Thursday, March 25, 2010

The Pawnbroker's Dress


The Pawnbroker’s Dress

One-minute review: An impoverished young girl was invited to a formal dance. She didn’t have the money to buy a new dress so she went to a pawnshop where she bought a dress that fit her perfectly for a reasonable price. At the party she had a magnificent time, dancing the night away.

But as the evening progressed, she began to feel nauseated and weak and she staggered out of the party,  weakly hailed a cab, and barely made it up the steps to her apartment.

As she lay, delirious, on her bed, she heard a voice say, “Give me back my dress. It belongs to the dead.” And indeed the young girl the next morning was found dead. The coroner said that she had been poisoned by embalming fluid that had seeped into her pores while she danced. The pawnbroker admitted that the dress had been given to him by an undertaker’s assistant who had taken it from a young girl just before the casket had been nailed down.

Famous Ghost Stories. Ed. Bennett Cerf. New York: The Modern Library. Random House, inc. 1944.

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