Haunted Objects: Stories of Ghosts on Your Shelf Read Online Free PDF

the man dies of what seems like snakebite symptoms. His son inherits the boots, but not his father’s silliness. A few weeks later, he dies in the same way, and there are some whispers about the sins of the father. The boots find their way into the deceased son’s closet until his own son turns 16. He slips them on, remembering how much he loved his grandfather and father. He’s dead soon after, another apparent victim of the curse. But when the boots are examined after the funeral, an old rattlesnake fang sticking through the sole is found, with enough venom left on it to kill 10 men.
    The story is a legend, but it points to some of the ideas behind things passed down. They can be a gateway to a time long ago, but they can also be a prison, a mistake waiting to happen again and again. In some cases, they even offer a way to release a dead relative from his or her own sadness.
    Pictures are a way for us to connect to our past, even if that past is one we didn’t know we had. Today everyone has a digital camera; most people even have one on their cell phones, making them within easy reach at any given time. But we are only a couple of generations removed from the time when a camera was a cherished item few people owned and even fewer mastered. Pictures were taken carefully using a different ritual than we use today, and it was after the “click” that the real work began. Owning a camera often meant having to develop the film yourself, and the intimacy with the process brought about a different love for what was captured. The pictures were transferred to slides and shown with pride. When the first moving film cameras came out, the emotional stakes were raised. You could immortalize those important moments of your life with motion. More importantly, you could pass it down.

    The camera that was handed down from grandfather to grandson.
    Eli remembers having to sit through his grandfather’s slide shows, although he remembers more how he tried to stay awake as his beaming grandfather would stop at every picture and tell a story about the moment. “It’s not that his stories were boring, but I guess they were,” Eli said. “I had just seen them my whole life. I loved my grandfather, but he had a way of thinking the most uninteresting things were exciting. He never really lived outside of the area he grew up in, so a trip to upstate New York was like going to Paris.”
    By the time he owned his own video camera, weighing about 10 pounds and needing to be carried on his shoulder, Eli had forgotten about most of the home movies he had seen, although he remembers the process of his grandfather taking out the projector and rolling down the screen on days when he would have rather been outside playing.
    “ ‘This is history, Eli,’ he used to say. ‘Your history.’ ” He fondly remembers staying at their house, but it took him years to realize why his sisters and cousins never went through the same ritual. As the only male, his grandfather must have seen him as the family historian, the person who was responsible for passing down their traditions and their stories.
    His grandfather passed away when Eli was 30 years old and lived five states away. His grandmother had died many years earlier. His uncle, who cared for the old fellow, was the one who called Eli with the news. “It tore me up, but you knew it was coming. I never had a chance to say goodbye, or at least didn’t before he died. I think that didn’t sit right with him. He had to try and find a way to come back and give me one more lesson,” Eli said.
    It began the night he heard his grandfather was gone. Eli spent most of the day getting things in order so he could leave to attend the wake and funeral. He was worn out when he finally fell into a heap on the living room couch. That night he dreamed his grandfather was in the room, sitting in the chair next to where he lay sleeping. He was tapping him on the shoulder, trying to wake him up, and when Eli