Support for WPR comes from Legacy Private Trust Company in Nina, dedicated to providing exceptional,

personalized investment, wealth management, and trust services to successful individuals and families

throughout Wisconsin. More at LPTrust.com. From BRI and Wisconsin Public Radio, it's to the best of our

knowledge. I'm Anne Strange Champson. Today, ghost stories.

Every night as the universe closes its eyes, the gods sit down to read a story.

Writer Patrick Rothfuss with a story from listener Joanna Truman. These are not the sort of stories

we know as ghost stories. The ones told only when the temperature drops and the leaves turn colors.

Upon these pages our history is written. Lives cut short or left too long, and those that end precisely when they should.

The gods are fascinated by our attempts to understand it. They love our whispered tales by firelight,

our ghost tours, our seances, our electromagnetic field readings, our bed sheet costumes.

But most of all, they love our stories. This is a story about a boy, a boy who became very lost.

It's a story about the girl who helped him find his way, then she left him on his own, then she died.

It's a story about spending 20 years of your life trying to forget one year of your life.

It's a story about ghosts. It's a story about being trapped in life. It's a story about ghosts.

It's a story about being trapped in time.

It's a story about what it means to be haunted.

We're telling ghost stories in this hour.

Eric Newsom is a former public radio colleague,

and his story is real.

It's in a memoir he wrote called Giving Up the Ghost. It's the story of how he felt haunted for years and years and literally terrified of ghosts. Yeah, I tried to keep it hidden,

and many of my friends thought it was a joke. If you say you're scared of heights, people

don't start talking about tall buildings. If you say you're an alcoholic, people don't tell you

...