If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.

-- H.L. Mencken

Augusta's not much of a ghost town.

Last night's Halloween and today's All Saints "Day of the Dead" always seem to inspire stories of the mysterious and unexplained, but as one historian told me Friday, the Garden City lacks a signature ghost story.

So we stretch things a bit.

Last week I got a call from someone outside our area who had come across a story on Augusta's famous Haunted Pillar on the Internet. He wanted to know who the newspaper would recommend he talk to about this cursed marker at Fifth and Broad.

I said he could talk to me because I had written about it, touched it several times, and I had been cursed with thinning hair and weight gain.

"Really?" he said.

"No, I'm kidding," I replied quickly.

"It's just a fun story we made up a long time ago, and everyone in town is in on it. So now, you're in on it, too. The old market's column is not really haunted, cursed or in its original location."

Still we try.

One of our best potential ghost stories would have been the old Mackey House where legend says 13 Revolutionary War patriots were hanged by the British. I was told a seance even interviewed these famous "Spirits of '76."

Unfortunately, we discovered in recent years, the real Mackey House was torn down long ago, and the place where the seance was held is what we now call the Ezekiel Harris House -- built after the American Revolution.

I'm not sure why the 13 ghosts showed up to be interviewed at the wrong address.

I could also make a case that most of Harrisburg should be haunted. You see a good part of that old Augusta mill neighborhood is actually built on top of what used to be open space where a lot of people were buried.

Over the years, the tombstones were moved, but it's likely the bodies were not, and it's probable there are lots of remains buried beneath a lot of residential crawl spaces.

Another tale that shows up in Georgia ghost story anthologies involves a figure dressed in a Confederate uniform spotted walking among the tombstones in the Walker cemetery on the Augusta State University campus. But that was its only sighting.

I used to live in that neighborhood and would often jog the campus on dark summer nights because it was cooler. I never saw anything spooky.

This newspaper has reported ghost stories over its 200-plus years of publication, although usually with polite skepticism.

A report in the late 1800s involving a ghostly figure spotted floating about what is now Olde Towne turned out to be woman in a nightgown who liked evening strolls.

Another story described the haunting of a rooming house on what used to be Talcott Street but is now a back hallway of the judicial center under construction at Walton Way and Ninth.

In reading it, I got the idea the reporter suspected alcohol might be involved somewhere, and that makes a bit more sense.

As it was explained to me a long time ago, "Most ghost stories around here deal more with drinking spirits than seeing them."

Good stories often do.