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#ppl who actually clean and tend to the graves for money and idk i just think that might appeal to me
aro-aizawa · 3 years
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nnnnnnnnnot gonna lie i always feel slightly off balance when i think “oh that’s something i think i might be able to do as a job!” bc on one hand, yes! finally! but on the other hand i’m super noncommittal and i really don’t want to say that i’m interested in something, someone take me at my word and think that’s now my lifes goal when it’s smth that i’m only thinking i could do at that moment. i might change my mind or it’ll lose its appeal after a little while.
#shut up danni#anyway i just thought of smth i could do bc i've been thinking it in the back of my mind for like. years.#but never really did any googling for until now??#anyways one thing that i've always wondered is that i love walking through graveyards#it's always serene and i like taking a moment to think about the departed there and paying respects to their life#even if they're not anyone that i know they're still human and deserve respect in their final resting place even after decades have passed#anyways there's this old church on my road and i walk past its graveyard nearly every single time i take the bus or walk anywhere#and i've always been sad at how...weathered and damaged the gravestones have been#so i idly looked into what it would take to clean it and i found out that there are professionals for that!#ppl who actually clean and tend to the graves for money and idk i just think that might appeal to me???#bc i like cleaning things it's satisfying to me if i can get it pristine its just the motivation for it#so learning how to do that might be smth that i could do??? becoming a professional grave repair person#i've always had a bit of a weird relationship w death and the whole. thing. around death? so this could be for me#like yeah its a bit morbid and almost ripped from a goth kid's dreams but maybe it'll be smth i'll look into#no CLUE how i'd go about it#i did email that church tho and ask if there was any upkeep on the graves#bc idk might try and clean up a few of the graves there myself if they let me#some look like they could just do w a bit of polish and attention#but also like. completely unironically i'm#also laughing bc i LOVED danny phantom and the aesthetics of ghosts growing up so.#me thinking abt professionally cleaning graves? HA
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victoria pedretti, she/her, cis female ✧*:・゚did you see josephine “jo” walker the twenty-seven (104) year old ghost walking around halloweentown? they’re known as the romantic, makes sense since they tend be quite sentimental & mystical. they work as a florist & (failed) poet and spend a lot of time at halloweentown cemetery listening to what are you doing new year’s eve? by ella fitzgerald. they’ve always reminded me of new flowers on a decaying gravestone, a fallen chandelier in the middle of a mansion. wonder how they’re taking all the disruption in the town. ( may, 19, she/her, est )
triggers: death (she is a ghost), (mass?) murder, suicide
disclaimer: i’m bad at math and figuring out years and ages required a lot more math than i was ready for, so i’m hoping i get my timeline right ! pray for me !
born in 1915 (march 5, 1915 to be more exact - gotta get that chart), josephine’s family (the ‘nickname’ didn’t come in until later) came from generations of money earned and establishment garnered. also i have no clue what i just wrote i’m writing this first bullet last asdfhjl
when she was six, she had her first encounter with the dead or dying. she’d come across a baby bird who’d been pushed out of his nest too early and, unable to find the nest itself, decided she would pick it up and cradle it in her hands until it evidently passed on. it looked at peace. 
this is unnecessary information, but it’s good to note.
anyway, if you have the money, why not spend it? when josephine was seven, the walkers moved into a victorian mansion. the patriarch was fully under the belief that he would be the next nathaniel hawthorne –– he wasn’t worried about the family going broke while he forced them to let him focus on his writing, what considering all of the money they had at the time had been simple inheritance from generations of walkers.
(kind of important to note that the victorian era was actually... pretty recent? it ended in 1901 and this is all going down in 1922 so!)
within the mansion, they also has some much needed help –– it came with two butlers, two nannies, two maids, and two groundskeepers. they seldom had any use for the nannies.
there was definitely something off, though, and that ‘off’-ness just kept increasing over time. her mother claimed to hear things. she and her siblings claimed to see things. her father began retreating into himself... 
which is why they couldn’t move! he still had work to be done! a great novel doesn’t write itself in one year, silly! they couldn’t leave! he still needed advice!
i don’t want this intro to get super long so we’ll skip ahead about a year. suffice it to say that everyone was still on their bullshit. 
in 1925, when josephine and her twin brother were 10, her older sister was 12, and her older brother was 14, her dad full-on “heeeere’s JOHNNY”d them, then killed himself.
josephine and her twin brother (who’ll just be referred to as ‘her brother’ from this point forward) were the lone survivors of the walker family. as 10y/os, they both still fit in plenty of places that their father could never.
that being said, one of the maids had also made it unscathed. an agreement was made: they helped clean up the mess – she just couldn’t handle messes! – she would act as their guardian. josephine knew they were probably doing something wrong by cleaning it all up – cleaning up a whole-ass crime scene that included their family members – before any authorities arrived, but was she in too much shock to argue? maybe so.
after that, there were zero buyers. it was already expensive, but now there’d been a mass murder? who. 
considering the maid never left the grounds, this did put her out of work. they still had the walker inheritance to fall back on, something that had been unlocked to josephine and her brother five years later, but that was it.
we’re gonna skip ahead a little bit because this is getting long. all that’s happened of note between now and the next bullet: the maid literally never left the grounds. jo began getting called jo. she tried to go to college using some of the inheritance then dropped out. she trained to become a florist.
throughout the next many years of her life, jo began trying her hand at poetry. she ultimately failed at it, but... some people just really don’t know how to market themselves. even past attempting to truly become one, she continued writing in the hope that she might finally –– after over ten years –– make peace with the massacre.
by the time she was 25, she’d gotten married. by the time she was 25, she’d pushed everything to the back-burner. by the time she was 25, she hadn’t seen or thought of the maid in years. by the time she was 25, she was discussing starting a life with her new husband.
by the tail end of her life at 25, her brother had died.
because this is a wanted connection on the main, i’m going to leave the cause unclear.
just when she thought she’d gotten over everything, as emeril would say, ‘bam!’
her husband and friends tried to be of help, but it got to the ‘beyond’ point when she started seeing her brother
another note: on the wanted connection blurb, i made it utp whether he was ~haunting~ her or if she was just hallucinating, so we also gonna make that unclear!
two years, a divorce, and multiple burned bridges later –– jo thought she finally knew what had to be done to get it to stop. she had ‘rationalized’ it as best as she could. in a lot of lore, ghosts couldn’t move on to the next plane of existence until they’d made peace with something or other. maybe there was something integral about her?
so she greeted the maid who hadn’t aged a day in the past 27 years, then proceeded to hang herself.
 this would be kind of bittersweet tragic if it’d actually worked.
 instead, this bitch was suddenly just looking at her own body like “FUCK. I REALLY DID THAT FOR NOTHING.” and gained this sick scar that wrung around her neck like the noose had.
the maid was like “i mean ur never gonna have to worry about aging now tho so??”
as it turned out, they were just in the middle of plenty of families who’d gone mad and died in that house... as she had only figured out after she killed herself.
boy, was she mad!
all of this partial humor out of the way, for the next decades upon decades, she was at a loss. the maid said that, yes, she was physically capable of leaving, but why would she when it felt so magnetic anyway?
with this in mind... jo left. it took an extremely long time to understand how to turn visible, and then even longer to understand how to turn invisible again. apparently she didn’t need doors – like, that was new.
anyway. once she had gained an understanding of what she could and could not do (rest in peace, salt), she began just... doing everything she’d been doing while she was alive... over and over again...
every morning, she made bouquets that she wasn’t paid for. every afternoon, she visited the cemetery to lay them on the most derelict graves. every night, she went back to the mansion.
did she need to find a purpose in her ‘life’ in order to move on? was there something she needed to make peace with? or was she doomed to ‘live’ forever, doing the same things, feeling trapped by the same place?
and that, my friends, is where we leave off.
personality, we’re just going to use various tests/ideas: i knew she was a pisces, kae said she sounded like a scorpio moon – so pisces sun, scorpio moon, capricorn rising (i have a birth chart now) ; total and complete enneagram type 4 ; i honestly don’t use mbti that much anymore but probs infp ; i’m undecided between hufflepuff and gryffindor... then again, i never read the books i just know she isn’t a slytherin and ppl always forget about ravenclaw ; i think melancholic? possibly phlegmatic? j definitely not choleric or sanguine
my mind! it’s so powerful!
connection ideas:
twin brother wc is on the main !
her ex-husband... but make him some immortal or undead being that, therefore, would still be alive.
other writers she’s met through the years, be they in ‘recent’ years ( any time after 1942 adhsjfl ) or in what she’d consider to be ‘her’ years.
idk just. friends. some pretty loose stuff!
any type of connection can be w/ any gender btw!
i’m. not great at wcs, but i’ll keep them coming!
i’m also so open to brainstorming or checking yours out!
like this or hmu to plot !
*my discord is also @ john donne’s whore#5590 if you prefer discord! psa that it literally won’t let me use the mobile version tho which makes plotting there! harder!
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