Strange ideas of the paranormal.

My Google alert on "roadside memorial" turned up this item at examiner.com:



I've already blogged about the underlying story (as another in my long series of posts about makeshift death-site memorials). This post is about the mistake of putting the story under the already stupid "astrology & paranormal" tag. Did somebody at the Examiner think actual ghosts — to the extent that makes any sense — were involved? Like, maybe it was some college town variation on the old "Ghost Riders in the Sky" legend:

"(Ghost) Riders in the Sky: A Cowboy Legend" is a country and cowboy-style song [that] tells a folk tale of a cowboy who has a vision of red-eyed, steel-hooved cattle thundering across the sky, being chased by the spirits of damned cowboys. One warns him that if he does not change his ways, he will be doomed to join them, forever "trying to catch the Devil's herd across these endless skies."

Here's Marty Robbins singing the song. Or if you prefer: Johnny Cash. Or here it is by the singer who possesses the voice that is the first singing voice that I ever heard and thought: This is the greatest voice ever. I must have been about 4 years old at the time, considering the year that the greatest recording ever — as I saw it — came out (1955).

But back to "Ghost Riders." Here are the lyrics. I'd love parody lyrics applicable to apparitions of college-town bike riders.

Tempe, Arizona ousts "ghost bike" memorials.

"We all expected that they’d basically have to come down someday... We would like them to be permanent, but we know that’s not actually realistic. We just wanted to make sure that it was done respectfully and with the cooperation of the families," said bicycle advocate Ryan Guzy.

Floyd Reeser, a director at Bike Saviours and builder of both ghost bikes, said he was disappointed initially to hear that the memorials were being taken down and said they “should have been welded to the street” as a reminder of bike safety. However, after reading about how most of the ghost bikes are taken down, he echoed Guzy’s thoughts.

“To have one stay up for even a week would be a miracle in most places,” Reeser said.

"We knew the memorials can’t stand forever... And after being weathered... I mean, we had bad rain, we had a storm, we had wind, we had snow."

"So I knew the time was going to come where we really had to move the memorials. Not only because the tributes themselves start to look unkempt and start to communicate a message that wasn’t part of the honoring that the donor intended; it also signifies a moving on, a readiness for the community to go to that next step."

The age-old problem of roadside memorials, in the Newtown context.