This Month

We are still awaiting from W. A. R. Wood a fill-in about the ghost which he did see. We asked him to send along the story and we hope that Mr. Wood’s ghost goes west without too much delay. Meanwhile, we make shift with the spooks which he did not see, but which he laid so effectively in the Mysterious East. (“Ghosts,” page 86.)

The credibility of ghosts seems to be in direct proportion to their distance and antiquity. Compared to Siam or Cornwall, the United States is only sparsely haunted nowadays. Unlike Mr. Wood, I have never met a ghost, but I did see a very queer automobile in Colorado some years ago, on the road front Idaho Springs to Evergreen at bright noon on a summer day.

There were three of us on die front seat in my own car. The graveled road, comfortably wide enough for two cars, was on a standardized grade cut into the mountainside. There was a steep cliff above us on our right and a heavy three-cable guard fence on our left. The road was a series of straightaways, with a sharp loop every half mile or so where a jutting of the mountainside was too great to cut through or too steep for the easy grade to be maintained. At these points the road curved sharply around the obstacle and resumed its general direction eastward.

As we approached those bights, we could see any oncoming traffic as it turned into them. The turns were sharp and the outer loop of the bight was usually an abrupt hairpin.

We were pulling up the grade at about twenty miles an hour, perhaps fifty yards from one of these loops, when I saw a car coming towards us, downhill, and about to enter the loop. It was moving slowly—a dark blue touring car with the top up. I judged that we would pass each other midway around the loop, at the hairpin.

We made the first turn, covered the fifty yards or so to the hairpin and started around it. That was exactly what the other car should have been doing, above us and momentarily out of sight. But there was no car on the road as we came around the hairpin and straightened out on the upper side of the loop. We all spoke up about it. Where could it have gone? It took us only a few seconds to reach the upper end of the loop, to turn and look up the long straight stretch beyond. No car. We stopped and got out.

There was no exit of any kind from the road — on one side the rocky slope above us, on the other the stout cable fence. We agreed that there had been a second or so when the car could have gone through the fence without our seeing it. This was certainly improbable, but we walked back to the hairpin to look. No sign of any accident and no means whatever of leaving the road except by ripping through the guard cables. But they were intact and that, was that.

We had all three, on the front seat, seen the same thing, a blue touring car with the top up, at a distance of less than seventy-five yards. There was not time for the car to turn around and get out of sight before we completed the loop. There was no other way of concealing the car or getting it off the road. We never did see it again.

I believe this is what the professionals call a mass hallucination. It has nothing to do with a mirage, which is usually seen at a much longer distance. From Isle Royale, in Lake Superior, one can always see a string of bogus islands on a clear summer afternoon. These islands will not show up in a photograph and neither, I suppose, would the blue touring car with the top up.

Comic-book artists should read “Kids’ Movie” (page 89) and weigh the possibilities it opens up about an entirely new kind of heroine — the women who wrangle the small fry on an all-comers basis at a YMCA. The panther girls and snake women of the comic strips go up against some fairly tough customers, adventuring as they do on Mars or in the jungles or far-off Tibet. But most of them have to fall back on their death rays and disintegrator pistols, and there is always some belated comic-strip hero in the offing to whisk the female character away from the unspeakable tortures which the other comic characters — humorists that they are —are about to inflict on her. The legend of feminine helplessness is thus falsely furthered, even while the ladies are filling their Saturday mornings with feats of derring-do, unassisted. It may be that the comic artists have already sized up the kids’ movie performances and found the whole thing too rough for general circulation. We can only guess, for instance, what kind of situation would cause a veteran supervisor of kids’ movies actually to ring the emergency bell.

If at any time the juvenile population seems to need thinning out, the aquatic pastimes described by David Graham (page 93) might be substituted for the films, and the Saturday morning gatherings transferred to the swimming pool.