Disclaimer: The views expressed by the ghost are not the views of the author. I just wanted to make sure the ghost came off as an evil bitch. Thank you.

Now I'm not exactly this total mannerless slob. In public I try my best to not scratch things I shouldn't and stuff like that. I just believe in the privacy of your own home it's okay to sit back,
fart, burp, and scratch. Mom hates it. Always tells me to be more ladylike. I ask her why seeing how we're all family. She replies I'll never get a husband if I don't stop belching like dad.

Who wants a husband anyway? Men are more trouble then they're worth if you can't even fart around them.

And no, I'm not a lesbian. I like men fine. I just don't see the point. Sorry guys, but you're all shallow jerks. I mean, a girl can only hear about how she's nice but "too fat" for so long before she gets the idea.

Well, anyway, that's not what this story's all about. This is the story about my time in a haunted house.

It was one of those situations straight out of the movies. Whomever could spend a whole month living in a certain house, rumored to be haunted, would inherent it and all the money that went with it. So far the longest, a non-believer, had lasted two weeks before running out in the middle of the night screaming she couldn't take it anymore.

Now me, I've lived in a haunted house myself since I was about seven. I've gotten use to ghosts and their tricks. Materializing just on the edge of your blind spot. Moving things around on you.
Weird noises. The whole kit-n-caboodle. Since I was an adult and tired of my over protective parents telling me what to do, not to mention owing over 1,000 on my credit card bills, I decided to try my hand at living in the haunted house. I filled in my application and the lawyer moved me in. He wished me good luck and left as quickly as he could.

Rumor has it he tried to stay here and only made it 12 hours.

The first couple of nights went by peacefully enough. I had my elbows on the table while eating and a wooden spoon wacked me in the knuckles and one time I was scratching my butt and I got smacked by a newspaper I didn't even know I had. I mean, I don't subscribe to the paper, too depressing.

However it was no worse then the time mom wacked me on the back of the head for burping in the middle of dinner.

The trouble didn't really start until I was watching Star Trek. It was Plato's Stepchildren. The one where Kirk and Urhura are forced to kiss by aliens who's food gives them telekinetic powers. I was sitting there, eating popcorn, my feet on the coffee table, and watching tv, when suddenly this woman in Victorian-era clothing appeared next to me. I knew she was a ghost cause I could see right through her. I ignored her. Up until she said something completely unforgivable.

"Is that man kissing a nigger?"

I mean, how un-Christian! How horrible can you be to use the n-word? I told that old dead bitch to shut the fuck up and take her racism out of my house.

"Your house?! This is my school!" She raged, totally drowning out the rest of the show. It really got on my nerves all her "blah blah blah" this and "yackity-smackity" that. And the racist bullshit coming out of her! It made me sick.

"Do you mind? I'm trying to watch Star Trek!" I shouted at her. "God, you're not only a racist moron but you're the rudest ghost I've ever had the misfortune to meet."

She puffed up for a second and then disappeared in time for the end.

Well, after that things got a bit worse. I came home from work the next day and kicked off my shoes, only to have them thrown at my head. Then when I let one rip I got a book thrown at me.
Not just any book, mind you, but Harry Potter & The Order Of The Phoenix, British edition not the dumbed down American one. Do you have any idea how thick that thing is? And it was a hardback at that! I'm just lucky she didn't know what the books were about. Cause she proved to be the most bigoted, racist, homophobic ghost I ever met. There I was, watching a re-run of NYPD Blue when the character of John was flirting with a guy, and the bitch put a lamp through the tv! Good thing it wasn't Will & Grace, I suppose.

I won't even get into what she said when I dared to listen to Barry Manilow. Let's just say her anti-Semitic statements are still ringing in my ears.

She also took it upon herself to try and teach me proper manners. Every day it was a lecture.
How to do my hair. What I should wear. On the very first Saturday together, she pulled the blankets off my bed and told me to get up. It was five am! I told her to go move onto the afterlife. She said she wouldn't tolerate laziness. I told her to go to Hell.

She washed my mouth out with soap. The nerve. I mean, I'm 28 years old!

In retaliation I told her she was an un-Christian bitch. I gave her huge lectures about "love thy neighbor" and how God is disappointed in her for not loving all His children. This always shut her up. She hated it when I proved that her views were sick and wrong. She'd sulk for hours,
wandering around the house and whining about how times had changed.

The next week I spent studying up on her. Seems her name was Victoria Baxter. She had run what amounted to a charm school back in the 1800s. Very much a woman of her times, she played at being a philanthropist to people's faces while behind their backs expressed moronic views. The woman could've given charm lessons to Adolf Hitler.

Now there's a few things you should know - for all my disagreements with my parents they taught me many good things. Like that bigotry was for cretins. If I ever expressed a racist or anti-
Semitic thought they would've beaten the shit out of me.

Homophobic ones - well, my parents weren't perfect. They did grow up during the 1940s and 50s in small, highly religious towns. The fact they taught me what they did was amazing in and of itself.

Well, I went back to the house every day with more ammo to use against her. She spent every day trying to mold me into a "perfect young lady."

Now I'm not a big socializer. You'll notice my tale is very light on dialogue. That's because I'm no good at writing it, even when I experience it. My ghost, however, was a big time talker and not just about her idiotic views. She talked about everything. Including her death. Over and over again. I finally got to the point where I was wearing my headphones almost 24/7, listening to whomever I could, Michael Crawford, Barry Manilow, Brent Spiner (better known as Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation, yes, he sings), even Weird Al Yankovic, as loud as I could.

She didn't like that and tried to get me to take them off. So I took to taping them to my head.
Not fun as it pulled out a lot of hair, but better then listening to her.

So this is how I spent my first two weeks. Going to work, coming home to deal with the ghost,
talking to my parents on the phone.

Dad never believed in ghosts. So when he and mom finally came to visit he got the shock of his life. He had lived in our home for years without experiencing anything. Seeing Victoria made him very pale.

Mom tried to be polite to her. However she made the mistake of showing the ghost a picture of her best friend, who just happened to be black.

It was fun seeing a dead woman on the receiving end of mom's temper. Dad's awful, but mom always leaves things bottled until she explodes. When she does it's like fucking Pompey.

"I don't know how you put up with that - that thing." Mom said later on after Victoria vanished in a huff.

I shrugged. "I hate her with a passion, but once the house is mine I can have an exorcism. If that doesn't work I'll tear the place down and turn it into a public park. She'll be forced to move on then. No one will stand for her antics."

Dad, like me, is not a big speaker, unless you get him on a subject he likes. All he said was,
"She's a demon. Ghosts don't exist. She's a demon pretending to be a ghost."

"Ghost, demon, either way dad, come the end of the month, I'm bringing someone in to evict her one way or another."

"It's not polite to talk about people behind their backs!" Victoria's disembodied voice rang out.

"You're not a person!" I said back. "You're just a spirit. A spirit without a soul."

That did not go over well. I had to rush my parents out as my books began to be flung at me.
Mom wanted me to leave but I wasn't about to. I was going to kick this ghost's spectral ass.

I lasted two weeks, I could last two more.

The next week consisted of more lectures in manners and more physical punishments if I didn't do what she wanted. I got very little sleep, she often shook my bed in the middle of the night just because I had my nightgown hiked up. Like I could help it? I was asleep! So I took to sleeping naked. For this every inch of my skin that was hidden by clothing became covered in bruises. My work suffered from lack of sleep. So I took vacation and sick time for the rest of the week and a half.

When she got on me about my poor posture, I slumped. When she ridiculed my reading choices,
I started bringing home pornography. I'm probably the only person in the world who actually read the articles in Hard Core Dykes. I started burping, scratching, picking anything I could. I walked around the house buck naked. With the curtains tightly drawn, trust me, my body is not something you want to see naked. I squeezed my pimples. I ate right over the sink. I took sleeping pills and snored my way through the day.

And I watched a lot of Star Trek. Every incarnation. Even the one I hated, Voyager. (I love Enterprise. Still don't think it should've been canceled.) Oh did she hate it! Called it "godless trash" and a number of other names I won't repeat. I responded by pretending to drop my remote and "accidently" kicked it so I had to stand up. I bent over, and farted in her face.

"You are the worse student I have ever had!" Victoria suddenly snapped one night as I picked my teeth with a fingernail. "You won't wear your corset, you break every rule of proper deportment, you express radical ideals, and you keep insisting I'm dead!"

"You are, Vicky," I replied. "You died in 1899 when one of your students couldn't take it anymore and stabbed you in the chest. This is 2005."

She vanished. I didn't see her again until the last night I'd have to stay in the house.

"You don't have to bring in a priest." She said, looking sorrowful. "I found the way out of here.
To the next life. Look, I'm - I'm sorry. I wasn't a nice person when I was alive and it seems I wasn't very nice when I was dead either."

I shrugged. "Whatever. Look, Vicky, you're wrong about a lot of things, but right about others.
I'm not the most lady like person there is. But I like myself as I am. Warts and all."

Victoria didn't know how to respond to that. She just popped out of existence. A few minutes later the house suddenly felt very empty and peaceful.

Well, it goes without saying that I got the house and the money. I actually did tear the place down and put up a public park. I moved into a place closer to my parents. Used the money to pay off my bills and buy all the Star Treks on DVD, yes, even Voyager.

There's only one problem with my new place.

The ghost that haunts it is a rabid Star Wars fan.

The End