The phone rang again just as I was beginning to doze off. This time the call was from Betty Hill, who lived on our road about a quarter-mile west of us. She was mad and her angry message quickly cleared my head of its sleepy stupor. Our horse was tearing up her garden, snorting in her bedroom window and clattering around on her back porch; she announced.

I wasted no time in getting dressed and was still pulling on my trousers when I climbed into the truck. Three minutes later I was at my neighbor’s house, where any sign of a horse was conspicuously absent. A careful search resulted in a complete blank. No horse, no tracks, no mud on the porch, nothing at all.

Betty, who had been waiting for me and came out as soon as I pulled into her driveway, was beside herself. She couldn’t figure out what had happened to the animal. She knew it had to be somewhere. We searched again without luck and she apologized for getting me out of bed. "Must have been dreaming," she said.

"It was probably the ghost again," I suggested, now only half-jokingly. She muttered something about only nuts believing in ghosts and stomped off into the house.

While all of this was going on Wanda had checked the barn. All four horses were there. Always more open to the possibility of paranormal phenomena than I am, she concluded that I was indeed chasing a ghost. Once back inside she considerately fixed another strong dose of 90-proof nerve tonic and had it ready when I walked through the door. The look on my face explained all.

"It’s time we tried a new approach to the problem," she said. By this she meant we might as well acknowledge that we were dealing with a ghost.

Things changed for the better as soon as I accepted the unacceptable. People naturally thought we were crazy for believing in ghosts but our decision certainly made the situation less aggravating. Instead of chasing a phantom I counted noses as the barn whenever a report of a loose palomino came in. I started befriending the creature instead of ducking behind a tree every time I heard it clapping down the road. It didn’t worry us at all that it might be a ghost.

The next time I heard it trotting my way, I called, "Whoa, fellow!" By golly, it did just that. It stopped just like any well-trained animal. I still couldn’t see it but knowing where it was supposed to be, I started to move in that direction. As I did so, I muttered reassuring words such as "There, there, fellow, don’t be nervous. Everything is all right." When I was almost to the spot where the ghost should have been, I heard a horse shuffle about and go back up the road to the east at a comfortable gallop. That was the first time I had heard it reverse its direction but it wasn’t the last.