I started to feel like Ebenezer Scrooge, for I had another spectral visitation the next night. Round about three, perhaps four, or whenever the witching hour is witchiest, I heard a creak, and a draft of air cold as the crypt washed over me. On this moonless night, there was not a speck of light, and the ranch might as well have been resting on the bottom of the ocean.

There came a noise: Clatter-clop, clickety-tromp.

Jacob Marley’s chains dragging against the floorboards? The centipede’s kin seeking revenge? No, too loud for the latter. I held my breath, burrowing beneath the coverlet, and stayed as still as a quivering wreck of a woman could manage. I was too terrified to reach for my phone’s flashlight app, lest it pinpoint for the phantom exactly where I lay. Yet despite my precautions, the sound came closer—and with it came an infernal reek. A reek mixed with…lavender?

I heard the sound of snorting, as if Beelzebub himself had popped in for a bedtime story, and I tried to breathe as shallowly as I could. But just as I thought I would perish from sheer fear, I heard the thing move off again, into the night. Another creak, and the draft stopped. I lay there, panting with horror, until at last my tired body gave up the ghost (or more precisely, gave up on the ghost) and I fell back into an uneasy doze.

This morning when I set feet to floorboards, I found a bouquet of fragrant wildflowers at the foot of my bed.

Apparently, this ghost wants to be friends.