Ghost Tours Not Paying Ghosts
Fredericksburg’s 180-year history contains enough cowboys, Germans, and Comanches to fill its cemeteries with a lot of dead people.
And they’re not happy.
“I’m in five different ghost tours and I never signed up to entertain nobody,” says the corpse of Robert Pug (1874-1905) who died before learning what a double-negative is. “We’re troubled souls caught between dimensions and now, it seems, also sideshow performers. They need to pay us.”
“They’re not performers,” says tour owner, Lou Mason (1963- ) of Lou’s Boos. “The ghosts do what they do and my customers watch. That’s it. If a bunch of people look at a waterfall, do you owe the waterfall money?”
“The tours know we can’t go someplace else,” Mr. Pug responds. “I was murdered by savage injuns on this here spot [1], so this is where I gotta do my haunting. They’re exploiting us.” Several dead Comanche nod in agreement but it is unclear if they understood. The Comanche don’t have a word for exploitation.
“They want a 20% ‘ghost fee’ added to each ticket,” Mr. Mason reveals. “Yeah, good luck with that. All we actually do is walk folks to different places and charge ‘em fifty bucks. We’re already a rip off. Now they want us to raise our tickets to sixty? At a certain point people will just stay home and scare themselves.”
Not being able to reach a compromise, the ghosts have filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board. “Being dead doesn’t strip a group of their collective bargaining rights,” said their lawyer, reading from a prepared statement before never being heard from again.
The ghosts have also applied for membership in the actors’ union. If they’re performing in front of audiences, the de facto performers’ union should protect them, right? Not so fast…
“Paranormals don’t qualify for membership,” states union spokesperson Paula Dim (1958- ). “Is ‘paranormal’ an accepted term? I don’t want to offend. Alive-challenged? Anyway, you’re suggesting we track members across an additional time-space continuum. You can imagine the havoc that would bring to our accounting department. The computers still get confused with leap years. Plus most of these ‘performers’ died before Social Security numbers were issued so there’s also that.”
“Looks like we dodged a bullet,” says Mr. Mason, pumping a fist in the air. “We would’ve had to become a union signatory and abide by their casting guidelines. That would’ve meant at least two minorities per show and we’d have to bring in ghosts from Kerrville.”
[1] Historians note Mr. Pug actually died of dysentery after eating bad chili.
Billiam Coronel is a multiple Emmy-winning comedy writer who now lives in the Texas Hill Country. He was on The Tonight Show multiple times and wrote on a dozen sitcoms including FAMILY GUY.