Here are some ghost stories written by my middle-school students – by my uncontrite TEPS-M cohort, to be exact. Really their stories are pretty good – I suspect in some cases they may be borrowing from plots of movies or TV shows or books that are unfamiliar to me in some cases, but even still they did a good job translating. I made quite a few grammatical corrections and even a few stylistic adjustments to their writing, but the ideas and descriptions are fundamentally theirs.
I am a taxi driver. One day, I was driving my taxi. It was a typical day. But that night, I was driving along a street where there were no people. Suddenly, a girl knocked on the taxi's window. She said, "Are you free? May I get in?" I said, "Sure," so she got in. She told me, "I need to get home fast!" So I drove very fast and girl told me the way to go. I arrived at her house, and it was a very old and big house. She said to me, "I'll give you the money, just wait a moment." She went into the house. I waited and waited, for a long time. After half an hour, I was feeling very angry. I was frustrated from waiting for her. I went up to the house and knocked three times on the door. A man opened the door and greeted me. He asked me, "What do you want?" I said, "Your daughter rode in my taxi and went into this house, but she didn't pay." The man was very surprised, and yelled, "What are you talking about? I was embarrassed. He showed me a photo and said, "Is that the girl you gave a ride to?" I answered, "Yes." The man said, "Oh, no. Today is the anniversary of her death. Oh, I miss her so much." He cried. I was very scared. I ran to my car and drove very fast to my house.
This is a true story about a haunted house. Last summer vacation, when I was 14 years old, I and another friend went to a haunted house. Our town is pretty old, so there are a lot of old, haunted houses around. Among them, we chose the building that was the biggest. It has 5 floors including a basement. We thought that it was an old clothing company, because there were so many old clothes and mannequins. The mannequins were especially scary, because they were taller than we were. On the first floor, there was nothing interesting – just a few mannequins and a counter. The second floor seemed to have been a storage area, and the third floor, too. The problem happened on the last floor, the fourth. It was a workroom, because there were some sewing machines and mannequins. This floor had more room than the other floors. We started by checking from room to room, and we checked all the way to the last room, then we returned. My two friends didn't notice it, but I did. All the mannequins' necks had rotated 180 degrees. I regretted that I didn't have a video camera. Still, I never wanted to go back to that place after that.
One night, I was at home. I was the only person in the house. It was really dark, so I turned up the lights. As it became bright, I heard a strange sound in my room. I was so scared. I hugged my dog, and I went to my room. When I turned on the light, there, I saw nothing in my room. At that time, I heard the strange sound in the living room. I felt even more scared, so I called my parents. The didn't answer their phone, however. I thought maybe the strange sound was coming from the computer or TV. I turned off the power for those things. Still, I heard that strange sound. Until this day, I don't know what that strange sound was. It's really scary to remember it.
There was a man once who said he wanted to sell a camera which he said could take a ghost's picture. He said he would sell the camera for three thousand dollars to people who can't see ghosts, and only five hundred dollars to people who can see ghosts. Someone came to try to buy the camera and offered five hundred dollars, but he couldn't find the ghosts that the camera showed. Two days later, someone who really could see ghosts came to buy the camera. Unfortunately, the camera had a problem with bad photo quality. So the customer came back to the man who had sold the camera, that man said he would fix it. In the pictures, there were some unclear pictures of ghosts. The camera seller said, "Let's meet tomorrow, and I will give you this camera, all fixed." The camera seller fixed the lens of the camera. It looked like a black point on a ball. He wiped off the lens and gave it to the customer, who was now satisfied with the camera. A few months later, after taking a lot of photos, the camera began to have a problem again. He complained the there was a red stripe. The camera seller took the customer to his home, where he stunned the man and pulled out his eye, which he put in as a new camera lens. You see, actually, the camera lens is the eye of someone who can see ghosts. The camera seller announced, "Here is the latest model of my ghost-seeing camera!"
[daily log: walking, 1km]