CustardQuest I - The Real-Life, True Treasure-Hunt Game



  Investigative Notes: CustardQuest I

  Released April 1, 2012 - 12:00 p.m. EDT

  Reward: $350

  by Custard Marks

  Copyright 2012 Custard Marks and CustardQuest

  Investigative Notes

  Case Name: The Case of the Gray Man Ghost

  Subject Matter: Lost Soul (Ecto-Mist Type)

  Date of Report: April 1, 2012

  I hadn’t expected an investigation here. We’d just come to visit for the weekend, as we did once every few years so my dad could see Mr. Furse, an old college football buddy. But just like I can’t choose when I might suddenly need a bathroom, I can’t choose when a real-life, true, unexplained phenomenon may present itself. But I always travel with my notebook, antacids, and laser-tag gear, so I was prepared for anything.

  Let’s get to the facts.

  We had just eaten dinner when Jack asked his parents if he could tell us about the “Gray Man.” They both seemed uneasy about the topic, exchanging glances of uncertainty, but I sensed paranormal activity afoot, so I insisted Jack continue. The truth awaited. And here’s what Jack told us at the dinner table.

  About three weeks before, he had been watching television in the family room. It was late. So late, in fact, that his parents and brother had already gone to bed. He was sure of that, and they confirmed so much during his retelling of the incident. Jack was on the couch, half-sleeping, half-watching a television show about zombies. This suggested he may have dreamed the whole thing, or, at least, what he experienced next may have just been zombie-TV hysteria. Jack reported he heard a sound so sharp and abrupt it made him jump. He eyed the family room without moving his head, but it was completely dark, so he saw nothing. It raised goose bumps on his neck, but he continued with his television show, trying to convince himself it was just the creaking of wood and plaster as the house settled, just like his dad had explained away many other things that went bump in the night. But things were very unsettled in that house, as I found out later.

  It wasn’t more than a minute after the first noise that Jack heard it again. This time, it was more distinct. This one didn’t make him jump, as he was already on edge and waiting for something else to happen. But the third one, which followed ten seconds later, made him bolt upright. The sound was unmistakable. It had been a cough.

  “Mom, dad, Ollie?” he had asked. But he would have seen his parents or Ollie walking down the steps from the second-floor bedrooms, so he knew it had not been any of them. Besides, Ollie was a solid sleeper, and he had heard his father snoring not five minutes earlier.

  From the dining room to his right, toward the garage on the left, something walked across the hallway. It traveled without haste, in no hurry to get to where it was going.

  It was completely dark, the television being the only illumination, and the entity appeared to Jack as a gray, non-descript figure, but it had been unmistakably human in general form. A man, too. And he had been grainy with indistinct borders filled with a swirling fog.

  Jack screamed and ran up to his parents’ bedroom, where he found both sound asleep. Awakened, they were annoyed and assured him it had been his imagination, he had been dreaming, or it was the effects of the pizza and ice cream they’d all eaten that night.

  I listened to Jack’s story at the dinner table with much interest and was actually pretty well freaked out the whole time. I would suggest to others that when you have guests staying for the weekend at your house, do not tell them about a gray ghost that roams your hallways.

  Mr. and Mrs. Furse accompanied Jack’s story with jokes and sarcasm, and my parents also did not take the eyewitness report seriously. Although I am a True Believer to the core, I’m also the one whose duty it is, as a paranormal investigator, to search for the truth. Jack was convinced about what he saw, and he was sincere, in my opinion; however, his subjective beliefs were, just as Mrs. Furse had said, capable of being misguided by imagination, dreams, and indigestion.

  That was the end of Jack’s story. He hadn’t heard or seen anything else in the three weeks since it had occurred. At this point, I was ready to write a summary and file it away.

  I went to bed that Saturday night at the Furse home at the same time as everybody else, around midnight. The Furses’ house was large, as Mr. Furse was president of Ultimate Sportswear, a successful company, so my parents and I each had our own bedroom. Although my parents had their own bathroom in their room, I had to use the one down the hallway. I had been looking up “coughs” in my Encyclopedia of the Unexplained but could find nothing on the subject. So it was past midnight by the time I was ready for sleep. I went down to the bathroom at the end of the hallway, and I swear to you I was not eavesdropping, but I could not help but hear Mr. and Mrs. Furse’s voices through a vent in the bathroom ceiling as I stood atop the bathtub edge, eight folded towels, and ten tippy toes.

  “I didn’t want to scare Custard, Ollie, or Jack, much less Bucky and Angela, but there’s something I haven’t told you,” Mrs. Furse had said from their bedroom. “Last night, I was watching television after you all had gone to bed, and I . . .”

  Mr. Furse encouraged her to continue.

  “I heard somebody cough. Just like Jack did.”

  “It looks like we have a ghost. And he has a cold.”

  “I’m serious. And then I saw somebody walk across the hallway. He was completely gray. I couldn’t see any details, but it was definitely a man. He was translucent, like he was filled with a cloud, because I could see the front porch lights through his body. And he was headed down the hallway toward the garage.”

  At that moment, I fell off the stack of towels, landing inside the tub hard on my backside.

  Mrs. Furse came out of her room and asked through the bathroom door if everything was okay. I told her everything was fine. I had merely fallen off the toilet. I’m not good with stressful situations or thinking very fast, and this was the best thing I could come up with. When she asked me how I managed to do that, I told her I had been washing my feet. Again, I’m not good at this sort of thing. She then asked me why I had been washing my feet, and I said because the dog had been licking chocolate cake off of them during dinner. I thought this was a pretty good recovery, but then she reminded me that we had ice cream for dessert, and they don’t even have a dog. When I told her it was good they didn’t have a dog because they can be allergic to chocolate and get very sick, this seemed to be good enough for her, because she accepted the explanation (Actually, she said, “That’s interesting.”) and left me alone. This was a relief, because the Case of the Gray Man Ghost was about to be reopened and an undercover investigation commenced.

  Luckily, the Furses had provided me access to a computer, so I returned to my bedroom and conducted more research on coughing-related paranormal activity and looked up the local history for the area.

  I poked my head outside the room fifteen minutes later, and everything was quiet. There were no lights on in the house, but I was always prepared, so I just pulled the trigger on my laser-tag pistol to light my way. The glow was blood red and added another dimension of creepiness to what I was already feeling, as well as a stream of new sweat down my temple. The pistol had no ammunition and would provide me only light. But light is all I need to find the truth. I know of no ghost ever discovered by a bullet.

  My stomach was churning, but I made it downstairs without my dinner doing an encore appearance. I wanted to recreate what it must have been like for Jack and his mother, so I sat on the couch in the dark. I didn’t turn on the television, as Jack had described, but, otherwise, the circumstances were comparable. T
he Furses lived in the boonies, and to the left, windows looked out over a thick wooded lot well lit by the full moon. Warmer weather had already leeched the brown from the tangles of green briars, but the winter-chewed trees still stood as meatless skeletons, creeping me out nearly as much as the Crooked Tree on Will and Windy’s farm back home. Otherwise, I didn’t see anything that seemed peculiar outside the window, so I scanned the rest of the family room until I was looking precisely where Jack had described seeing the Gray Man cross the hallway. Unfortunately, or fortunately, I saw no apparitions.

  I walked to the same hallway, still in the dark, and stopped where Jack’s ghost had once traversed. Jack said the ghost had moved from right to left, so I followed the same path, starting in the dining