The Awful Truth About Our Ghosts
In Virginia City, ghosts are just people who died trying to fold a fitted sheet. That is the sober, scientific fact of the matter, and anyone who claims otherwise has either never wrestled one of those diabolical cotton traps or has lost the match so thoroughly that his soul still circles the bedposts muttering oaths that would make a Comstock miner blush.
I have it on the best authority—my own eyes and the sworn testimony of three bartenders, a truck driver, and one highly unreliable mule—that the specters drifting through the Silver Saloon and the old mines are not seeking revenge or buried treasure. They are seeking corners. Four of them. Matching. At the same time.
It can't be done, and the attempt has killed more respectable citizens than cholera, claim-jumping, and bad whiskey combined. Consider old Hank Pettigrew, a man of otherwise sound judgment who once held his own against a claim-jumper with nothing but a shovel and a vocabulary that could peel paint.
Hank returned from the wash-house one evening with a clean fitted sheet, determined to conquer it before supper. Witnesses say he laid it on the bed, seized two corners with the confidence of a man who has stared down hard-rock tunnels, and began the ritual.
First he folded it lengthwise. Then crosswise. Then he discovered a third corner that had no business existing. Then a fourth appeared, mocking him from under the mattress. He tried the hospital-corner method favored by soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines.
He tried praying.
By the third hour, the sheet had developed what can only be described as independent locomotion. It billowed, it twisted, it formed a perfect square that immediately collapsed into a wrinkled accusation of human incompetence.
Hank’s last words, delivered in a voice of pure philosophical despair, were: “There is a fifth corner. I can feel it.”
He expired on the spot, and his ghost has been seen ever since drifting through the Washoe Club, forever reaching for a corner that slides away like a greased pig at a county fair.
The phenomenon is widespread. In the old opera house, the chandeliers rattle not from spectral opera singers but from the restless spirits of laundry day. Down in the abandoned mines, the cold drafts that freeze a man’s marrow are merely the sighs of deceased housewives who once believed the manufacturer’s claim that the sheet was “easy-care.”
Easy-care! As if any garment that requires Euclid's geometric skill and Job's patience could be called easy.
I once watched a ghost—transparent, polite, and clearly exhausted—spend an entire night attempting to fold the same sheet over a phantom bed. Every time it nearly succeeded, an invisible force (which I suspect was the sheet itself) would pop a corner free with a sound like a cork leaving a bottle.
The ghost would look at me with the mournful eyes of one who has seen the abyss, shrug its translucent shoulders, and begin again. I offered it a drink. It declined, explaining that spirits cannot hold liquor any better than they can hold a fitted sheet, and both endeavors end in the same damp disappointment.
Scientists from the South come north to study the matter and depart in confusion, their notes filled with phrases such as “anomalous textile hostility” and “possible demonic origin of elasticized hems.”
They miss the point entirely. The fitted sheet is not haunted; it is the haunter. It is the purest expression of the universe’s contempt for order.
Virginia City merely happens to be the place where enough proud, practical people have met their match that the air is thick with their unfinished business. You may walk the streets at midnight and hear the faint, rhythmic flapping of cotton against the wind, punctuated by soft curses in several languages.
That is not the devil. That is simply another citizen discovering, too late, that the corners will never, ever meet.
So the next time a pale figure drifts past your window in the silver city, do not scream or reach for a pistol. Offer it a flat sheet instead. It will look at you with infinite gratitude, fold the simple rectangle in three crisp motions, and vanish forever into whatever peaceful laundry room awaits the dead.
As for the fitted sheets still among the living—burn them, or better yet, leave them for the next fool who thinks he can tame the untamable. The ghosts are already numerous enough.
