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Story of the Month: October

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Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day October Story of the Month

It was a night unlike any other at the haunted disco. At Club Bones, macabre apparitions danced with eerie hobgoblins to songs played fortissimo. A crescendo in the music brought all the ghosts to the dance floor, where they bobbed and weaved to the staccato beats. Attendees danced, chatted, and tumbled into one another in a show of slapstick fun. But the night soon turned from a schmoozing event into a confusing one!

Everything was going great until the tunes started playing pianissimo. Suddenly, the DJ booth ignited in sparks and the music cut out entirely. The whole place was sent topsy-turvy, which altered the mood and brought on a serious malaise. Then the spooky guests discovered that someone had mangled the cables to the DJ booth. The party turned into a whodunit as guests tried to figure out who cut the cables. The pugnacious mummies blamed the zombies for the interruption and noodged them to confess, while the werewolves accused the vampires and vice versa. A trio of witches, who had been performing acupuncture off to the side, threw down their needles and accused the trolls of the crime.

It was starting to look like something gruesome might happen. Then Detective Specter stepped forward. He was a scholar of mystery who derived his skill for remembering ghostly events from the use of mnemonics. He established a theory. He pointed out that none of the haunted guests ate food, so the mice that lived in the walls of the disco were probably very hungry. The mice came out looking for dinner, saw the spaghetti-like cords, and chomped away thinking they were edible. Detective Specter shined a light into the mouse hole to reveal three mice with fat bellies full of speaker wire. Mystery solved!


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