I posted this creepy short story a while back, but I was thinking about how Halloween really meant something back when I was in grade school and it unlocked a memory.
OCTOBER was the start of an uncontrollable excitement. The decorations went up above and on both sides of the giant chalkboard. Paper cut-outs of pumpkins and autumn leaves and acorns got hung. And they'd devote entire hours to the construction of Halloween crafts... like those cool little napkin ghosts with tissue-ball brains.
There was this one strange/cool teacher who was so incredibly pale and thin, like a living Edward Gorey illustration...
Picture her like this, but with a long, thin neck.
On a particular day in October, she turned the overhead lights in the classroom off. Then she began to read
The Green Ribbon to a room of young jittery Halloween-starved children.
She was a soft-spoken woman, but one we all kinda feared/respected. Very elegant in her movements as I think about it. So we hung on every single word...
Once there was a girl named Jenny. She was like all the other girls, except for one thing. She always wore a green ribbon around her neck.
She puts her hand to her neck, and I swear to you she's WEARING A GREEN RIBBON.
There was a boy named Alfred in her class. Alfred liked Jenny and Jenny liked Alfred. One day he asked her, "Why do you wear that ribbon all the time?" "I cannot tell you," said Jenny. But Alfred kept asking, "Why do you wear it?" And Jenny would say, "It is not important."
At this point we're fixated on that ribbon. Wondering where this is all headed. And TRULY unaware that this gentle teacher is telling some sort of ghost story.
Jenny and Alfred grew up and fell in love. One day they got married. After their wedding, Alfred said, "Now that we are married, you must tell me about the green ribbon." "You still must wait," said Jenny. "I will tell you when the right time comes." Years passed. Alfred and Jenny grew old. One day Jenny became very sick. The doctor told her she was dying. Jenny called Alfred to her side. "Alfred," she said, "now I can tell you about the green ribbon. Untie it, and you will see why I could not tell you before."
This story is STILL exciting and cool and wonderful....and even now it's shockingly impressive that something so short can have such incredible tension and suspense... We're all holding our breath with curiosity... We're dying to know what happens. (It's important to note that I have fallen for every M. Night Shyamalan twist in all of his films...)
The teacher begins to slowly undo the ribbon around her neck with her long pale fingers, which now might as well be ghost fingers...
Slowly and carefully, Alfred untied the ribbon, AND JENNY'S HEAD FELL OFF!
We all went completely and absolutely NUTS.
Also worth noting that severed heads and the concept of a headless body really scared me as a kid. So the trauma of that event was permanent and incredible.
Oh the glorious old days of Halloween in grade school. REAL Halloween. With pumpkins, ghosts, witches, and devils.
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