(Tom Keats) wrote in message ...

[snip]


I'm gonna started scoutin' around for scary ghost cyclist
(cyclist ghost?) stories again. I halfheartedly tried
awhile back, but didn't come up with much. The ones I
found just weren't scary. Maybe I'll have to invent some.


Dear Tom,

Alas, no cycling ghost stories come to mind immediately.

As I recall, Bierce mentions bicycles only in passing
in doggerl in the Devil's Dictionary ("the wheels go round
without a sound").

Nothing rings a bicyclist's bell in Saki, although you might
adapt his pair of enemies trapped under the log, who reconcile
just before the wolves arrive. (Perhaps a helmet and anti-helmet
pair stuck under something that doesn't occur to me after crashing
into each other in the fog, just before they hear an approaching
semi's horn and--stop me before I scribble again!)

Nor can I think of any John Collier stories with cyclists.
Of course, he preferred demons, devils, genies, and witches.

None of Robertson Davies' gaudy-night ghost-stories
featured bicycles that I can remember.

Perhaps Stephen King has done something?

With ghosts, vampires, and werewolves, the basic problem
is likely the need for a dark or moonlit ride, something
that few of us indulge in. Possibly a mysterious lamp
failure could be a starting point?

For slightly less depraved tastes, I've noticed but never
read a series of bike-race mysteries by Greg Moody,
"Dead Air," "Deadroll," "Derailleur,", "Perfect Circles,"
and "Two Wheels."

Of course, you mustn't advertise your lurid and utterly
implausible literary interest in ghosts and murder mysteries,
lest anyone take you for the kind of low-brow clod who can't
enjoy great literature like, say, "Hamlet."

(I believe that a curious form of punctuation known as an
emoticon may be appropriate here to signal heavy-handed
irony, but I come from a much more long-winded background
and have never used such curious modern contrivances--could
a ghost story manage to infuse a smiley-face with some
horrifying meaning?)

Carl Fogel