I really ought to have been working today, but I woke up and went on Facebook and it told me it was my friend Ferda’s birthday. Well she got me a rather nice Miffy book when it was my birthday, so I thought “I’ll write her a story with her as a panda,” knowing she likes pandas, thinking it would only take about thirty minutes.

So I wrote the story, which took about ten minutes, then decided to illustrate it with some quick MS Paint-style sketches. Drawing on the computer took too long and didn’t work out well, so then I switched to wax crayons and decided to scan them in. It kind of went from there into a full-scale production, which has taken me over four hours now, including all the time putting it up on my site and making sure each page links together.

Anyway, Happy Birthday Ferda, here’s you story:

Ferda & Mark by H. Benjamin Petrie

I’ve also linked to it in the Highlights section of my site.

Also, to any readers I still have, I again apologise for not updating. I’ve had writer’s block and been busy with uni work. That’s nearly finished though, and I do have a nearly finished article to post in the next week or so.

I was the first one to reach the haunted house, because I only lived a few doors away. After I had stood there for a few minutes, admiring the flaky once-white paint on the front door, the half-boarded up windows, the long grass speckled with yellow flowers, Adam came into view preceded by a long dark shadow that mimicked his movement across the patchwork tarmac.

As I watched him come towards me I thought about how, as my Dad had said when I told him I was staying over at Adam’s tonight, it had been a while since I actually had stayed over at his house, or anyone else’s for that matter. Still, at the time, I had my interest in ghosts and the supernatural to keep me wholly occupied; an interest which was vindicated that night, the night when, even if no one really seemed to believe me, then or since, I saw a ghost.
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My name is Ben, I’m fourteen and I once saw a ghost. It was three weeks ago, in this old haunted house that stood empty at the bottom of my road for as long as I can remember. And for as long as I can remember, the place fascinated me because I’m really into ghosts and the paranormal and all that, and this place, with its dark, peeling paint, boarded up windows and overgrown front garden, looked just like a haunted house straight from Goosebumps.

Actually, I didn’t exactly see the ghost, but I know it was there. I could feel it. And I heard it. I’d take someone who knows about ghosts there to prove it, if I could, but they knocked the place down last week to make way for some housing estate, so instead, I’m writing this down, so there will be a record of ‘the ghost of Sycamore Avenue’ and of how I came to see it.

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