In Over His Head!
Keeping Tabs Weekly, Fall 2024
Clarence Tinsman of Binghamton, New York, blames college students for what he alleges happened last weekend. Tinsman runs a modest pawn shop called Found and Lost, which has seen its fair share of oddities in the community.
“Friday night, these boys from over at the university come in, grinning and stupid,” he says. “Them with their craft beers and their biology majors, they get cute. So, three of them come flouncing in with a beat-up bowling ball bag. It’s even got the old school logo on it from years ago, when it was still called Harpur College.”
The students, Tinsman notes, were not interested in pawning a bowling ball. In fact, they said they were “turning something in” that they had found in the basement of one of the old biology buildings.
“They were carrying on laughing, saying, ‘This is the lost and found, right?’” Tinsman says. “They put it on the counter and lit out running, took off for the hills. I knew it was a prank then, but this smartphone generation, they aren’t smart enough to remember to stick around to see how the prank plays out.”
Tinsman has seen it all in his forty-five years of owning and operating Found and Lost, and every year, the college students attempt to play a practical joke on him and his business.
“A couple of years back, one fellow brought in a sizable bag of marbles, and then twenty minutes later, a second one come in, saying he’d lost his marbles and wondered if I’d found them,” Tinsman explains. “Another time, every season on the TV show Lost on DVD. I actually made money on that stupidity.”
This year, however, Tinsman was taken aback by what he found inside the bowling ball bag.
“It was a human skull,” he says in disbelief. “Like that Sopranos episode. A real skull.”
He says he called campus security, who said they’d send someone over after the weekend, midday Monday. He was uncomfortable with the delay, but after shelving the bowling bag, he gave it little more thought.
And then things turned dark.
Midnight Caller
In the dead of the night, Tinsman’s automated security system alerted him to an open emergency exit door at his business. He was asleep in his favorite recliner when the phone alarm woke him.
“It’s happened before,” he says. “I didn’t think anything about it. I just threw on some clothes and drove down to the shop.”
When he flipped on the lights, Clarence Tinsman got the shock of his life.
“He was just standing there in the storeroom,” Tinsman says, his voice shaky, unsteady. “I could smell him in the dark, just before I saw him. It was a dirty, musty smell, like an old fireplace. And then when I saw the big pickaxe in his hands, I thought I was about to be murdered.”
Dressed in soot-covered overalls with a barrel chest and sleeves rolled up on leathery gray arms, the figure gripping his pickaxe with two hands was even more terrifying than just a dangerous stranger in the night: the intruder had no head.
“His neck was all burned and blackened,” Tinsman says. “And it all just came to me then: I heard a story years ago about a coal miner’s ghost in Blair Mountain, West Virginia, who haunted the old mine shafts there, always looking for his head. That’s when I knew what was happening.”
Tinsman says the large headless figure turned as Tinsman slid past the nightmare, his back to the wall, until he reached the bowling bag on the shelf.
“He came 600 miles in the darkness to claim this,” Tinsman says, “and I would give it to him if he’d just go back to his grave in the mines.”
But as Tinsman lifted the decrepit skull from the bag and extended it to the headless miner, he was shocked yet again.
“His shoulders slumped. He lowered his pickaxe to his waist. His whole body seemed to sag. Turns out, it wasn’t his head.”
He says the coal miner turned then and disappeared out the emergency exit and into the alley behind the business. When Tinsman screwed up his courage enough to check where the figure had gone, the alley was empty.
“I was scared silly,” he says. “As I was going back inside, I was shaking like the leaves on the trees. And I was just about to close the exit door when I heard a sound in the alley. I thought he was coming back—until I realized the noise sounded like hooves on the concrete. Clip-clop. Like a horse.”
He says he screamed when a giant black horse, its eyes red and nostrils aflare, reared up before the doorway, immense, blocking the streetlamps at either end of the alley, and its spectral rider bent down toward him, revealing an empty collar where his head had once been.
“It wasn’t his either,” Tinsman says.
He adds, “I’m surprised he didn’t get here first.”
Sleepy Hollow, he notes, is 150 miles from his Found and Lost pawn shop, much closer than Blair Mountain, West Virginia.
“Now, I read there’s the ghost of a headless cannoneer in Texas somewhere,” he adds, “but that’s over fifteen hundred miles. I imagine he’ll show up sometime Sunday night.”
When Keeping Tabs Weekly reached out to campus security about this story, the on-duty guard listened and gave serious consideration to what Tinsman had reported to us.
“I think,” the security guard finally said, “his store is too close to the paint shop across the street.”
