Obviously, The Fat Kid’s delicate mental state was brought on by direct contact with the device’s spirit, and miscellaneous other spirits that haunt the chateau, but what about the other BZ associates? Are they immune to the curse? The Shadow came face to face with the BAGD twice on the night he stole that ghost hunter routine off the TV and wandered around with a camera, and he’s perfectly fine, so he must be immune, right? Not necessarily.

When The Shadow opened this investigation into the haunting of Chateau Clintonville, he forgot to answer one of the questions he started with. If it killed itself on the 3rd Avenue Bridge, how did the BAGD’s ghost get to Clintonville? Around the world, many people who absolutely despise us die every day, but there are only a half dozen (to the best of our knowledge) malevolent spirits haunting the chateau. If just anyone who died could waltz into the chateau and break our balls, we would never get another night’s sleep. There must have been some way or reason that the device came. And there are other questions. For instance, the BAGD has been dead for a year and four months, so why is it here now? Where had it been before now? And why did it show up here? I have an idea.

The BAGD was pretty much old news until Decanus Picto called its spirit back from the grave in order to answer some dumb-ass questions about squirrels. It was only after Picto’s séance that the BAGD really returned. As any spiritual medium will tell you, the problem with amateur spiritualism (up to and including the use of Ouija boards), is that once you open the door into this world, and invite a spirit in, it’s in, and it doesn’t leave unless you know how to send it back. Picto being the ultimate amateur in everything – including squirrel worship – gave the BAGD a gateway to this world, brought it back from hell . And once it got here, it ran amuck.

Again, its effect on The Fat Kid is obvious, but it is also causing other issues. For instance, did anyone notice that when it spoke with The Shadow it said that it was here to drive The Fat Kid, Decanus, and The Shadow insane, even though two of the three aren’t here, and haven’t been at least since Picto conducted that séance in Dublin? And as far as we know no one has seen or heard from Decanus at all since the séance. Has he already been driven insane?

And let’s consider The Shadow. Many people here at the BZ offices just assumed he stole our precious Margaret James original, but why would he do that? Attentive readers will recall that this past spring, the only way we were able to get information from The Shadow regarding the hijacking of our site was by threatening to send him to prison – because as everyone knows, The Shadow has had very bad experiences with prison, and hates the idea of going back. Why, then, would he steal from BZ, knowing full well that he was the only person – or whatever he is – who was an inveterate thief with private access to BZ’s collection, and that based on that we could send him to jail? He wouldn’t.

What happened to the Margaret James, I don’t know. Maybe the spirit hid it, and The Shadow fled, fearing he’d get caught. Or maybe it succeeded in making him crazy, and persuaded him to steal it. Maybe it possessed him, and stole the picture in his form. We don’t know. But any way you look at it, the curse of the BAGD seems to be coming to pass not through direct haunting experiences like The Fat Kid had, but in other ways.