A story for you.

Once I went to a haunted house. Not a real haunted house where ghost children poked me in the elbow, like the theatre I visited last night.

No this was a cheap clapboard affair with air cannons and warped mirrors. It was the kind of haunted house my wife and also my mother can’t stop giggling at.

When I entered the final room, there wasn’t the usual disaffected teenager in a rubber mask. Instead, there was a bug-eyed man in a hat who said, “Are you ready for the haunted part of the house?”

I nodded and the strange man drew back a curtain.

Past the curtain was a shelf. On the shelf was a shell.

“Behold!” The man in the hat ejaculated. He held the shell preciously out to me.

It was a shell. The kind that you find on a beach.

“Listen to it,”

“It’s just a shell,” I said. “I can hear the ocean.”

The weirdo began laughing. Truly this was the scariest part of the haunted house.

“You fool,” he wheezed, “That’s not the ocean you hear. That’s the ghost of the crab of this very shell singing songs to the ocean. THIS,” he grimaced, pointing an eccentric finger at the shell, “This is the haunted house you paid $7 to see!”  With that, he pushed a button.

A door opened, music played.

As I went through the final corridor past displays of various cabinets holding nothing but shells, I realized that the music was AC/DC. However, the words had been changed.

I left the house humming “Highway to Shell”. The best $7 I have ever spent.