I Lived It: Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Ghost Won’t Stop Haunting Me Because I Made Fun of Her on Twitter for Being Excited About Getting an Orange for Christmas

Some things in life defy explanation. They evade logic and reason, challenge every one of your beliefs until you have to accept the inevitable and give into the unknown. This is what happened to me because Laura Ingalls Wilder simply won’t stop haunting me after I tweeted how dumb it was that she got excited about getting an orange for Christmas.

This all started a couple of weeks ago when I was two Diet Cokes deep and tweeted, “Immediate gratification might not be great but at least we’re not losing our shit like Laura Ingalls Wilder when she’d get an orange for Christmas.”

Pretty dumb, it only got like 5 likes and I didn’t think about the tweet at all until a couple of days later when I’d finished getting ready for bed, walked back to my room and saw the lights were out and a single candle was lit. I didn’t remember lighting the candle and when I tried to switch the lights on again nothing happened, no matter how many times I flipped the switch. So I just sat in bed trying to read by the light of a single candle like some old-timey Masterpiece Classic bullshit and fell asleep. 

After I’d been asleep for maybe a couple of hours, I woke up to what sounded like a piece of wood hitting another piece of wood. I turned to see where the noise was coming from and that’s when I saw her: Laura Ingalls Wilder–churning butter and looking madder than when she slapped Nellie Oleson. Actually, I didn’t know it was her right away and screamed “who are you?!” and she replied, “Laura Ingalls Wilder you brazen, slandering hussy!” through gritted teeth. 

I was stunned. I’d never seen a ghost before and didn’t expect to see the one who wrote all of my least favorite books from my childhood. When I asked her what she wanted, she said nothing and just kept churning. I asked again and she just looked more annoyed and churned faster. When I asked a third time she screamed, “burn the bird telegram!” What the fuck was she talking about? 

Then I remembered–the tweet I wrote about her being excited about getting an orange for Christmas. I told her that I’d get rid of it in the morning and she disappeared. I fell back asleep and woke up the next day and thought I’d just dreamt the whole thing. 

Well, I didn’t delete the tweet and things only got worse. While I was making dinner, a clod of dirt from out of nowhere fell into my pasta and I looked up to see that my wall was covered in sod. Unbelievable. When I sat down to eat, I reached for my phone and instead found a little chalkboard easel. What did she want me to do, practice calculating my sums? 

That night, phoneless and my kitchen covered in dirt, I was looking forward to logging on to Twitter, deleting the dumb tweet and getting my life back to normal. However, when I got to my room, what was once my computer was now a copy of one of her dumbass books, “The Long Winter.” I held one of my candles up to the wall and written in butter were the words, “remove the libel or you may die(bl)” Damn, not great at writing even in the afterlife.

I never thought that I’d have to say this but never underestimate the wrath of a ghost who made a career off of writing extremely detailed historical self-insert fanfic to make white people feel better about the fact that their great-great-great-great-great grandparents committed genocide so that their daughters could get moldy oranges for Christmas. Anyway, I have to walk to a library since my car is now a cow, I guess, so I can log on and delete the tweet that started this nightmare. 

Oh no, I forgot my bonnet!