It was Markie’s favorite class, which meant that Friday was her favorite day of the week, thanks to her favorite teacher, Mr. Hale. Actually, it was the last 15 minutes of Mr. Hale’s sixth-grade social studies class that Markie loved so much, because that’s when Mr. Hale told ghost stories.

And he told them very, very well.

Mr. Hale would turn down the lights, and almost before he spoke, Markie told us, the kids’ shrieks reverberated down the hall.

He told stories of Gov. Daniel Fowle, a man so big he had a bed custom-made for the Executive Mansion after it was completed in 1891. He didn’t sleep there for long: Fowle died in the mansion just three months after moving in. When Gov. Bob Scott moved Fowle’s bed into storage some 80 years later, strange things started happening. There were knocking noises behind the wall where the bed once stood. (Others tell of a voice from nowhere, asking quietly for “Helen,” which was the name of one of Fowle’s daughters.)

Mr. Hale told stories about Blackbeard and the ghost of the old Mission Valley Cinema, where Hale had worked as a kid. He spoke of the Victorian mansion in downtown Raleigh where, according to legend, a member of every family that ever lived there died in the house. One lonesome, spooky night, a young girl in the house awoke to find another young girl staring at her from the foot of the bed. Behind the spectral figure was a large window, and as she backed up, the full moon shone through the middle of the ghost’s body. She slowly vanished, Mr. Hale said, like warm breath on a cold winter day.

illustration by James Bernardin

More shrieks. More titters.

Tell us more, Mr. Hale. Tell us more!

On Thursday nights, all school year long, Markie would be twitching with trepidation and excitement. “Ohmygosh, ohmygosh,” she would say in the mornings, “I don’t know if I can go to school. I don’t know if I can take it.”

She would hastily stuff papers and books into her backpack. “I have to go,” she’d tell herself. “I have to.”

She loved it. Loved the tingle of fear, the mental gymnastics of balancing what you know just can’t be true with the creepy thought in the back of your head — like a black cat staring at you from the corner of the porch — that maybe it is true after all.

“Ohmygosh, ohmygosh, you just don’t know,” she would say. “They are the scariest things in the world. Hurry up, Jack, we gotta go!”

• • •

One thing’s for sure in the Old North State: You can’t lift a pine knot off the ground without uncovering a ghost story or three. From the mountains to the sea, literally. There’s the Brown Mountain Lights and the Balsam Mountains Boojum. The Devil’s Tramping Ground. The ghost of Theodosia Burr Alston, Aaron Burr’s daughter, thought to have drowned off Frying Pan Shoals and now treading the sodden beaches of Bald Head Island.

Where I grew up in High Point, we feared a certain railroad underpass in neighboring Jamestown. A young girl named Lydia had died in a car wreck there — perhaps on her way to prom? Yes, of course, on her way to prom! Now, on rainy nights, she walks the side of the road in a long white dress, flagging down passersby for help. Kind folks would pick up the young girl and give her a ride home, but when they arrived — don’t ask me where she lived, as that wasn’t part of the story — they would turn to find that she had disappeared from the back seat. Freak-out city.

A few years before Mr. Hale entered the picture, there was a storyteller at Camp Sea Gull and Camp Seafarer in Pamlico County and Camp Cheerio in Alleghany County, where I would take Markie and then Jack for weekend retreats with the Y Guides program. That storyteller’s name is Charles Austin, and Jiminy Cricket! He could scare the bejesus out of anyone. On the final night of the getaway, he would stand in front of the leaping flames of a massive bonfire, his face as shadowed as a charcoal briquet, his voice like a box of rattling bones.

“Let me tell you a story, sweet chiiiil-rrren,” he would say, and the hair would stand up on the arms of 40-year-old fathers. The screams would start before he even got wound up. That man would have prompted even Mr. Hale to look under his bed.

Many a father has held many a child in those springy bunk beds along the Neuse River or up at Camp Cheerio, drying a few tears and insisting that it is scientifically impossible for anyone to walk around with their own decapitated head held in one hand.

“It’s just a story,” we’d say. “Just a scary ghost story.”

Then we would smile to ourselves, thanking our own lucky stars that we had a little girl or little boy cradled in our arms, searching for comfort and a good night’s sleep.

Just a story. It doesn’t mean a thing. But that’s not altogether true.

Robert “Bob” Hale grew up in Raleigh and attended North Carolina State University. He taught at Martin Middle School in Raleigh for 33 years and then for another seven years at Ravenscroft School. He says that he retired in 2020.

But I wonder. Markie has grown into a ravenous reader, a lover of story, a therapist whose job it is to help others tease apart their own stories and vanquish the fears they harbor.

Maybe it’s a stretch, but I’m thinking that the ghost of Mr. Hale — or perhaps more accurately his spirit, since he’s still with us — will linger awhile. I hope so. Every now and then, even a ghost story deserves a happy ending.