Ghost of Midnight

… about neighbors, community and Front Porch Forum

About this Blog

Posted on Friday, October 27, 2006 by 1 comment

Helping neighbors connect is all the rage.  A growing number of efforts are underway to meet the pent up demand… people are eager for a greater sense of community where they live.

Ghost of Midnight is an online journal about fostering community within neighborhoods, with a special focus on Front Porch Forum. My wife, Valerie, and I founded FPF in 2006 and we’re thrilled with how hundreds of thousands of our members are using it in Vermont (more here).

We’re eager to hear from you, so please comment via this blog or contact us directly.

Michael Wood-Lewis

P.S. People ask about this blog’s name, Ghost of Midnight, so here’s the tale…

As a kid growing up in Indiana, a call would echo down the sidewalk after dinner as the sun was fading “Ghost of Midnight!”  This name brings back a wonderful sense of community within the neighborhood that nurtured me and my siblings. So now it’s the name of this blog.

A couple dozen kids would trickle into our backyard. Some dressed in dark clothing. A kind of tag game where one person would run wildly about while everyone else would try to tackle him, would invariably start among the early arrivals. Once a few more people joined, the game would morph to the inverse, British Bulldog, where a couple kids in the middle of the yard would try to tackle whoever they could as the pack streaked across the grass.  Picture a couple of young lions thinning a herd of bounding gazelles.

Once enough bodies arrived, the main attraction was underway. Everyone would cling to the rusty jungle gym in our backyard, waiting for a couple of the older kids who were “it” to start counting “one o’clock, two o’clock,… 12 o’clock, GHOST OF MIDNIGHT!”

By “Midnight” the other 20 friends had scattered across three yards, each hiding wherever they could. You had to stay within the property lines, and outdoors. The guys who were it would typically round up the littlest kids first. Once tagged, they had to return to base, the jungle gym, to await their fate in the fading light (all outdoor lights had been extinguished).

The fun came as the prisoner count mounted. The first “big kid” tagged set the tone for the game who was going to win? The guys who were “it” would win if they had tagged everyone and sent them all to base at the same time. However, if a free kid ran by and tagged the base and yelled “GHOST OF MIDNIGHT” before getting tagged himself, then all were free.

As a younger kid, I was a student of base strategy. Once caught, the prisoners would form a human chain with one end hanging onto a rope tied to a Jungle Jim cross bar.  The other end of the chain flailed someone’s kid sister yelling in the dark “free us, free us!”

And then… out of the blackness approaching footfalls… yes! And then a second set… oh no!! “Get ready, get ready!”

Some kids were known for self-preservation (they’d streak by and not tag the base if it was too risky to their own status), while a few others were heroes, diving to tag kid sister’s outstretched hand and hollering “GHOST OF MIDNIGHT” just before getting pancaked into the ground by the piling-on pursuer, who inevitably took a few cheap shots.

The base was empty, save the lone hero, grass-stained, sore and smiling, waiting to be rescued (often times, in fact, by the same kid sister who’d circle around in the confusion to liberate her hero).

And the game continued. We’d play as late as our kid-relieved parents would allow. The later, the darker, the better. I could tell stories all day about the finer points of the game… the sidewalk feint, the concealing power of shadows, the perfect hiding spot conundrum, and more.

This was neighborhood.

Well, summer is coming to Vermont maybe it’s time to put out the call to a new generation “Ghost of Midnight!”