“SO there was both a real and a fake ghost?” I asked my gracious storyteller.
“That is correct,” she answered. “Dribble had fallen in love with Young Staples at a very young age, but he never returned her love. When she learned that he was getting married, she decided to use what she considered to be the ‘myth’ of the Staples Family curse to scare Bobble away, a curse she learned about as a result of Young Staples’ extensive research.
“The Great and Powerful Trixie searched the basement the day of the wedding, and found the metal claws and poles that Dribble had used to scratch on the underside of the floors during the early attacks. The unicorn had used secret passageways to perform the physical assaults. A check of train records confirmed that she did arrive at the local station on time, so she obviously had been hiding out in the area. She was only forced out of that hiding with the arrival of Trixie and the failure of the game room attack in frightening Bobble away. From that point she began to let her obsession get the better of her.
“What she did not suspect was that her intense hatred for Bobble made the real Staples Family ghost more and more powerful, and unlike Dribble, its primary focus was always on the young heir. The remaining attacks can be divided into Dribble’s fakes, Dribble using her magic to create the white ape, and the actual ghost. The Great and Powerful Trixie believes that should answer all of your questions.”
“All but one, if you don’t mind.”
“The Great and Powerful Trixie does not mind.” And as she said this, she used her levitation magic to collect the photographs of Young Staples. She looked them over with what looked like a wistful sigh, and then carefully put them away in another trunk.
“Whatever happened to Dribble?”
Trixie looked me sadly in the eye. “Her fate matches that of two of the colts in the old stories. She abandoned her former identity and ran. And she has never stopped running…ever.”
Author’s Notes
My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic is copyright Hasbro, with due respects to Lauren Faust for her brilliant re-imagining of the franchise. All characters other than The Great and Powerful Trixie (and the brief reference to Princess Celestia) are my own creations.
The source of this story is “The Horse of the Invisible,” a Carnacki the Ghost-Finder story written by William Hope Hodgeson in 1910 (one of a host of detective series created to ride the Sherlock Holmes gravy train). The basic plot of the story is the same (other than the change in species and the swapping of genders), but I hope you’ll agree the “voice” used to tell it makes this a tale worth reading on its own. If you’re wondering about some of the odd formatting and style choices used, that was my attempt to replicate the appearance of The Idler magazine, where this story (as well as a good number of Sherlock Holmes stories) first appeared.