I discovered something disturbing yesterday. One of our toys is haunted!
It all began innocently enough…
I was in the yard playing with my favorite toy when I saw that someone had brought the pumpkin toy outside. The pumpkin toy is lots of fun – it’s hollow and has cut-outs for the eyes and mouth, and there are two little squeaky stuffed bones inside, one that says “Trick” and one that says “Treat.” Cute.
The object of playing with this toy is to reach inside one of the openings, pull out the squeaky toys, throw them around for a while, and then let Mom find them and put them back inside so you can start all over again. Like I said, a fun toy, but harmless and, as far as I knew, uninhabited. So I just continued playing with my favorite toy.
And then BJ came outside.
I haven’t given up on getting BJ to play with me, so I brought her my favorite toy to see if she’d like to play a game of tug-of-war.
Clearly tug-of-war was not on her agenda. Then again, she’s not really the tug-of-war type. When she plays by herself, it’s always with squeaky toys, usually smallish ones, and the squeakier they are, the happier she is.
Well, I thought, the pumpkin has small squeaky bones inside of it, and I’ve seen her pull them out and play with them. Maybe she’d play with me if I had one of those. So I put down my favorite toy and headed for the pumpkin.
But BJ seemed to have the same idea, and she got there first. And she made it plain that she wanted me to stay away from the pumpkin toy. That was fine with me, because just about that time, Captain Jack came outside and wanted to play. Jack likes to play the way I like to play – rough-and-tumble boy games. And so we played for a while.
And then I saw it…
“Jack! Look out! There’s a ghost!” says I.
Jack: “What? A ghost! Where?”
Me (whispering): “It’s over there, to your right.”
As the descendant of a long line of fearless wolf-hunters, I knew my duty, so I pounced on the ghost.
Jack: “Be careful, Sergei. It might slime you.”
“SLIME?!”
“Wait – I ain’t afraid of no ghost!”
I’d chew on it until it died…or whatever ghosts do when they – er, die? Well, I guess it was already dead, being a ghost and all, but I’d show it that this was my yard and I didn’t allow ghosts to haunt it. And then BJ came by to help me.
BJ: “You subdued it, now I’ll banish it.”
I knew I couldn’t let her banish the creature all by herself…
…but she insisted.
“Besides,” she told me as she carried the ghost toward the house, “it’s not haunting the yard. It’s haunting the pumpkin toy. Didn’t you see it in there? I chased it out of the toy, now I have to take it inside to perform the banishing ritual.”
Curious, I followed BJ into the house to learn from a dog who obviously knew a thing or two about ghosts.
As it turns out, the banishing ritual involves a lot of bowing and head bobbing, followed by a final big chomp.
The big chomp finale.
Afterward, I went back outside to find the pumpkin toy and make sure it was free of ghosts.
Sure enough, it was ghostless! So now I know what to do should any other toy ever become haunted – scare out the ghost, subdue it, and then do the banishing ritual.
Next time you have a ghost, who ya gonna call?
BJ and Sergei:
GHOSTBUSTERS!
