100 Ghost Stories Counting Down To Halloween! 13 Nights Left! "Milton"

I’m sitting in the small office of the judiciary building and I’ve got a pounding headache. The back of my neck is stiff and the vision in my left eye is beginning to blur; I can’t formulate a clear thought. On the other side of the wall of this office is the old courtroom which is being converted to a museum. Out of all the cases that have been tried in this building; room 13 is the one which has seen the most horrendous crimes grace it’s portals. I know this for a fact because most of them, if not all, are talking to me right now. The din of voices are like the clattering of plates and cutlery in a busy kitchen, but one voice is slowly coming through like the high note of a flute and is slowly taking precedence over the others; it’s someone named Elaine Teshima.

She was all of twenty years old in 1977 when she was murdered one night in her car by an unknown assailant. She suffered a gun shot to her head at point blank range; her killer was never found. She’s standing in front of me with dried blood on the side of her face. It’s running down her neck and on to her dark green blouse. I turn around to look at the clerk who is still typing up a waiver on his computer. He’s new and it’s taken him forty minutes to complete what would usually be a one minute task.

“How much longer?” I asked.

He swings his chair in my direction and says, “ One moah minute,”

His face turns white and his eyes go wide. Complete fear is coursing through his veins and he is speechless; he sees Elaine’s ghost. He slowly rises from his swivel chair and is muttering something incomprehensible.

“Muh, muh, muh,” the clerk falls to his knees and crawls underneath his desk where he curls up in to a fetal position. “Muh, muh, muh,”

I can hear Elaine’s voice in my head while she’s pointing at him, “His wallet,”

The pounding in my head is making my knees turn to water and I’m having a hard time standing, I have to grab on to my chair in order to right myself.

“His wallet,” she says as she’s pointing at the clerk.

If only to stop her from adding to my mind splitting headache, I walk over to where the clerk is now sniveling and crying and I get down on all fours. I retrieve his wallet from his pant pocket and hold it up to Elaine’s ghost.

“Inside,” her voice squeezes the vessels in my brain and I am close to fainting.

My hands are shaking as I find his drivers license. His name is Milton Aragon and he’s a 59 year old organ donor from Haleiwa. He’s got credit cards, a bunch of $5 bills and a old clump of yellowing folded up paper. I remove it and unfold it; it’s an obituary from 1977. It belongs to Elaine.

“Muh, muh, my fault. My fault, she tell me she no can go senior prom with me in 74. So, I no go but I find out she go wit’ somebody else. Everybody laugh at me aftah, make me shame. One day I see her, she work Times Supermarket. I come mad one time and I find one gun, I broke inside her car and I wait for her. When she pau work, she come inside her car and I shoot her,”

 After that he’s a blithering mess, I can’t understand a word he says. I also can’t understand why Elaine’s ghost is haunting this place because up until now her murder was unsolved. It wouldn’t make sense to me until I left the building and was driving back home on the freeway. Elaine had always been with Milton because he carried her obituary in his wallet. When he was hired at the courthouse, the collective psychic energy in that place somehow managed to manifest Elaine’s ghost. I think that’s why I had such a murderous headache; she sensed that I was psychic and was making every effort to break through the veil so that she could finally point out her killer.

Elaine is at peace now and Milton Aragon will grow old and die in a Honolulu prison.