Story: Ghost Story

This is an old one, written in 1994, with some reworking today. It's kind of unusual in that it relies on the possibility of ghosts, which I haven't seen much in other noose stories.

It was Dakota Territory, something like 1885. I had been leading a posse through the Badlands for about two weeks. A friend of mine had been killed back in Sioux Falls. I didn't do it, but when I heard they were looking for me I took off. That made me guilty in their eyes, and I knew what they were going to do if they caught me.

But two weeks of running had exhausted me and my horse. The posse finally caught me while we rested by a river, the only place for miles where there was any trees for shade. There was five of 'em, all big and mean with guns, and I couldn't fight back when they fell on me. They quickly had me down on the ground with my hands tied behind my back. While I was down they beat me up pretty bad, one of them getting in a few kicks to my stomach before they pulled me to my feet.

I got a short rest in the dirt while they discussed whether to take me back to Sioux Falls to stand trial and be hanged from the gallows there. But they decided to just get things over with here and now.

They dragged me to a big cottonwood, hoisted me up onto a horse and slipped the noose around my neck. Up on the horse in my dusty work shirt, jeans, chaps, and boots, I was sore from the beating I took and scared shitless about the rope dance I was about to do. I tried to tell them I couldn't have killed my friend, pleading for them to let me down and hear me out. But they weren't buying it. The horse shifted nervously underneath me and I realized that my life depended on her staying there.

The posse leader nodded, and the guy behind me slapped the horse on the rump and shouted "YAH!" to spook her. She bolted. By reflex I tried to grab her with my knees, but the rope around my neck tightened and pulled me off the horse. I swung wildly as I kicked at the air trying to find the ground again. The pain in my neck was fierce, since the rope caught me square across the Adam's apple. At first I made a couple of rasping sounds, trying to pull air in through my constricted throat. Then I couldn't even do that, as my struggling only tightened the noose more.

The posse men just watched grimly as I struggled. The rope holding my wrists behind my back wouldn't give, despite all my pulling against it. The noose's torture lasted for what seemed like an eternity. Just as everything was going black, the buzzing in my ears suddenly stopped. My head pitched forward, eyes glassy and froze open. My body relaxed, only twitching slightly as it sank completely into the noose's embrace. A small dark spot started growing in the crotch of my pants.

The posse watched my body dangle quiet and still from the noose. "Give him a couple minutes, boys, he ain't quite dead yet," the foreman said. Eventually one of them dismounted and approached. He looked at my face, looking for signs of life, then set to stripping off my chaps and boots. Satisfied with justice done, the posse mounted their horses to leave. One of them led my horse, my saddle and bedroll on her back. Soon they were gone, leaving only a corpse dangling from the tree.

Somehow I saw all this. I knew I had to be dead, but here I was watching my own corpse stiffen and cool as the sun set. I tried to get back into my body, but of course could not. Over the next few days I mostly stared at the dead cowboy decked out in work shirt, jeans, brown leather chaps and boots, hanging from that cottonwood. Watching myself bake in the sun, dangling still, except when a breeze came up and made me swing in slow semi-circles.

On the fifth day some more men rode up and found my body. I must've started to stink pretty bad because they were real reluctant to get close. They finally cut me down and buried me, noose still tight around my neck, near the tree where I was hanged. No coffin, no shroud, just a body with a few feet of dirt on top of it. They left a white cross made out of sticks for my marker.

But I was still there, kind of. A ghost.

Since then I've been wandering, looking for peace and rest. I don't know how many years it has been, since I have no need to track time, although I have seen enough changes to know that much time has passed.

I go through my memories a lot. Mostly it's just another form of torture, since they remind me of things I lost when those sons of bitches strung me up. But one in particular came to me. I was a kid, maybe 14, back home, and the law was hanging a bank robber. A full formal hanging, a gallows and the whole town singing hymns, the guy standing on the platform getting a hood pulled over his head, then the noose. . . .

A bunch of us kids crowded as close to the gallows as we could and we saw the whole thing: the trap door sprung open, the guy dropped, and with a thud was stopped by the rope. It didn't kill him instantly, but he didn't linger long.

A few hours later Jimmy Williams was telling the bunch of us who were there that the guy shot a wad in his pants just as he died. Most of us said no way. But I knew Jimmy was right. I saw the bulge of the guy's crotch, and the spot in the crotch of his pants.

I know I didn't shoot a load hanging up there in that cottonwood. I was too fuckin' scared. The wet spot in my pants was only piss running down my leg when my bladder let go at the end. No orgasm pulsed through my dick as I breathed my last. I remember every feeling that I felt then, and that one was missing. There was no final release. Maybe that's why I'm still here. Who knows. It's not like I can ask anyone. No one sees me, of course, and I can't do anything to affect things. I have no need for vengeance, especially after all these years. So I just wander, lost in feelings of emptiness and restlessness that have been all I've had since the 1880s.

Now I'm at the edge of a field. Looks like it was a cornfield a year or two ago, but now it's fallow. There's an abandoned barn to the north with holes in its roof. I go over to the barn. I feel a strange sense of anticipation. I go in through a big open door and pass toward the back of the barn.

In the relative darkness there's a man who looks about 25 or 30 with shaggy hair and a beard. He is shirtless and has a hairy chest—pretty well put together, kind of like one of my cowboy friends from all those years ago. His work boots come off and he shucks his jeans, folds them, and places them on top of his flannel shirt in a pile next to the wall. Light comes in through the one grimy window and the cracks in the barn wall and highlights the burly, buck-naked man. He puts the boots back on, pulling the laces and tying them loosely. I know he doesn't know I'm here, so I move a little closer for a better view.

He grabs a rope and a bucket. A lot of the floor in the loft above has rotted away. He goes over to a spot underneath an exposed ceiling beam. Standing on the upturned bucket, he throws an end of his rope over the beam and ties it off. When he steps off the bucket, I can see that the end that dangles is tied into a noose.

The guy's about to hang himself. I know I can't stop him even if I wanted to. I simply watch with building anticipation.

The man gets a pair of handcuffs from his pile of clothes. When he stands up I can see his cock is more than a little erect. He walks over to the bucket and stands for a moment, silently scratching his balls and pulling on his cock until it is good and hard.

Then he steps up onto the bucket, a little gingerly, looking scared and nervous but still excited. He stretches on his toes and pulls the noose over his head, tightening it as it goes around his neck. There is little slack in the rope, so he won't drop very far. He adjusts the rope carefully, so it circles his neck right above his Adam's apple and the knot is behind his left ear. He sets one cuff around his left wrist, then puts his right wrist into the other cuff, in front of him, just above his hard cock. Finally he opens his left hand and the key to the cuffs drops to the floor. Naked except for his boots, his hands held firmly by the cuffs, he stands on the bucket taking his last breaths, his neck linked to the ceiling by a 3/4-inch hemp rope.

He strokes his cock with his cuffed right hand. It's like he's playing a game. The knot around the beam isn't the sturdiest knot ever tied, just an overhand knot, really. The noose is a formal seven-turn hangman's knot that looks huge against the side of his head. Maybe he could still get his hands up to the overhand knot and untie the rope before he passes out. If I was a betting man, though, I wouldn't take those odds.

His furry chest rises and falls slowly. His cock is as hard as any I ever saw, and moist at the tip. I move closer so as to be in front of him, and watch him close his eyes.

"Here goes nothing," he says.

He kicks the bucket out from under his feet and he drops. His toes end up a foot and a half off the dirt floor of the barn. His face shows intense feeling, maybe not agony but certainly ... pleasure, perhaps, and a little panic as the rope cuts into his neck savagely. He manages to keep his hand on his hard member, stroking it as he hangs. He's spins and twists a little at the end of his rope. His boots dance a bit, kicking at the air and trying to reach the ground or maybe the bucket, which has rolled a few feet away, out of reach. His face turns red as he tries to pull some air into his constricted throat. He gurgles once, then gets one raspy breath, then the noose strangles off all noises. There's no sound but what his boots make when they knock against each other. If he was going to try to get out of this, he should've had his hands on the rope by now.

His cock is rock-hard and his balls pulled up tight against his body. Something compels me to get close, and I feel almost right in front of him. The first spurt of his seed comes toward me as if it would hit me square in the chest. I feel suddenly lighter. As the second and third and fourth pulses of his cock shoot his last cum at me, I forget to watch his final struggles. In a few moments there'll be a naked man hanging dead in this barn, cooling and stiffening, waiting to be cut down and put in the ground. But with the last few drops of his cum, I feel myself finally being released to my rest.