Informant: The informant here is an Irish Catholic girl from Beverly, Massachusetts, a small town made out of the original Salem settlement and as such a traditionally superstitious area.

Transcription:

In high school, one of my good friends was a volunteer fireman and he was from a really small town next to mine and he did a lot of work because they didn’t have much permanent staff and he was going to deal with a car crash in Ipswich, which is also near Salem. A car rolled off the road after going round a bend and thank god no one was hurt, and the police wouldn’t talk to the people who had been in the accident, saying they should go to the hospital. And my friend said we should talk to these people and figure out what happened, I mean these people weren’t drunk and they said “you don’t want to know this story”. And he goes to talk to the people as they’re getting loaded into the ambulance and they said that a little kid ran in front of their car while they were driving and they swerved to avoid him. And he asked “did you find the kid after? Is he okay?” and they said that they couldn’t find him and they ran all over the place. And he told the police officers what they had said and they just shook their heads and said “this happens at least once a year and has for the past fifty years. It just happens. At this corner, in Ipswich, and someone wrecks their car. And I guess some kid actually died there in the sixties or seventies. So. I think I remember it because I heard it from someone so close to my age because like with my grandfather it feels kinda folklore-y like an urban legend but with him it was like “oh shit’ this actually happened if you believe in it, which I do.

Analysis:

Ghost stories possess a strange resonance that other scary stories do not – for that reason, many scary stories are simply called ghost stories regardless of their subject matter. After death, the memory of a loved one can still “haunt” for years on end. As such, the idea of the human being themself sticking around to do the haunting is just as powerful. These ghosts are rarely ever depicted as malevolent, merely concerned with the same things that they were concerned with in their moments before passing. In this story, the ghost of the little boy is supposedly just as innocent as a the boy playing by the road before getting struck would be – regardless of how many deaths he unknowingly causes.