Urban Legend
July 1st, 2011 § Leave a Comment
This happened to a girl my mom knew when she was my age. Well, my mom didn’t actually know her, but my mom’s best friend’s second cousin went to school with this girl. It was back in the eighties, when they were all in high school.
This girl, she was just an ordinary girl, and she was hanging out one day at the Sun Valley mall after school, with some friends. As she walked out of one of the shops, she noticed a strong smell of aftershave — she was a sucker for aftershave. She looked around, and there on the elevator was the most incredibly hot guy! Curly brown hair, tight jeans and a tight black t-shirt. She watched him going up the escalator with her mouth open.
She stood there for so long that her friends finally poked her in the ribs to wake her up.
“Go after him!” they told her. But by the time she got her courage up to follow him, the boy had disappeared.
Well. She was completely smitten. She went to the mall every day after that, hoping to run into him. At night, she dreamed about him. She remembered everything about him: his hair, his eyes, his face, what he wore. She even remembered the tattoo on his left bicep: a rose with a dagger stabbed through it, dripping blood. Freaky.
She even wanted to get a tattoo just like his, but of course her parents wouldn’t let her. So she convinced her grandmother (who spoiled her rotten) to stitch the same pattern onto the back of her jean jacket. She wore the jacket every day; to school, to the mall, just everywhere, always on the lookout for her dream boy. She hoped that he would see the design of his tattoo on her jacket. Then he would know that she was his soulmate.
Every night, she would chant the Gypsy Love Spell. Do you know it? You light a white candle and while it burns, you picture the face of your true love, and you say:
Candlelight, warm and bright
Fan the flames of love tonight
Let my soulmate burn for me
All my love, come to me.
It totally works! I got Eric Pedley to ask me out that way.
Well, okay, it didn’t work for this girl. She never saw her dream boy again. She got depressed, and stopped eating, just cried for her boy all the time, until she wasted away and died.
After the funeral, her parents donated all her clothes, including the jean jacket, to the local Goodwill. Another girl, about the same age as the first one, bought it a few days later. But she only wore it once.
After the first time she wore it, she started to act really strange. She cried all the time, wouldn’t eat, and talked non-stop about a beautiful boy who came to her in her dreams. Soon, she got really sick with a fever, and died. Her parents donated the jacket back to the same Goodwill.
It got sold again, to another girl about the same age — and the same thing happened. When her parents gave the jacket to Goodwill, the manager recognized it, and remembered how often it had come back to the store, and why. She started to wonder, but then let it go. It was just too crazy — whoever heard of a haunted jean jacket?
Anyway, she sold the jacket a third time, and again, the girl who bought it died, the same way the others did: while raving about a gorgeous guy that she’d never met.
The jacket showed up at the Goodwill again. The Goodwill manager was completely freaked out! She took the jacket home that night, and tried to burn it in her backyard, using old newspapers and magazines for kindling. The jacket started to spark and smoke. The manager noticed a sudden smell in the air… like aftershave. It was so strong, it made her choke.
Then some of the sparks jumped from the fire onto the lawn. The woman’s entire back yard caught fire, and her house almost burned down!
After the firefighters put out the fire, they found that the whole jacket had burned to ashes — except the rose and knife pattern. A few words from the newspapers survived, too: “love” … “come” … “me”.
Isn’t that so weird?
And after my mom told me that story, I’ve never bought clothes from a used clothing store, ever again. Because you never know. You just never know.
Inspired by the tale “Furisode,” from Lafcadio Hearn’s In Ghostly Japan
