A Halloween Ghost Story

In the mountains of North Georgia where I grew up over half a century ago,my favorite Uncle was Anon Westmoreland.I was so impressed at the number of poems and stories we read in school that I thought he wrote...This story was also attributed to anon...

 "A young man and his wife were on a trip to visit his mother. Usually they arrived in time for supper, but they had had a late start, and now it was getting dark, so they decided to look for a place to stay overnight and drive on in the morning.

Just off the road, they saw a small house in the woods. "Maybe they rent rooms," the wife said. So they stopped to ask. An elderly man and woman came to the door. They didn't rent rooms, they said, but they would be glad to have them stay overnight as their guests. They had plenty of room, and they would enjoy the company. The old woman made coffee and brought out some cake, and the four of them talked for a while. Then the young couple were taken to their room. They tried to insist on paying for this, but the old man said he would not accept any money.

The young couple got up early the next morning, before their hosts had awakened. They left an envelope with some money in it on a table near the front door, to pay for the room. Then they went on to the next town. They stopped at a restaurant and had breakfast. When they told the owner where they had stayed, he was shocked. "That can't be," he said. "That house burned to the ground, and the man and the woman who lived there died in the fire."

The young couple could not believe it. So they went back to the house. Only now there was no house. All they found was a burnt-out shell. They stood staring at the ruins trying to understand what had happened. Then the woman screamed: In the rubble was a badly burned table, like the one they had seen by the front door and on the table was the envelope they had left that very morning.