The hauntings began with the ghost of Anomalocaris. Stalk-borne, compound eyes rose up from the layered steps of the Ogygopsis shale. A three foot spectre of the ancient dead, the fossil yawned and blinked and stretched after more than 490 million years in the buried dark.
Grubman alone was there. He watched its lateral lobes undulate and the ectoplasmic mouth-arms struggle against the walls of time.
Professor Grub lost his tenure trying to prove it; escaped from the asylum at last, tearing his gown on a barbed fence that rose higher than a man should climb.
Afterward there were thefts and break-ins, and just before he was shot with a tranquilizer for the last time, Grubman filmed the wriggling apparition. These were the first true ghosts, the professor asserted, the rest sure to come in time. Daemons, he discovered, ripen in the ground like fossils, finding their full energies only after half a billion years.
We will never live to see the haunting of the dinosaurs, but sleep well knowing the Cardiff Giant and Robin Hood will one day walk again beneath a distended sun and possibly ponder the fate of man.
