Just Jot It January: Sludge, Spirits, and Their Souls, #JusJoJan

Today was a weird weird day.

You think of ghosts around Halloween, at least I do. They even play a role during Christmas often, for me, with the famous Charles Dickens story of A Christmas Carol.

I hated that growing up. My father watched it every single Christmas Eve, and before and even after I began watching with him, once I stopped thinking the movie was boring and started loving its message of redemption, I didn’t understand why anyone wanted to associate a time of such beauty with such a frightening subject.

I picked a more related time of year when I last wrote about

Ghost Stories;

however, this time is more spur-of-the-moment and perhaps it will catch people a little more off guard, just like a

ghost might do.

I may go for a third try blogging about ghosts, sooner than you might think, and definitely sooner than next October.

The story Dickens came up with isn’t the only story of ghosts I would love. It took me many years to actually read the book, but then Harry Potter was written and ghosts would forever become some of my favourite characters in all of literature.

I’m sick of waiting to get in gear and write the “essay” I’ve wanted to construct for several years. I am not a university student writing a paper and I can’t seem to put it down in words, but I am fascinated by the themes in Harry Potter, specifically death. Ghosts play a huge part in that.

There are four school houses at Hogwarts, the wizarding school the characters attend and live at for most of the year throughout the books. Each house, used to organize all the students, has a ghost representing it: The Grey Lady, The Bloody Baron, The Fat Friar, and Nearly Headless Nick.

One mysterious, one is silly, one frightening, one friendly and bit of a know-it-all, even when his head threatens to separate from the rest of his body.

There’s also a nasty little poltergeist named Peeves who flies around the castle and harasses its residents for amusement. He does not make it into the films, which is a real shame in my mind. What a character.

Then there’s the ghost of a girl who lives in one of the girl’s bathrooms, spending a lot of her time in the U-bend of the toilet. She died by looking into the eyes of a monstrous snake, but why does she linger? This was one of the most fascinating parts of those books for me. Why do any of them?

I never really watched Ghost and Ghost Busters was on a lot when I was a kid, but the scene in the second one where I believe its green sludge coming up the bath tub drain when the baby is getting a bath still haunts my childhood a little. Of course, I was a fan of the children’s character, a ghost named Casper, in that cute little film made in the mid 90s, from a comic book I believe it was?

I waited for literature to introduce ghosts, but I am more interested in them, not for the scare effect, as popular as that is, but for the souls they represented in life.

They can float through walls and they will never die, living as a part of and guarding their castle home. They each have their own sad/mysterious/gruesome tales of how they ended up in that position. Rowling discusses some more than others, with their stories as they may or may not apply to the broader story, throughout the series. I don’t know what it would be like to be left behind, watching the living world go on, but through all this I could imagine it.

Just Jot It January, #JusJoJan

Today is one of the last chances for this month’s daily prompting:

last chance to speak of rules like this.

This one was brought here by:

teleportingweena

I guess, after checking her blog today, I can’t say it’s a surprise she went with the prompt word “ghost”, but sounds interesting none the less.