Hola!

Hello, Cathleen Kennedy here, the newest contributor to this often humorous, frequently political (when James is writing), sometimes existential, and always serious forum we call elevennames.

When Thomas mentioned that he, Zach, and James had a blog, and that they were looking for other people to write every now and again my first thought was “well why not? Its not like I have lots to do this semester . . . . besides my senior project”. (which is sort of a big deal at our school) So now I am using this incredibly reputable blog as a tool for procrastination, by once a week subjecting you people out there in internet land to my opinions, ideas, and random digressions of thought.

What else is there to say? I like history, but nothing more recent than about 200 years ago. I often times work on plays both at school and in community theaters, usually in some kind of sewing or costuming capacity. I know three other languages besides English, and am in general very academically focused. And I enjoy nerdery of all varieties.

Oh, and I have no idea who I am voting for this coming election, because while I care about the future of our country, I know I will probably end up voting for the democratic candidate, no matter who they are. *sigh*

Now I am frantically casting around for a ghost story so I can be cool like the other kids and fit in for theme week . . . . I am actually incredibly interested in that sort of stuff, but am not sure if I should come up with some kind of vague, but real story like Zach, or just retell one of my favorites.

This is a semi true incident that combines something that actually happened with a ghost story I was told in Scotland and a conclusion that was provided by a friend to whom I was retelling the story:

In 1348 the Black Death or Bubonic Plague as it is called now, had reached Scotland. By this time the disease had been moving northward through Europe for a year and a half. In the capital, Edinburgh, people heard reports of the huge death toll in other cities. In Paris there were reports of over 400 people dying every day, not to mention the fact that it was said that entire villages could die over night. There seemed to be no way of stopping the horrible, painful death that came to everyone who caught this plague.

Then the disease somehow managed to breach the city’s walls. The first person infected was only a peasant, but the rest of the population, both rich and poor knew that with in days they too could be part of the epidemic that had swept across Europe. So the next night the city officials paid the brick layers to seal up the street on which the infected person lived. The inhabitance of the unlucky street woke up to find 12 foot tall brick walls had been erected at either end of their road shutting in both in the infected inhabitant and several families of healthy people.

Over the subsequent weeks the people in the surrounding area could hear the screams and the pleas of the people trapped with in the walls, as more and more of them became infected and others simply died of starvation. It is said that the residence of Edinburgh invented ear muffs, so they wouldn’t have to be consistently tortured by the horrible sound of their neighbors dying. Of course, there was no way of dealing with the stench. The bodies of the dead began to pile up because there was no way to dispose of them, and soon even those outside the walls could not ignore the horrible smell of rotting corpses that wafted from the walled up street.

Eventually the people inside the walls grew silent, and after about two months, the city officials decided that if everyone who lived there was dead (and they surely were by this time), then they could clean out the houses and resell them. There was only one man brave enough to enter the corpse infested street, a butcher. He brought his knives and a wheelbarrow and went systematically through the houses chopping the dead into manageable pieces and then disposing of the body parts. It took him three weeks of hard work, but in the end the houses were ready to be resold.

However, everyone who lived in one who has lived in those house between the 14th century and now has reported seeing dismembered body parts lying around their homes at some point or another accompanied by a horrible smell and sometimes ghostly screaming.

And now you know the horrible truth about earmuffs.

For another fun ghost story listen to this