MYTH
OF THE HAINT
OF HERE:

- AN APPARITION FOR THE AGES -

Haint nuthin' but a ghost thang, baby!

You may think I'm lying, but it's true. This isn't just some flight of fancy about some girl. I haven't been freely frolicking in fertile fields of imagination, much to my dismay. First things first, though…haint is a Southern United States English vernacular variant of the noun haunt and is used specifically to describe a spirit (ghost) that is typically believed to haunt a particular place and repeat certain actions over and over.

Therefore, I come before you today with a tale of an apparition that lingers amongst the nodes. (I wish I could regale her as that would make for a much better read.) I'm not talking about our authors passed and their legacies. Nor am I referencing such normal and mundane things as dead links or empty titles. I'm not even going to mention abandoned drafts or the passing thoughts of a write-up that should be. Oh, no. Instead, I bring to you a tale, possibly, of a little girl that has been dead for a hundred years, or at least one of a little girl lost.

There was a little girl that appeared to me one day while using the search function. How odd, I thought, as there were two very similarly worded titles. This, of course, is not unusual 'round here. (As a for instance, compare Little Girl Lost and A Little Girl Lost. Or even the usual and the usual? 'Nuff said.) So, as I am want to do, I clicked upon the shorter title. Much to my surprise, doing so resulted in me returning to the search results page but with slightly different results. Thinking this was but a glitch* and not merely a quick blessing from Knig of Tyops, I repeated the action with the same outcome. Are you lost, little girl?, I wondered, or am I? Where to little girl, where to…? More research was needed, and research I did and did it independently. No ghost hunters for me. No consultations with The International Society for Paranormal Research, as I knew she existed and could prove it. A-ha! Epiphany! Witnesses! I shall write about her for LieQuest 2024: A Lie Quest of Mythologically Discordian Proportions and show her to everyone! And so I am, avoiding repeating an incident illustrating the dangers of reckless paranormal experimentation. So far, so good anyways.

Who is she? I hear someone ask. Show us! Show us! Show us! echoes around and around. We want to see, the throng throws into the discussion. Well, to make a long story short and it's probably already too late, to find her, just search for the little red-haired girl and not the little red-haired girl, and definitely not Lucille Ball, Carol Burnett, or Ann-Margret. Click on that first one and it will take one to a search results page. Scroll down, she likes to hide. Eventually, she'll show, our little red-headed girl. Click on her again and you'll wind up on a search results page where her phantom is at the top, and she'll be immediately below. Click either one, and you'll end up in the same place. Her phantom first, and her second, over and over and over again. You've found her, the haint of here. You can see her, but you can never get to her, for she is an apparition, a ghost, the haint of here.

As there is no existing mythology to provide the true reason she is here, I prefer to believe she is a user lost in the nodegel, somewhere where the ectoplasm is thick, where extreme emotional distress intersected with cathartic emotional release. And to all the detractors, disbelievers, naysayers, and nattering nabobs of negativism who say, It's just something awry in the node forward, and be that as it may or main't, I say it ain't so. I believe her to be a ghost, and that's a better story now, isn't it? (Even the link view shows that little red-haired girl doesn't exist.) But I, for one, know the little red-headed girl exists and hope she continues to do so and doesn't get exorcised by a passing editor, god, or ordained cleric. I mean, she isn't hurting anything, much less everything.

*I knew it wasn't a bug for bugs go to JayBonci, not I.

Classical Mythology: Sources:
Bulfinch's Mythology
Dictionary of Classical Mythology
The Meridian Handbook of Classical Mythology
Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology
(not used for this article)