Oh yay, a new visitor! Welcome, welcome! I am so glad that you decided
to hear my story. It has been a while since I have had a chance to
express myself to a living human being. You will be the first, so you
should feel honored.
My name is...hm, well actually, I do not really like to use my name. I
have been called the Toys 'R' Us ghost for so long that my name has no
significance anymore, but my story sure does have significance. As you
read my story, you will notice that I actually like roaming around the
Toys 'R' Us store in Sunnyvale, California. However, this was not
always the
case.
My death all began with a four-letter word that is heard very
commonly in our society. Did you take a guess? If you guessed the word
love,
then
you are absolutely correct. Have you ever been in love? If you answered
'Yes,' then have you ever had your heart broken? Well, that is
how I ended up this way--DEAD. I gave her
my heart and she stomped all
over it. I don't want to put a damper on the word love, but it never
brought me much luck.
To some, it means happiness and joy, but to others, like me, the word only
causes nausea inside one's tummy. As you already
know, I reside inside a Toys ‘R’ Us store and I have to say I
absolutely love it. I am not your usual ghost who haunts
children who shop at the store while scaring families out of the store.
Instead, I
am a lovable ghost who only likes
to play tricks at times. But I must
admit, in the beginning, I hated it. Could you imagine living one day
with all the happiness and joy in the world, then all of a sudden the
next day just being a ghost and a memory? It was a very hard concept
for me to handle at first. Now I just float around, playing with the
toys on the shelves and sometimes moving objects after an employee sets
it somewhere. Since dolls are a classic "scare tactic," I move those a
lot. Sally, an employee here, gets so mad at me when I move the dolls
because she gets quite paranoid and thinks the dolls are alive. She
knows it's me moving them, but I think it's just her paranoia. Another
employee by the name of Jake loves when I make the music play on aisle
7. Since he works at night cleaning the store from the busy day, I
think he enjoys the music. He is always dancing around with the mop and
the broom. I think he might imagine it being a pretty young lady
dancing with him at a ball or something. He can be quite delusional too
at times. During the day, all the children are in store, so I try not
to do too much to scare them off. Sometimes, I just roll a ball off the
shelf or something small enough that no one really notices. But the
strange thing is, sometimes the children will wave at me. I feel like
they can see me. I think that deals with the
innocence inside of them from when they are born, kind of like when you
are young and have that imaginary friend. But that's just my theory.
All in all, I love keeping people on their toes in this store. I
think I actually get pure enjoyment out of it.
Well, now that you know a little about myself and where I reside, I
guess the last question that remains is how I ended up here in the
afterlife, huh? That is not the hard part to answer. Using an axe, I
committed suicide.
The more important thing that you might be wondering now is why. I have
had many thoughts and revelations about my suicide through the years,
and the word love
really does sum it all up. Basically,I loved a woman who did not love
me back and thought my life was not worth living.
Back in the day, I was a manly
man!
I am of Swedish
descent and was born sometime around the late 1840s. Around the 1880s, I began working on the
Murphy family farm as
a ranch hand where the Toys 'R'
Us
store now sits. I was even a preacher at our local chruch in
town.
My love for Murphy's daughter, Elizabeth, ran like a wild water stream
in the middle of a
rainy spring. But sadly, my love for her was not
reciprocated. Instead, she ran off with an East Coast lawyer because apparently I was not good
enough for her. I was just a ranch
hand and a preacher who was not going anywhere in life in her eyes.
But now look at me; I am dead because she deserted me. Since I was a
ranch hand, it was easy for me to get hold of an axe. It took a lot of
self-convincing to actually cut off my own leg, but I worked myself up
to it. It hurt like hell at first, but then everything just went numb.
As you may have guessed, I don't really remember much from there. I'm
guessing I died from blood loss. Since the store was not built for
another hundred years, I waited around the farm until the Murphy family
could not stand being there anymore. I think they would hear my cries
because that is all I did for the first few decades. But now, I have
come to
terms with this and now I absolutely love how I spend my time in the
afterlife. Thank you, Elizabeth! Thank you for allowing me to be a kid
all over
again!
Author's Note:
The original story is quite
humorous. I started off with a humorous story first because I felt it
was better to go from a funny story to a scary instead of the other way
around. In the original story, the reader learns about the ghost from
what a psychic says while visiting the store, and also from employees
in the story. In my version, I wanted the ghost to tell his side of
his own death rather than from the psychic and the
employees who talked about him. I
really liked writing it in first person and the way it came out. I also
tried to keep some of the same details and just elaborate on the main
points, but
the original story kind of left the reader wondering about the ghost
himself. In the original story, the employees talked about the ghost
and his everyday actions while the psychic was able to tell us his name
while he was alive--John, Johan, or Yon Johnson--and also his former
life. I thought it added more to the story to not tell you the name of
the ghost and to not give you every detail from the original story. I
also really
liked the pictures I chose because they go with the story very well. I
tried to arrange them so that as you read the story, you will see new
pictures for each important part of the story. I wish I was more
creative web page
wise, but the story sure does please me.
On to The Girl in the Dorms
Back to Mythology-Folklore Coverpage
Back to Mythology-Folklore
Introduction
Bibliography
Story Title: Haunted Toys 'R' Us
Author: Barbara "spirited" Mikkelson
Website Name: Urban Legends Reference Pages-Haunted Toys
'R' Us
Cowboy Welcome Sign
Web Source: Western
Wall
Toys Hallway
Web Source: Balin's Blog
Ghostly Farm House
Web Source: Flickr
Farm Hand
Web Source: Labour/Le
Travail
