Are You Afraid Of The Dark? The Lonely Ghost
Oct 12, 2009 | No Comments | @andrewmarcec
As I cycle through these old episodes, there is something that I’ve noticed about these DVD sets that really bothers me. They have changed the beginning theme. The beginning of each episode was got me in the mood with just that lone rocking boat, the creepy clown in the attic and the odd music that accompanied it. Now, not only do they factor in the ending, more upbeat music into the introduction but they also cut in clips from ALL SEASONS. This is also something I noticed that they did on all of the discs. The covers of the set and the discs are riddled with non season one images, images like the witch from “The Bookish Babysitter”, the watcher from “Watcher’s Woods”, and the old woman and girl from “The Tale Of Room 214″. Totally ruins every episode for me, but I digress…
“The Tale Of The Lonely Ghost” follows Amanda, a studious girl whose parents have gone away on business and is stuck with her ignorant aunt, bitchy cousin Beth, and the nanny. Amanda desperately wants to fit in with her cousin and her cousin’s friends and is willing to do anything to prove that to Beth. So when Beth challenges her to stay the night in the haunted house next door, Amanda can’t do anything but oblige.
This is one of the more classic episodes of AYAOTD, it being a haunted house episode. It also, as many of the episodes do, clearly points out the “nerds” and the “cool kids”. As always they are surrounded by the “dopey parents”. I mean the parents in every episode all HAD to be incredibly high, or just awful people who shouldn’t have been allowed to breed. Aunt Dottie is no exception. Not only does she start the episode of by ragging on Amanda’s luggage and criticizing her academic skills, but she also shows that she is a lazy parent. She calls Beth down to help, and when she receives no answer she joyfully says, “welp, must be on the phone again! Oh that daughter of mine.”
Beth is your classic spoiled bitch, but she loves her stuffed animals. She loves them so much that one of Amanda’s “cook kid tasks” is to organize them every morning. She also uses the word “zeeb”. Does that smell like the most awesome kid ever to come out of Canada in the early 90′s? It does to me!
Amanda takes all this in stride. After asking the awkwardly phrased “How does one not become a zeeb?” She gives into peer pressure and attempts to stay in the haunted house for the night. This is where the episode finally gets cool. Late at night she enters a room and sees some words scrawled on the wall, but they are backward. In the closet mirror across the room she sees they spell “help me”, just as a little girl appears on the other side of the mirror.
I know, you’re terrified right now, me too.
As Beth and Amanda clean up the room which has been covered floor to ceiling in backwards handwriting, Beth is incited into the mirror by the mirror-age (you like that?) of hundreds of stuffed animals. She, and all the furries in Canada, followed her inside and the little mirror girl takes her place in the room with Amanda.
Amanda runs back to the house to find the nanny, a character that had seriously zero introduction, and her relationship to the house and story is unknown. Amanda drags her into the house against her will, even though she’s begging and pleading not to go in, and takes her to the room. In the room nanny is reunited with her long lost daughter and enters the mirror world with her daughter.
All of Beth’s friends enter the room and Amanda gets the last laugh!
Moral of this episode: All old people have creepy pasts they really want to relive even though they say they don’t.
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