Thursday Writers Prompt: My Favorite Childhood Game

   It was Christmas, 1969 when Santa Claus left me a Green Ghost Game, like the one this one pictured below.

  The game consisted of the cool glowing board that stood on legs about 4 inches above the floor with black decorative pieces you slid into slots to decorate it. (a spooky house, shipwreck &  tree). It included 1 large ghost spinner, 12 mini ghosts, 4 player pieces, 3 trap doors and keys to open those doors plus 3 card board box "pits" that fit under the doors that held "creepy" things. (feathers, plastic sticks and length rubber band's which represented "batwings" "bones" and "snakes" respectively.)

To play, the game board, spinner and mini-ghosts had to sit out in the light several hours.
Then, in a dark room, you'd set it up, dividing the 12 mini-ghosts between the 3 boxes, putting the boxes under the doors & distributing the keys among the 4 players. 
The large ghost spinner clicked over a metal tab when you spun it for a "creepy sound" and you moved the number of spaces it's finger pointed to.
Three of the keys actually had a shape that fit one of the pit doors and the 4th key was a trick dud that didn't open anything. The object of the game was to collect the most mini-ghosts and the squares you landed on dictated whether you had could trade keys or could open a pit to try and collect a ghost. Eventually the boxes had fewer and fewer mini-ghosts.
 The trick dud key was just a way of keeping a player from opening a pit and you never knew who had it or when you might end up with it.
The game ended and winner was declared once all the mini-ghosts were arranged around the base of the larger spinner ghost.

I loved this game and I remember we played it fairly often. Anytime one of us had a friend over-night, out it came and sometimes my sisters and I would play it just for fun ourselves. I think we played Green Ghost from time to time all the way through my high school years  until I graduated and went off to the Air Force. At that time, my Mother put my Green Ghost game away and didn't allow my sisters to play with it. In fact, all my belongings they might have wanted to play with, she put away out of their reach, much to their frustration.

Then eventually, after military service, college and marriage, I took that Green Ghost Game with me. It was still perfectly intact in the original box and it lived under my bed for years and years. It no longer could hold a glow, but it was childhood memento I could not let go. I clung to a hope I might perhaps be able to pass it on to one of my sister's children, but that just didn't seem to be a thing any of them were interested in. I also considered trying to sell it, but I despise messing around with mailing anything, anywhere and there's tons of Green Ghost games online even now.

So it continued residing under my bed--actually until 2021, when I finally, reluctantly, took it to a local Thrift Store, saying goodbye to that wisp of childhood.