{"id":3805,"date":"2013-10-31T09:00:08","date_gmt":"2013-10-31T14:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.melrosetroop68.org\/blog\/?p=3805"},"modified":"2013-10-30T20:11:48","modified_gmt":"2013-10-31T01:11:48","slug":"read-me-a-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.melrosetroop68.org\/blog\/?p=3805","title":{"rendered":"Read Me A Story"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"books01\"<\/a>The phone call surprised me Saturday night. The disc golf Tri-O was completed and the Boy Scouts of Troop 68 had left my house for their overnight camping trip. I was sitting at home watching television, thinking about going out to the campsite for a little while. The phone call was from from the acting senior patrol leader for the weekend. He was wondering if I would be joining them for supper, and if I would bring the book with the ghost stories. The Scouts wanted to hear a story or two while sitting around the campfire.<\/p>\n

I knew which book to which he was referring. It was a collection of true ghost stories, Haunted Heartland<\/strong>, by Beth Scott and Michael Norman. I had mentioned this book on an outing earlier this year. Since this weekend was the weekend before Halloween I guessed the Scouts were in the mood for a couple stories of the supernatural variety.<\/p>\n

I decided to grab two books when I left the house. In addition to the Haunted Heartland<\/strong> I also grabbed The Grasshopper Trap<\/strong> by Patrick F. McManus which is a collection of humorous stories. I thought it might be best to add a comical story or two between the scary ones since there were a few young new Boy Scouts on the campout.<\/p>\n

The two stories I read from The Grasshopper Trap<\/strong> were Mean Tents<\/em> and First Knife<\/em>. During Mean Tents<\/em> we followed a history of tents used by McManus during his camping activities, including a tent he and a childhood friend made from old gunny sacks. The Boy Scouts got a good laugh from that one. They also chuckled through the story about his First Knife<\/em> that he received from his parents on his eighth birthday.<\/p>\n

The first story from the Haunted Heartland<\/strong> was The Phantom Miner<\/em>, a story about a terrible mining accident that happened on the Minnesota Iron Range, and how one of the victim’s ghost stopped the mine from reopening. The second story was Windego Of The North<\/em>, a tale of a mythical humanoid creature occasionally seen in northern Minnesota. A sighting of the Windego foretold of a death that was soon to follow.<\/p>\n

The Boy Scouts enjoyed the stories but I think I should have only read two, or maybe three at the most. The boys were getting a little antsy by the end of the last story.<\/p>\n

Seven years ago I posted an article to this blog referring to campfire stories as “television of the mind”. Saturday night’s story time once again proved my theory. Even teenagers enjoy hearing a good tale told by fire light.
\nhttps:\/\/www.melrosetroop68.org\/blog\/?p=43<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Both books referred to in this article can be found on Amazon or maybe even at your local book store. Check them out. Your Scouts will enjoy them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The phone call surprised me Saturday night. The disc golf Tri-O was completed and the Boy Scouts of Troop 68 had left my house for their overnight camping trip. I was sitting at home watching television, thinking about going out to the campsite for a little while. The phone call was from from the acting […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,25],"tags":[389,410,151,399],"class_list":["post-3805","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-camping","category-story","tag-campfire","tag-funny","tag-ghost","tag-story"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.melrosetroop68.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3805","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.melrosetroop68.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.melrosetroop68.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.melrosetroop68.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.melrosetroop68.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3805"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.melrosetroop68.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3805\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3808,"href":"https:\/\/www.melrosetroop68.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3805\/revisions\/3808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.melrosetroop68.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3805"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.melrosetroop68.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3805"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.melrosetroop68.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3805"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}