Bubba Shares Real Scary Story for Halloween
I’m blaming it on the big box stores. Those folks put out Halloween stuff in July and Christmas stuff in August (what happened to Thanksgiving?). Heck, I was in one of those stores the first week of October and they already had their Halloween stuff marked down and were moving it out to make way for more Christmas trees.
The world has lost its mind.
And what that has done for us in the worldwide HQ of Sagamore News Media is make things busier. We have more year-end stuff happening now, more folks wanting to talk about 2023 advertising (which we always appreciate) and more fun stuff with record keeping.
So it was the other day. I was sitting at my desk trying to see over the massive pile of papers because I thought someone was at my door. Well, I thought I could hear them, I just couldn’t see . . . when all of a sudden the phone rang.
“Paper, Timmons,” I barked, perhaps a little too harshly. (I’ve got to work on that!)
“This here is a special call for Timothy Timmons from Mr. Halloween himself, Morris Karloff,” a familiar twang said.
“This here?” “MORRIS Karloff?” The twang? It could only mean one thing. “How you doing, Bubba?” I sighed.
“Dang, Timmons!” Bubba Castiron said. “How’d you know it was me? I disgraced my voice and everything.”
“Disguised?”
“Huh?”
“Never mind.”
For those not familiar, Bubba Castiron is a few screws short of a hardware store. He hangs out with his pals at a little hole-in-the-wall joint called the Crawl-On-Inn out somewhere between Bowers, Kirkpatrick, Colfax and Clarks Hill. I’ve been there once but not sure I could find it again if I had to – and I really hope I never have to. Elvis tends bar there and you can usually find Bubba, Tater, Gumball, Big Country and part-time waitress, part-time truck driver Bambi.
It’d been a while since I heard from Bubba, but one thing was for sure. He hadn’t lost his knack for calling at the worst possible times.
“Bubba, I’m kinda busy here. What can I do for you today?”
“Well, Timmons, seeing as how it’s Halloween and all, I thought I’d tell you about the big trip me and the Mizzus took to the Big Cranapple?”
“Big Apple?”
“Huh?”
“Never mind. So you guys went to New York?”
“That’s right, Timmons. And we had a grand old time. Even stayed in one of those fancy-schmancy high-rise hotels. It had more than a hundred floors and we were all the way up on the 93rd.”
“Wow, Bubba, I’ll bet that was quite the view up there,” I said. I’ve always loved New York and I could just imagine the view from that high up.
“It was, it was,” Bubba said. “But that’s not the big deal. Timmons, that hotel was haunted as Sammy Terry’s basement.”
“Now, Bubba. Don’t tell me you believe in ghosts,” I tried.
“Well, I ain’t saying I does and I ain’t saying I doesn’t. But after what happened there, I can tell you it was the scardiest thing I ever heard or saw in my life.”
Much as I hate to admit it, Bubba had once again managed to interrupt my day and then caught my attention. He was like a wreck on the interstate. You know you should just drive on past, but you find yourself looking out of morbid curiosity.
“So what happened, Bubba?”
“Me and the Mizzus had gone out to eat at one of those fancy Coney Island restaurants – the kind where they actually wrap the silverware in paper napkins instead of making you pull ‘em out of the dispenser. When we got back, the head honcho at the front desk told us that they were having a problem with the elevators. Timmons, he actually leaned over and whispered they were ‘haunted!’ Well sir, I figured they probably done did call them Ghostbuster fellers . . . say, did you ever see those documentary movies on those guys? They sure do good work. Anyways, we didn’t want to wait until they got there – besides, we didn’t want to take a chance and get slimed you know. So we told the waiter-dee of the desk that we’d just take the stairs.”
“But you said you were on the 93rd floor?”
“That’s right, Timmons. And you ain’t gonna believe what all happened.”
“Was the stairwell haunted?” I asked.
“It mighta been,” Bubba said. “The more stairs we climbed the dimmer the lights got and we heard moaning and groaning – then again that all might’ve been ‘cause we was getting pretty winded. But when we finally – and I do mean finally – got up to our floor, the scariest thing ever happened.”
“You saw a ghost?”
“No.”
“You heard one?”
“No.”
“The air temperature was cold?”
“No.”
“Well what was it for crying out loud?”
“The Mizzus looked at me and said, “I forgot the room key.”
With that Bubba burst out laughing and I was pretty sure I could hear the gang all laughing in the background as he hung up the phone. I hate Halloween.
Two cents, which is about how much Timmons said his columns are worth, appears periodically on Thursdays in The Times. Timmons is the chief executive officer of Sagamore News Media, the company that owns The Noblesville Times. He is also a proud Noblesville High School graduate and can be contacted at ttimmons@thetimes24-7.com.