HARD TO
EXPLAIN TALES 4
The Armadillo Basket
(NOTE: while this story does
not meet the first person only viewpoint requirement, it intrigued me because it
illustrates one way an Urban Legend can be created and passed on...)
This was a story told to me
by my step father and my mother when I was younger. I didn’t think much about it
until a couple of years later when I read the story about the armadillo basket
in a book in my school library.
We had some cousins in a
small town in New Hampshire. My entire family would go on vacation there to stay
in a small cabin we had in the mountains. One night
my Stepfather told us a
story about a ghost our cousins had in their home once. I am not sure how they
ended up with it, but one of the girls had found this beautiful basket made from
an armadillo shell. Shortly after they brought the basket into the house
strange things started to happen. Lights would go on and off by themselves.
Doors would close and things would be moved around without any explanation.
This went on for some time,
and several in the home began to get more afraid of the strange occurrences. The
Father would get angry at the children blaming them for these things, but there
were times things would happen when nobody was home. It wasn’t until a hall
closet were the basket ended up was constantly rummaged through that the father
put the two together. He threw the basket away in the local dump, and the
problems stopped. It turned out that a neighbor knew about the basket. The story
was that a young sailor had a wife in New Hampshire and another in Europe some
place. He had purchased the basket for his wife in Europe but it somehow got
delivered to the wrong wife. He had died before he could get back to retrieve
the basket. Now he was to spend eternity trying to get the basket back.
-Thom C.
