This could be a bad night to be Donald Trump

It’s Friday the 13th … do you believe in ghosts?

It’s not widely discussed. Those who have witnessed it firsthand are, for obvious reasons, reluctant to talk about it. You’ll never see them publicly recounting their tales in front of the cameras and the microphones. These aren’t stories they are eager to tell.

But one hears whispers, rumors, stories told by the friends of friends. And those whispers, rumors and stories are too numerous and too eerily similar to be dismissed.

Something is happening. Something, it seems, happens every Friday the 13th, just before midnight.

The stories begin right around the turn of the 20th century, with the earliest reference I can find coming from August of 1897. …

What I’ve pieced together from all these stories sounds unbelievable, and I certainly cannot prove any of it. But there are more things in heaven and earth than I can prove.

All I can tell you is what I believe. And what I believe is this: Somewhere in America, just before midnight on every Friday the 13th, the ghost of Frederick Douglass appears at the bedside of some racist wretch.

It happened to Henry Billings Brown, and to D.L. Griffith, George Wallace, and Ty Cobb. Byron de la Beckwith barely survived the encounter. We have no way of knowing who could be next. The spirit moveth whithersoever it will.

But there is a long list of Americans who might want to take a cue tonight from the rumored ritual of media mogul Roger Ailes. Every Friday the 13th, it is said, he gets a bottle of 12-year-old Scotch and joins a group of friends for an all-night poker game. “It’s the weekend,” he likes to say, “We don’t need to sleep tonight.” And then, his forced laughter trailing off, “I’m not sleeping tonight. Mustn’t sleep. That’s when he finds you …”