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bullies, Wellington traveled with a cadre of toadies, flunkies, and general hangers-on whose apparent sole purpose in life was to laugh at all of Wellington’s juvenile pranks as well as his immature sense of humor.
    Francis Sr. and his family lived in a small wood-framed lower-middle class row house in Ashton. They survived from paycheck to paycheck as did most of the people in his particular social strata. But he never complained and did all he could to support his family. He was a dedicated hard worker who was assigned to the job of second shift laborer at a local mirror manufacturing plant on the south side of Franksville.
    One late winter night when the roads were treacherous and Francis was driving down the steep winding hill, heading home from his job, Duke was simultaneously traveling like the proverbial bat-out-of-hell up the hill from the opposite direction. His car was fishtailing wildly and traveling outside of his lane. Duke was accompanied by one of his friends, Nick Giamondi, both of them laughing hysterically at yet another of Duke’s idiotic stunts. As fate would have it, the two cars met at the exact wrong time as the back end of Duke’s ’55 Corvette fishtailed into the oncoming lane and was struck by O’Halloran’s 1953 Ford Country Squire Station Wagon. Normally such a collision would not have done much damage to the tank-like Ford, but at the last moment, in an ill-fated attempt to avoid the collision, O’Halloran turned his wheel too hard and lost control of the monstrous vehicle sliding across the highway, through the guardrails, down over the embankment, and finally slamming into a cluster of large trees, killing him instantly.
    Duke’s corvette was damaged somewhat in the back end and he suffered a fractured leg, while his friend Nick managed to escape with just a few cuts and lacerations. Police filed charges of vehicular homicide against young Wellington but his influential father helped him to get away   just a fine, which his father   grudgingly paid. Likewise when the O’Halloran family tried to sue the Wellingtons in civil court, the results were just as unsuccessful.
    Duke had escaped a jail sentence and a lawsuit. One might think such a close brush with the grim reaper might make him reflect; might even make him a bit humble, but it did not. In fact, in some people’s opinions his arrogance seemed to have increased, as did the number and severity of the various twisted pranks he pulled on his classmates. For young Francis O’Halloran, Jr. the idea of watching the person who killed his father get off scot-free was often more than he could tolerate. But Francis was a small boy with few friends and his family did not travel in the same socio-economic circles as the Wellingtons, so the best he could hope for was to avoid any contact with Duke whatsoever. He feared that if Duke recognized him as the son of the woman who tried to sue him, he would suffer intolerable harassment at the hands of Duke and his army of cronies. So he kept a low profile and remained quiet, doing his best to operate below Duke’s radar.  
    During the next two years before Duke’s high school graduation many strange stories began to spread around the area about mysterious sightings at the very same curve where Francis O’Halloran lost his life that fateful night. Some people claimed to see a man standing near the side of the road as if looking and waiting for someone to drive by. One person said they stopped to offer the man a ride but when they opened the car door he was gone. Some people even went so far as to describe the man as looking like the late Francis O’Halloran, which of course started the rumor mill buzzing and before long all sorts of ghost stories began to permeate the region.
    The O’Halloran family heard about the stories but did their best to ignore them as such tales only served to increase   unhappy memories. Duke