Beth, here is a story for your Strange Stories. My son just bought a book called Weird Texas. Of course I'd already heard of a lot of these stories,(Sara Jane road, Saratoga Lights, etc.) but this one was a new one! In Forest Lawn cemetary there is a statue of two lovers people are calling the Kissing Statue. During the light of day, the couple is just standing side by side arms intwined. Now, I haven't tried this, but it is said that if you go there after dark (Not ME!), pull your car around the drive behind the statue, and shine your lights on the couple, they will turn and kiss. Hmmm, anybody brave enough to try it? I'd like to know if it's true! What a neat thing for a couple on a date to go see. Even if it turns out not to be true, it beats going to the submarine races!
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Becky, as you know my son and I wanted to "see" this, so one night, well early one morning 1:30 AM, we loaded up with our cameras and headed to the cemetary... IT WAS DARK! but had no trouble finding the statue, I was driving and my son watching. We drove on around and looked at them. We saw nothing, then he said wait! drive back around, so I did, I turned around and went back the other way and WOW she moved... I said Ok this has to do with the lights and shadows right? The video camera wouldn't show that dark at night, so we take out our 1,000,000 power spot light and drive back around... my son and I both gasped out loud as we saw, his HEAD, not hers turn around and look at us.....I couldn't believe my eyes, so my son , being a big mocho man and not afraid of any thing starts to get out of the van and with the light walks toward the statue, the closer he got the weirder it looked... then we heard a noise, I screamed and he ran back to the van to check on me... once he got in the van I took off.. ( not much scares me either LOL) and when we made the turn away from the statue, something hit my van, we both just looked at each other then I drove out of the cemetary like a bat out of hell! spooky , oh yeah......strange things do happen! But we both want to go back. any one game to go with us, that would be fun, a van load of us! Maybe OCT 31st **LOL**

I belong to a chapter of the Red Hat Society in Port Arthur. In February of this year, one of our dear members passed away. Her funeral service was held in the church. When I arrived at the church, I thought I smelled something burning, and asked the church custodian if he would check it out. He came back and told me he couldn't find anything. The service began and things seemed to go okay at first. There was still a smell of something burning, so one of the men near me went to check it out himself. He hurried back and asked the custodian where the extra fire extinguisher was. I thought to myself, "Now this can't be a good sign." Our pastor then asked everyone to calmly exit through the front and side doors. We had a serious fire. The exit went fine. The pianist even continued playing as we left. (We now call her Titanic Bessie) The firemen came and put out the fire and told our pastor that if there hadn't been a funeral there that day, the church would have surely burned to the ground. Something in the heating unit went wrong and when it turned on, it caught fire. My dear friend went out with a bang and saved our church too!

You would think my story ends there, but there is one more little tidbit. This past Saturday, my Red Hat chapter got together for lunch. It was our late friends birthday, so we decided to drink a toast to her. As we each said a few words about her and clinked our glasses together, we heard someone from the booth behind us giggle. I turned around to see who it was, but there was nobody there! In fact, we were the only ones in that part of the room (or were we?)! We just kind of smiled at each other, each of us knowing in our hearts that she was there with us.

First, the setting: it's 7 o'clock on a cold, late December Saturday morning four years ago. We live in a two-story symmetrical Victorian house, and the house is equipped with a burglar alarm.
Second, the characters: I, Price Bradshaw; my wife, Margaret; our black lab-mix dog, Sadie; and a squirrel, who shall remain nameless to protect the ears and eyes of the innocent among us.
Third, the story, as it actually happened:

I am in the habit of arising early while my wife prefers to sleep in as long as possible, especially on cold mornings. So I was in our computer/craft room at the other end of the house, playing a few games on the computer while Margaret slept. I do not normally turn the alarm system off unless I intend to go downstairs, so it was still on. Within one minute either way of 7 a.m., the house alarm goes off. Perhaps you can imagine what's going through my mind as I start flailing around, trying to get my feet off the desk and my rear end out of the comfortably tilted office chair. Anyway, I finally manage to get all these things done, and stagger to my feet just in time to hear Margaret hollering to ask what was wrong. In the time it took me to get to the bedroom, my head cleared enough to realize that it really couldn't be a burglar because nobody would break into a house in early morning daylight. Therefore, It (and whatever It was, It was now a capital I-t to my mind) was something else.
Bravely I told Margaret to answer the phone when the alarm monitoring people called and to tell them that I was investigating the situation. I returned to the computer/craft room to get my glasses, and as I entered the room, a gray-brown It scampered across the floor. I now knew It was a squirrel. A squirrel inside the house? We had them, off and on, in the attic for years, but how did it get inside the house?

Anyway, we now began a room-by-room sweep of the second floor, and as we verified that It was not in a given room, we shut the doors to that room and moved on. In this manner, we cleared all of the second floor except the stair landing. And It wasn't there. I said, well, maybe It had gone downstairs, so I went down the stairs and turned left into the gentlemen's parlor. There It was! It spotted me coming and dashed past me to head up the stairs again, only to find Margaret stamping her feet and screaming at the top of the stairs, and with me in hot pursuit from the bottom. It weighed Its decision carefully and sprang through the balusters on the side of the stairs to land on the rug in the foyer. I turned back down the stairs, and It barreled into the ladies' parlor and leaped up into the still-standing fully decorated Christmas tree! I could just make It out as It climbed the rest of the way up into the tree. It seemed to have a little trouble doing this, which I thought was curious, but didn't think anything more about it until much later. "Aha!" I thought. "I've got you now!" (What I was going to do with the squirrel once I "had" it had not yet occurred to me.)

But yet once again, the wily creature leaped from the tree on a bee-line for the dining room. Once It reached the end of the dining room, It jumped upon one end of the tables displaying Margaret's Department 56 collection. I could only look on with horror in anticipation of all those ceramic buildings and people crashing to the floor as the squirrel danced his way along. At this point, Margaret shouted from the foyer for me to open a doorand try to get him to run out. So I ran into the wet bar and opened the French doors opening on to our side porch. this awakened Sadie, who yawned, came out of her doghouse and stood in the doorway trying to figure out what was going on. Back to the dining room! The squirrel looked at me again and ran full tilt the whole length of the two Christmas Village tables, dived off the end, came back up the dining room, saw the French door open, with Sadie standing there yawning, and decided to make a dash for freedom. It ran right under Sadie between her front legs and kept going into our side yard. Sadie finally woke up and took off after the squirrel. Having suddenly become extraordinarily quick of mind, I closed the French door. It's gone!

Subsequently, we examined everywhere It had been, and determined that the squirrel had worked Its way into an interior wall from the attic, then managed to gnaw enough wood off the inside of the frame of a pocket door to allow Itself to fall out into the gentlemen's parlor (which is what triggered the alarm). In Its excursion through our Christmas tree, It neither broke nor even knocked off any of the many fragile decorations, and in Its headlong flight across the Christmas Village, It knocked over one (and only one) ceramic figure. Nothing was broken. As we were dismantling the Christmas tree after Epiphany, we found a cardboard spider trap (a tent-like cardboard contraption about four inches long and two and a half inches high containing a sticky substance that our exterminator uses) near the top of the tree in back. I asked Margaret if the exterminator placed it there, and she said no. It was only after examining the small gray hairs stuck in the edge of the trap that I remembered the apparent difficulty the squirrel had in climbing to the top of the tree. Its tail had become stuck to the spider trap and It had leaped into the tree and then climbed the tree with the spider trap attached!
We've always felt that the folks at National Lampoon were following us around with a video camera, and if you've ever seen "Christmas Vacation," you may understand why!