August 13, 2025

Ghost Picnic
by Jim Wright

Click here to listen to this story on the Kaidankai Podcast.


On this late-spring morning, galaxies of dandelions waved in the grass as our motley gang of ghosts waited in the graveyard for our visitor to arrive.

Missus Norris sat primly on her marble headstone, knees together. The drowned boy Teddy crawled in the dirt, observing a line of marching ants. Strangle-Pete, the mute guy from the ancient part of the cemetery, leaned against an ash tree and fiddled with the ratty hemp noose cinched tight around his neck. 

I squatted in the grass, watching the sky. I’m the newest ghost. Once, my name was Tim Rankin, a doctor in our little village of New Bohemia. I passed in a car accident in 1948 after downing a fifth of bourbon.  The gang tells me that half my face is blue-black from where I smashed into the steering wheel. 

My curiosity must have survived my cross-over to the spirit-land because I’ve spent many decades here mingling with the dead and studying what it means to be a ghost. It’s a mystery why we four ordinary souls were marooned as spooks in this boneyard when most folks fly straight on to the real aftershow. Missus Norris thinks we have unfinished business that nails us to this world. But who the hell really knows?

We heard hard breathing and footsteps crunching through leaf-litter. Soon, a familiar figure emerged from the trees—a blonde, matronly woman dressed in a quilted jacket, slacks, boots, and a floppy sunhat. The woman carried a camp chair and notebook, with a picnic bag over her shoulder.

As she stepped over a low iron border fence and entered our graveyard, I felt a pang of envy. The living can move at will across the landscape. But we ghosts cannot travel one step beyond the boundary of this abandoned cemetery. 

The woman opened her chair, put her picnic bag on the ground and spread her hands like a priest: “Welcome, spirits! It’s me, Amelia, back for another visit. My blessings be upon you!”

We surrounded her in a loose circle.

Amelia fancied herself a medium. This was her fourth visit to our graveyard in as many weeks. We ghosts have been away from the living for so long that none of us knew her, but she radiated friendliness.

Her only drawback was that she was a crank. She was completely blind to our presence.
Amelia settled into her chair and declared, “I feel the presence of a Civil War soldier. Come to me, spirit!” She waved a hand and looked intently past us ghosts at some imaginary target.

“Reveal, phantasm!”

As Amelia spoke to the air, Missus Norris sniggered, Strangle-Pete snorted, and Teddy the drowned boy had a big grin plastered across his blue face.

 I laughed too. But I also felt a twinge of regret—that I could not share with Amelia my fascinating insights about the ghostly life.

Did you know, I imagined lecturing this foolish woman, that living humans carry within them the spectral energy that can later become a ghost? Yet, breathers notice it no more than their own skeletons. To the living, this ghost-plasm is invisible, intermixed with the other elements that make up the human body. But occasionally, we ghosts can spot tiny phosphorescent flares in the auras of the living, a sign of their inhabiting inner ghosts. 

And were you also aware, I could tell the clueless Amelia, that spirits fade over time? Fact! Every year, we ghosts leak a bit of energy, like color leaching from cloth in sunlight…

But I waste my time. The self-absorbed world of the living does not care about the dead.

Through most of the morning, Amelia held court in our graveyard, interrogating fictitious spirits: “Little girl, tell me of life on your celestial plane!” Eventually, though, she was rummaging through her picnic bag. We pressed around Amelia with hungry stares as she took large bites from a sandwich.

Then, an event occurred that I had prayed for during every one of Amelia’s visits. A random flare of ghost-energy, of greater length than usual, unexpectedly shot out from Amelia’s aura, near her neck. I pounced, grabbing it. Because both the flare and I were made from ghost stuff, I was able to yank it hard like a fluttering handle.

Though she couldn’t see me, a look of panic crossed Amelia’s face. She cried out, dropped her sandwich, and put a hand to her throat. 

At first, her tattered bit of plasm resisted my tugging but gradually, it stretched into a longer, tongue-shaped scrap. Strangle-Pete stepped forward to help me pull. As the flare extended, Missus Norris and even Teddy laid hold and hauled with all their might. 
Amelia flailed her arms and struggled to breathe. But the flare stubbornly withstood our tug-of-war.

Then, as we heaved with our last strength, Amelia’s full spectral form spilled from her body and tumbled onto the ground. Like a newly hatched pupa, the ghost thing wriggled, a soft mass. We watched as it immediately began to harden and imprint with the shape and face of Amelia. Nearby, her physical body sagged dead in her chair.

Missus Norris attacked first, cackling as she plunged both hands into the sticky ghost-plasm. She crammed a great clot of it into her mouth. The rest of us followed, racing to gobble up the spirit image before it toughened and became inedible for ghosts. As we tore out chunks of Amelia’s ghostly body, its still-forming face made hideous meeping sounds. 

At last, our feeding frenzy ended. Nothing remained of our prey but a sheen of goo on the grass.

The rest of the day, we lay in the shade, full and satisfied, knowing that devouring Amelia’s ghost had probably added at least a century to our gang’s flickering existence. 

In the early evening, a passing hiker discovered Amelia’s body. As medics removed her amid the flashing lights of an ambulance, Strangle-Pete smacked his lips and croaked the first words I had ever heard him say:
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“Yummy picnic!”

                                                                      💀💀💀
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Jim Wright lives in central New York State, USA. He writes short stories when he can and works as a school psychologist when he must. He is a past member of the Downtown Writer’s Center in Syracuse, NY.