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Blogs by Ronald Dondiego
New York Hack 11/13/2005 11:42:03 AM
The Kiss of Death ... I know that you might find this difficult to believe, but there are ghostly presences in New York City. These apparitions of the night sometimes hover around their old haunts: subway cars, saloons, deserted streets, and shadowy corners - to name just a few. But the most famous ghost I know of was from Greenwood Cemmetary in Brooklyn, not far from where I grew up. So quite naturally I wrote my first short story about her several years ago.
Her name was Amanda and she appeared to lonely young men near the outskirts of the cemmetary. She would tell the young men her story of how she was part of a love triangle, and of how her fiance had murdered her after he found out that she had another lover. It was an awful incident. It appears that the young man in question had crept into her room one hot, summer eve and plunged a dagger into her throbbing heart. The man fled but was later apprehended by the long arm of the law, tried, and subsequently hung in Washington Square.
So when I was a young man I would walk the outskirts of Greenwood cemmetary at my own risk, because I knew upon hearing amanda's tale young lonely amblers such as myself would become mesmerized by her effulgent eyes. Then, having cast her spell over them, Amanda would steal away their breath in one long, mystyfying kiss. By the time the kiss has ended the young men have desperately fallen to the ground, stone cold dead with a horrorfied stare, and a fearful gait, her kiss of death still lingering upon their pallid lips.
Even today the frozen corpses of young men are occasionally found lying in the foliage of Greenwood Cemetary; Amanda's kiss of death seals their fate. While Satan digs their graves.
