, and she said, "See you tomorrow', the night before my first day. Then I saw a Scooby Doo looking ghost during my first "lights out", when the lights go out in the cave. It looked like a Halloween sheet ghost without eyes, shimmering electric green as Danu, my Glo catfish. It began at the stairs up to the Totem Pole, (who I call a deva), and moved towards me down the hall. It lasted the entire "lights out" while I tried to blink it away. I did not see it again, but a week later I was alone in the cave sweeping. At the very same spot where the ghost had appeared, at the foot of the stairs up to the Totem Pole, I caught the faint whiff of a good cigar. The smell grew and walked with me so much that I began chatting with it. I never knew such a friendly ghost, so welcoming. It followed me all the way to the mouth of the cave. Another week passed before I made the connection and named the ghost. I'm quite sure that it is Samuel Kohler, who bought the cave in 1872 for five-thousand dollars, protecting it from vandals. When he passed away his son David broke into the cave and stole a calcite speleothem from Prairie Dog Island that is on his grave in Kutztown Cemetery. It must pin him to the cave. 

  I was covering for miniature golf reading Poldark when the maintenance man, Mike, came to cut the grass. He said that there is a white lady ghost, and that the guy that hired me saw a ghost in the rest room of the restaurant that I'm going to work in. He thought that it was a real person and was waiting for him while he closed, but there wasn't anybody there. The owner told me that the inn is haunted. The tenant said that his kitchen cupboards just opened. He said that he's heard horses in the restaurant that used to be a barn. The girls have told me everything from the seats in the theater moving to noises in the restaurant and the rest room doors of the souvenir shop opening and closing. 

  The cave bathroom is haunted. The first time I just saw something black, very solid, perhaps the hem of a skirt, beneath the stall, when nobody was there. The second time it was loaded with sprickets. Sprickets are unique to the cave, half spider, half cricket. They don't chirp or bite. They are big, have very long legs, and are stripey brown and black. They have extraordinarily long antennae too. We think that they eat algae, which is good for the cave as the algae corrodes the soft limestone. They hang out in the eighteenth hole box at mini golf too. Their closest known relatives are found in Australia with 97% the same DNA. I passed the first stall and saw a young white woman with wet hair covering her face sitting on the toilet. She was wearing pants and a long-sleeved top. I wondered why somebody would have the stall open and looked back, but there wasn't anybody there. A spricket followed me up to the theater, tickling my neck.