THE HAUNTED WHEEL
I guess maybe it's a half a mile across that old amusement park. All the
land there is low; we could see right over the top of Little Valley as
you might say, and the big tree away off there on the ridge stood out
good and plain. Maybe that was partly because the sun was getting over
that way. Anyway, I know that about a couple of hours later the tree
looked as if it were all kind of spangled with gold like a Christmas
tree. It seemed sort of as if the sun was going ahead to get the tree
all decorated for us.
Westy said, "The sun's beginning to get over to the west. See?"
I said, "It's going to beat us to the tree, too."
So you can see from what I told you that it was easy to follow a
straight course right through that old park. Sometimes we had to clamber
over piles of old boards and we had to work our way kind of in and out
through the old rotten trestle of the scenic railway. That thing crossed
our path like a big, long, wriggling snake. Some of the old booths were
boarded up and some of them were all falling to pieces. The concrete
basin that used to be a swimming pool was all full of rubbish. And the
little platform away way up, that the man used to do the dive of death
from, was all falling to pieces. Some places we had to climb over the
old ramshackle booths, but that was easy.
All of a sudden Westy stopped short and said, "Look ahead; do you know
what?"
"What?" I asked him.
"See that old ferris-wheel?" he said. "We're going to run plunk right
into it."
I took a good squint and sure enough it was right in a bee-line with our
beacon. It wasn't across our path but it was lengthways with our path.
It was so narrow that we might have gone past on either side of it, but
just the same it was right plunk in our path. It was quite a long ways
ahead.
Once, when Westy and I were going through that old park on our way home
from Little Valley we got a good scare on account of that old
ferris-wheel. And that's what started people thinking it was haunted.
Maybe you've heard of haunted houses but I bet you never heard of a
haunted ferris-wheel.
That time we went through there--oh, I guess it was a couple of years
ago. Anyway, it was in the night and everything was as dark as licorice
bars. Maybe you never ate those, but they're mighty good, they're black.
All of a sudden we heard a kind of a creaking noise and we couldn't make
out where it was. Sometimes it sounded just as if it might be a person.
We followed that noise the best we could and pretty soon we came to the
old wheel. It isn't so big, that wheel. And it isn't so little either.
Then we could hear the sound good and plain and it was up in the wheel.
It sounded pretty spooky. Sometimes it was a noise like some one crying.
And then it would kind of die away.
When we got home we told about it and Mr. Ellsworth (he's our
scoutmaster) said it was probably just the wind blowing in that creaky
old thing. But after that, all the kids in Bridgeboro said the wheel
was haunted. If you say a place is haunted, it's haunted.
But one thing, it kept the kids away from the old park. Because, anyway,
they weren't supposed to go there. Gee whiz, I can't say whether I'm
afraid of a ghost or not because I never saw one, but I know that white
is their patrol color. Anyway, if I were a ghost I wouldn't hang out in
a ferris-wheel, I know that. I guess they're half crazy, anyway, because
there used to be one in the old tumbled-down schoolhouse in North
Bridgeboro. Jiminy, I should think he could have found a better place
than that to stay in. But my father says it's pretty hard to find places
to live in these days. We should worry, the woods for us.