A Halloween spooky story
I wrote my first spooky story for a improv show.
Love Lamp is an improv group mixing stand-up comedy and improv: stand-up comedians tell jokes for five minutes and the improv comedians build the show inspired by the jokes.
For Halloween, standup comedians had to get out of their way and tell a spooky story.
Here is mine.
I lived for several years in Paris. You probably know Paris as the city of love. There is also a very dark side to the city. It’s a very old city, more than two thousand years old, that has seen a lot of history, good and bad, and a city full of rats and cockroaches.
The story I’ll tell you tonight happened to my boyfriend and I, a couple of years ago. It was a Halloween night, with a full blue moon, a phenomenon happening only every fifty years.
We wanted to visit the catacombs. These are old mines under the city, abandoned and forgotten for centuries. During the Black Plague, cementeries had to be emptied and all the bones were moved into the catacombs.
My boyfriend and I were supposed to meet one of our friends, Francois, to visit the illegal part of the catacombs at midnight. We arrived in the park but Francois was not there.
Another guy was there. He told us “Are you Max and Elisa? Francois’ friends? He told me he couldn’t make it, I’ll be your guide tonight. My name is Ghosty.” We knew everybody was supposed to have a knickname in the catacombs, so we said “Nice to meet you Ghosty, we’ll be Spooky and Witch tonight”.
We had to be careful to not be seen entering the catacombs: we rushed into the pit.
We spent an hour walking around in the tunnels. It was dark, wet and we didn’t have any cellphone reception. We saw all the bones and skulls, all the marks left by the French resistance during World War II and other creepy graffiti left over the years. Ghosty explained everything to us in great detail.
At some point, we heard the guards. We didn’t want to get a fine, so we ran in the tunnels. After a while, we stopped: the only way forward was by a very low passage, not written on the map.
Ghosty went first. I was just after him. When I got up, my light was fickering. I couldn’t see anything. I was in a very small room. I could touch all the walls at once.
No trace of Ghosty. And my phone had died.
I felt a really cold wind on my neck. And I heard a voice: “Ghosty is gone now. Please leave. Now.”
I couldn’t feel him anywhere, I touched every walls and roof. The voice came back: “I said NOW!”
We rushed outside the catacombs. My phone got back to life, blasting music. I had twenty messages from Francois: “I’m at the entrance. Sorry I’m late. Where are you guys?”
I called him back and told him everything that had happened. His only answer was “Last time someone called Ghosty was in the catacombs was fifty years ago…”.