The Smoking Ghost

parlance · Guest

One day I went out to take pictures of boats and while walking along the beach I ran into a Dene Native from Southeast Alaska. We started talking and next thing I know we are sitting in my house having coffee and swapping stories. Some where along the way the topic of ghosts came up, partly because the haunted church is in the area and I started telling him the stories about that place. Well, he had a story of his own to tell.

The Dene man's uncle lived in a house that turned out to be haunted. A lot of his relatives didn't like coming around to visit because the ghost was very active. It would start raising a fuss in the kitchen, throwing stuff around and even breaking things. An incident like that happened while my acquaintance was visiting his uncle, and when he asked what was going on, his uncle said, "Oh, that's just the ghost, He wants a cigarette. Watch this."

The uncle pulled out a cigarette and lit it, placing it in the resting notch of an ashtray on the table. The noise in the kitchen suddenly subsided. Pretty soon something invisible picked the cigarette up and began puffing on it, doing so until the smoke was used up and then the cigarette dropped into the ashtray. After that the house stayed quiet.

"See," the uncle said, "he just wanted a smoke." And then he laughed.

I mentioned the episode in the movie, "Ghost", where the dead guy in the subway was drooling over some cigarettes that spilled out of a vending machine and then moaned, "Ooooh, what I wouldn't do for a cigarette!" We both laughed about that and then I told him about "Uncle Joe."

My mom's best friend grew up on Spirit Lake Reservation, back when it was still called Devil's Lake. The missionaries gave it the name, Devil's Lake, because they didn't understand the concept of "spirit" in the context of the Native American culture. The Lake and the Reservation now bear the original name, properly translated.

The best friend told us one time about a man who ended up living with her family who became an "uncle" by default. He started out just working around the place for her father and then never left. When the old man died, the family buried him on their land in a remote place reserved for family graves. Afterwards he started haunting the house, doing things that attracted attention in a way that indicated he wasn't happy. It wasn't until one day, when they were talking about him, that something happened to give light to the mystery about his uneasy rest.

My mom's friend was going to take out a cigarette and fumbled the pack, juggling it in an attempt to try and catch it, and this caused cigarettes to spill all over the floor. As she was picking up the cigarettes, suddenly she looked up and said, "I know why Uncle Joe has been so restless! He wants his cigarettes!"

She lit a smoke and placed it on a high shelf in an ashtray for the deceased man, who had smoked three packs a day when he had been alive. They later took two packs of cigarettes to his grave and left one lit and smoking on the headstone. They promised to not forget to bring him tobacco from then on and apologized for not thinking about it sooner. After that Uncle Joe was quiet and there were no more problems. But the next time they took him tobacco, the packs of cigarettes they had left before were gone. And that was strange, because they lived far out away from everyone else, and nobody had been out to see them or Uncle Joe. So where had the packs of cigarettes gone?

I guess the moral of the story is, kick the habit when you are alive or you will pay hell for it when you are dead if nobody thinks to offer you tobacco.

creepycritter · Ghost Enthusiast Joined: 13 Jun 2006 Posts: 33

Poor Uncle Joe...He musta been having a nicotine fit!! Mad

Wonder what he does when he runs outta toilet paper. Confused

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