At first glance it looked like a scarf blowing through the sunset soaked woods, somebody's lost possession as opposed to somebody lost to possession which was all too common in the woods. Ever since the civil war, ghosts clung to every tree like spiderwebs in an old farmhouse, refusing to leave for the simplest reason. They didn't want to.
Exorcisms only work if the dead are willing to go and if they aren't, there's no force in this life or the next that can make them. More often than not they end up slipping into something that can move faster than them (admittedly this is almost everything bar slugs and snails). This time it was the remnants of their body.
The hair that drifted between the branches bore leaves tangled so badly in the strands it resembled a sapling from the right angle. Her face resembled a deflated balloon, flesh all gone but skin weather-worn to a leathery sack that fluttered in the breeze barely ahead of her hair.
She'd been killed accidentally, the shot wasn't meant for her at all. Like most ghosts she'd been in the wrong place at the wrong time when she lived and paid for it dearly. Like most ghosts she found her post-death freedom too much fun to give up for the sake of peace for the living and to silence the never-ending howling all around her as her fellow restless souls tried to snatch her physical form from her.
She'd been winning that tug-of-war for just over a hundred and fifty years and had plenty more fight in her. It wouldn't have been so bad but she kept trying to upgrade her physical form for something more substantial. She'd only go after children, believing that she'd be able to grow up and live in their young bodies after kicking their own souls right out. She'd managed the latter a good dozen or so times but the former required the body to be more... together than she tended to leave them.
Exorcisms only work if the dead are willing to go and if they aren't, there's no force in this life or the next that can make them. More often than not they end up slipping into something that can move faster than them (admittedly this is almost everything bar slugs and snails). This time it was the remnants of their body.
The hair that drifted between the branches bore leaves tangled so badly in the strands it resembled a sapling from the right angle. Her face resembled a deflated balloon, flesh all gone but skin weather-worn to a leathery sack that fluttered in the breeze barely ahead of her hair.
She'd been killed accidentally, the shot wasn't meant for her at all. Like most ghosts she'd been in the wrong place at the wrong time when she lived and paid for it dearly. Like most ghosts she found her post-death freedom too much fun to give up for the sake of peace for the living and to silence the never-ending howling all around her as her fellow restless souls tried to snatch her physical form from her.
She'd been winning that tug-of-war for just over a hundred and fifty years and had plenty more fight in her. It wouldn't have been so bad but she kept trying to upgrade her physical form for something more substantial. She'd only go after children, believing that she'd be able to grow up and live in their young bodies after kicking their own souls right out. She'd managed the latter a good dozen or so times but the former required the body to be more... together than she tended to leave them.
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