Haunted - final clothes post...

I don't think that i finished up the clothing posts that i was putting up here this past summer. So wait for it - the final clothing post is....

...underpants.

Surprised? Not really.

For this post, i'll recount a story to you from my childhood.

My grandmother in Philadelphia had a neighbour who was an elderly gentleman. He lived alone. I think he may have been a retired dentist but i'm not sure. When i was in late grade school, i began to get handmedowns from this old man. It started innocently enough. The first thing i got was a Mighty Mac winter parka. I actually really liked it. The zipper had a bar attached to it that looked tough & made it very easy to zip up in the cold winter.

Over the next few months i recieved a couple of other items from this old guy. Scarves, hats, gloves - all fairly innocuous stuff, harmless, really. I secretly kept hoping that i'd receive some of his old dental stuff (laughing gas, drills, etc) but that never happened.

One day i got a pair of jeans & some old man pants. Cool! I've always been happy to dress like an old man, so this didn't really bug me. A couple of shirts showed up, fine, i held my breath hoping for a fedora but that never came.

Then one day it got strange.

In one of the packages, mixed in with some normal stuff, i received some undershirts. Sleeveless, fairly worn undershirts. I remember thinking "this seems a little odd" but hey, they were comfortable. This was ages before wearing awfully named "wifebeaters" became even remotely cool. I kept them well hidden under my shirt.

Sadly, though, my source of septegenarian fashionware dried up...my grandmother's neighbour passed away and that was that. It was back to modern preteen dressing for me.

Or so i thought. Because months after the gentleman passed, my grandmother came to visit and had a final package for me. I figured "this is it, this is where i get the dentist tools and a really swanky cardigan collection". I opened the box and looked inside.

It was underwear.

Not new underwear. Not funny boxer shorts with wacky cartoon polkadots. Real honest to goodness old man underpants. Let me rephrase that: real honest to goodness DEAD old man underpants. Rather than describe them here, i'll let your imagination fill in the details.

I will admit that the first thing that went through my mind is "dear god in heaven, i cannot wear these". I did not want to appear ungrateful, but i couldn't wear them. Not because they had belonged to someone else. Not because the colour was somewhere between off white & corn yellow.

I couldn't wear them because i was afraid that they might be haunted.

I was genuinely scared that an old dead lonely dentist's soul might still be tied to this Earth, and channeled through a pair of Fruit of the Looms. I did what any other kid would do. I stashed them into the back of the closet and tried to forget that i ever saw them.

A guilty conscience (i was a young Catholic so i felt guilty about everything) can be quickly assuaged as time passes. Eventually, i forgot about the package that i'd stuffed underneath the board games & Lego sets. In fact, i did not even think about those underwears until years later when i went tearing through the closet trying to find a pair of shoes.

I recalled my fear from years earlier, and decided to do something about it. I took the package, placed it into a plastic bag & drove to the nearest clothing drop box. Rather than throwing the underpants in the garbage & risk being haunted by an old dead dentist, i figured it was better to pass the legacy on to someone else. Someone unwitting.

To this day, i half expect to see the package make its reappearance on my doorstep, like that horror movie where the skull keeps showing up no matter how the lady tries to get away from it. You know the one.