“Who’s got my Golden Arm?!”
This is, to my recollection, my earliest encounter with a ghost story, antedating my ongoing, abusive, unhealthy love affair with horror (for those keeping score, I’m the henpecked, downtrodden party in this particular relationship). It’s not the clearest memory, I was only five-years-old, but it’s less opaque than other memories from that age.
“Who’s got my Golden Arm?!”
My kindergarten teacher’s name was Mrs. Nina and one day she decided to introduce the class to a classic, chimeric spirit. If I am to relay this accurately, I must confess to not remembering much of the story, but here’s the briefest of synopses:
A man has a friend who has a prosthetic arm made of solid gold. Friend dies and the man decides to disinter his friend, remove the 24-karat limb from the corpse and sell it for money. The friend takes offense, crawls out of his grave, hunts down his buddy and then…
Well, you could Google “Golden Arm” and find a number of variations to this slice of folklore. Some give you a formal, Victorian rendition; others give you the chitlin’ circuit interpretation. Its central characters are alternatively friends, brothers, or man and wife.
In most portrayals the returned friend/brother/wife stalks through the thief’s house, crying out repeatedly, “Who’s Got my Golden Arm?!” until finally they happen upon the terrified thief, cowering in his bedroom, and then the ghost screams “You’ve Got it!!!” That’s where the story abruptly ends, but it’s intimated that some grievous demise awaits the one who stole the arm. I’m sure that the ghost didn’t just say “You’ve got it! And I just want you to know that it’s not cool man. Stealing my golden arm: not, cool! I’m gonna go re-bury myself, but I just want to let you know that I am seriously, seriously reconsidering our relationship right now, bro.”
It wasn’t the vengeful spirit’s return from death that disturbed me most. It’s that he had a golden arm in the first place. You’re meant to sympathize with the dead person’s plight, but the surrealistic, abominable image of this character stands frozen in my mind, unchanged in the 20+ years since I first heard the description. Actually there’s not much description in the story, but I managed to chart the unexplored areas and mapped out a loathsome figure. One with jaundiced, spoiled eyes and skin the color of the ocean at night.
This was a bad person, the man with the golden arm. A burgeoning lunatic with a combustible temperament, hoping that someone will steal his precious arm just so he’ll have a reason to terrorize them. Today I can apply some semblance of logic to the conclusion I’d drawn as a kid; a golden arm would be terribly heavy and cumbersome, and only a troubled mind would dream of grafting such a gaudy, useless artificiality to their body. In short, you’d have to be crazy to want a golden arm, and not the good, comedic kind of crazy, or the tolerable, fearless-when-it’s-not-necessary kind of crazy, but the seething, malignant kind.
That special brand of crazy potent enough to wake the dead.
February 27, 2009 at 8:17 pm
Holy crap. My aunt could tell ‘The Golden Arm’ so as I’d near pee my pants every time, no matter how I tried to prepare myself with the peptalk of how I already knew what was going to happen.