I don’t live in Riverwest anymore but find cause to cross the Locust Street bridge every week or so. Most recently, for a copy of the Ghost Story Tour booklet. It’s part of a month-long event organized by Riverwest Radio inviting readers to visit 21 sites across the neighborhood, pairing a story with each site.

The stories are all just two or three pages, the perfect length to read over a block-long walk. The sites are a mixed-bag, sometimes with plot-relevant Halloween decorations or public art. In other cases, the building itself is the attraction, newly clothed in ghostly myth. It’s what I like best about the event, how well it spans the gap between corners of culture that don’t often meet. Public art, literature, audio/visual media come together to make something that invites all to the table.

Each of the stories, as you might guess, are of precisely the same quality. Though maybe some moreso than others. For me, the ones that worked best in this collection are those that downplay their literary aspirations. As a guy who mostly reads hundred-year-old books about the existential crises of European nobility, I’ll go against taste and say that the Ghost Tour’s standouts are the weirdest, funniest, and least sensical of the lot.

There’s Ludwig Usinger’s Infamous Paranormal House Pary, by Jen Lyons, about a cousin of the famous sausage magnate who hosts a party for local demons and spirits. After the gathering, his daughter is left with a collection of tiny sprites, which she keeps in cages and watches as they hatch from the husks of their former bodies and fly off.

Then there’s The Overturned Clown Car by Bethany and Gene Gallistel, about a troupe of punk clowns who persist in haunting 2954 N Fratney. It has a great bit of dialogue, which I love for the narrator’s deadpan reaction, but also because of how good a job it does of encapsulating the collection’s overall ethos.

Another personal favorite is The Nightmares, by 14-year-old James Henderson, featuring what he describes with chilling candor as “a huge pumpkin creature.” Here and elsewhere in the collection, monsters are the focal point even when they’re not antagonists. The real villains are usually more mundane. In Henderson’s case, uncompromising parents. Other stories are haunted by petty criminals, apathetic neighbors, disbelievers, or anyone else who runs afoul of Riverwest’s cardinal rule—Don’t be a jerk.

If you’d like to read more, you can pick up a copy of the Ghost Tour for ten dollars at Riverwest Radio, Fischbergers, Nessun Dorma, Woodland Pattern, Bliffert Lumber, Riverwest Grown, and the Co-op. It’s a fun outing for the right group of friends, though I found it to be a good excuse to pace through the neighborhood’s quieter streets by myself. In this case though, go before sundown to keep safe from threats paranormal and mundane.

Friday

Saturday