This ghost story is one I tell each year to the kids who come to the library. It actually happened to my older sister, but I tell it in first person because that works a lot better.

The Lady of Realta

When I was a kid in Colorado, we used to go to summer camp, and one of the camps was a church camp, a place called Rainbow Trail, which is down in the southwest corner of the state. Just about a mile away from the camp was a lake called Rainbow Lake, and about a mile past that was a ghost town called Realta. Now a ghost town isn't a town full of ghosts, it's a town where all the people have gone and left. We used to go up to Realta on hikes and look for stuff like old spoons, or sun glass - which is glass that's been in the sun so long it's turned purple, or other stuff that people had left behind.

Now one rainy day, when we were stuck in the lodge and couldn't go out to play, one of the counselors, a guy named Bill, told us the story I'm about to tell you. Seems that back about a hundred years ago, Realta was a thriving community. An up and coming town. They had a silver mine, and a gold mine, and big timber mill. And in fact, the town fathers were talking about putting in street lamps, and they had sent to Marble and built a big fountain out of marble right smack dab in the middle of the main street. Seems like the town was luck was never going to change. But then one night, just at the turn of the century, something happened.

The stagecoach came up from Durango, and it got to town just before midnight, and a woman got off of it. She was a tall woman with long blonde hair, and she was wearing a pale pink dress. And as she was crossing the road, just as she was coming alongside the marble fountain, two drunken miners came out of one of the saloons. And one of them pulled out his gun. Nobody's sure now if he was just shooting to celebrate midnight, or if he was trying to shoot at his friend or what, but the bullet hit the lady, and she fell over the marble fountain and bled to death.

Well, of course the first thing they tried to do was find out who she was. But nobody in Realta knew her. And no one in Durango knew her. And no one in Silverton, up at the other end of the stage line, knew her either. So they buried her in an unmarked grave by the lake. Then they tried to get the bloodstains off the marble fountain. They tried lye soap, and boraxo, and scrubbed and scrubbed, but they couldn't get the bloodstains off the fountain, so they left them there.

Shortly after that, the town's luck went bad. There was a flood in the gold mine, and a fire in the silver mine, and then a big forest fire that burned a lot of the trees that the timber mill depended on. And with no place to work, people started to leave Realta. They left even faster than usual, because there were stories going around. Stories about a bad luck ghost - a tall woman with long blonde hair wearing a pale pink dress. The stories said that if you saw her, something bad would happen to you. Pretty soon, there was nobody left in Realta.

'Long about the nineteen twenties, a boy and his father were fishing at Rainbow lake. Now the father knew the stories, but the boy didn't. And one evening, the boy was down by the shore fishing, when he looked up and saw a woman standing at the edge of the water. A tall woman with long blond hair, wearing an old fashioned pink dress. But he was a friendly sort, so he called out, "Hello there. Would you like to have supper with us?" The woman turned and looked at him, and then vanished.

Now I've been to Rainbow Lake and I can tell you that there's nothing to hide behind if you're right next to the water. It's all just little rocks and mud. So the boy, he went to his father and told him what he'd seen, and the father wasn't sure to believe him or not. So they went ahead to make supper. But that night, while the boy was chopping wood for the fire, his ax slipped and he cut his foot just about half off.

'Long about twenty years after that, there was a trucker going up the Million Dollar Highway. Now the Million Dollar Highway is the road that runs from Durango to Silverton, and it's a real mountain road. The mountain comes down and then there's a little bitty ledge for the road and then the mountain goes on down again real steep, and the road full of curves and such. Now the trucker he picked up a hitchhiker. We know he did, because when he didn't show up in Silverton they went lookin' for him. They found the truck where it had come off the road, down at the bottom of the mountain, and the trucker he was dead. But the hitchhiker, he lived long enough to tell them that the reason the trucker went off the road was because there'd been a woman standing in the middle of it. A tall woman, he said, with long blond hair, wearing a long pink dress.

A few years after that there was a family of flatlanders used to come up. Tourists, you know, from Nebraska, and they would go hiking through Realta, and one time they took some pieces of marble from the old fountain as souvenirs. Now, one of the pieces of marble had a funny brown stain on it, and they tried to scrub it off with Ajax and steel wool. But it wouldn't come off, so they figured it was just part of the rock, and put it up on the mantelpiece with the rest of the rocks. But that New Year's eve, just at midnight, that funny brown stain started to glow a bright fresh blood red, and it stayed that way for the whole twelve strokes of midnight before it went back to being a funny brown stain.

Now Bill was telling that story, and we were all looking at him kind of big-eyed, but when he finished up we said, "Aw, there's no such thing as ghosts; you're just tryin' to scare us. It's working, but you're just tryin' to scare us." And then somebody noticed that it had stopped raining, so we all went out to play.

And that should've been the end of it. But that night Bill's cabin, which was all boys, kidnapped my cabin, which was all girls. Now they didn't really kidnap us. It was a kind of a game, and usually what you did was you all went down to the barn and jumped around in the hay and got hay in your pajamas and then everybody would go up to the lodge for hot chocolate and graham crackers. Just for fun, you know? But the boys told us to put on our coats and shoes and come along to go up to Realta and catch the ghost.

So we put our coats on over our pajamas and our sneakers on our bare feet and we all went trooping up the trail to go catch the ghost, all giggling and having fun.

But you know, even in the summertime, it gets cold in the mountains at night. Especially if all you've got on under your coat is your pajamas, and by the time we'd gone a while, we were getting chilly and cranky and saying "Aw, come on, there isn't any ghost. Let's go back and get our hot chocolate and graham crackers." And by the time we got up near the lake, we were just grumbling.

And then, all of a sudden, one of the girls, a girl named Robin, screamed as loud as she could. We all turned to see and grabbed for each other and shouted and looked and I can't tell you what anybody else saw for sure, but I thought I saw something tall and pale kinda flickering between the trees.

Well it took a little for us to calm down enough to tell each other what we'd seen, and some people, they hadn't seen nothing. Some people were like me, they thought they'd seen something, but they didn't know what it was. But Robin, the girl who screamed, she was sure. She'd seen a tall woman with long blonde hair wearing a pale pink dress, she said, and nothing we could say would shake her story.

Well, after that we all decided to go on back to camp. But it was a ways to walk, so on the way, we started to thinking. And some of us said, "Hey, wait a minute. The camp nurse is tall. She's got long blonde hair. She could've put on a pale pink dress and come out here to scare us to death." So when we got back to camp, most of us went on up to the lodge for hot chocolate and graham crackers, but some of us went to see if we could catch the camp nurse at her cabin. But when we got there we found out that she'd been up all night with a boy who had poison ivy, and he told us that she'd never left, so it couldn't have been her.

Well, somehow or other, we all got to sleep that night. But the next day Robin, the girl who screamed, she fell off her horse and the horse stepped on her foot and broke three bones.

And that really happened.