Grandpa Joe always loved a good prank. Even after he passed, apparently. Last Tuesday, my sister Millie was driving home from work, humming along to the radio, when she felt a chill. Then, a voice, thin and reedy like rustling leaves, whispered from the back seat, “Psst… Millie? Need a ride to the afterlife disco?”
Millie shrieked, slamming on the brakes. Her eyes darted around the empty car. “Who said that?!” she yelled, her voice trembling.
Silence. Then, a ghostly chuckle. “It’s me, Joe! Your dearly departed grandpa! And I’m terribly late for the ectoplasmic boogie-woogie contest.”
Millie, a practical woman who wouldn’t believe a ghost if it slapped her with a spectral herring, cautiously looked around again. “Grandpa… in my car? But…you’re dead.”
“Technically, yes,” the ghostly voice conceded. “But I’m also fashionably late and my spectral scooter’s in the shop.” He sighed, a ghostly puff of air ruffling Millie’s hair. “This earthly vehicle will have to do.”
Millie, completely bewildered but also kind of amused, cautiously drove on. She spent the next ten minutes in terrified but hilarious conversation with a ghostly grandpa who was complaining about the lack of decent spectral tunes on the radio and demanding she turn up the volume. She finally dropped him off at the local cemetery – the “afterlife disco,” he explained, was having a “haunted happy hour” tonight. He thanked her profusely, promising a lifetime supply of ghostly cookies (which, she admitted, sounded oddly appealing).
As she drove away, Millie saw a figure in a shimmering white robe waving goodbye near the graveyard entrance. She noticed something else too – a tiny, glittering spectral scooter leaning against a tombstone. Apparently, Grandpa Joe’s “spectral scooter’s in the shop” was just a slightly transparent excuse for a good ghost-ride.
