Mineral spirits

Source
In honor of Halloween fast approaching I'm going to start posting some of the more macabre stuff I've found over the years.

Gilliam Sykes O'Dell had a terrible time with his house which was one time reported to be the most haunted house in American history. His parents died a horrible death in their home when a local teenaged boy murdered them. It turned out he'd once had a crush on O'Dell's mother, a former high school teacher. After killing Gilliam's parents, the teenager killed himself. This happened just after Gilliam graduated from Purdue University in northern Indiana. Shocked and distressed, the young man became a shut-in at his home. "It was like everything changed. The air in the house was different then I started to hear the voices..." A frightened Gilliam told a local newspaper reporter years later.

Gilliam tried to ignore the problem and as a chemistry student set up a laboratory in his basement. His parents death left him not only with pain but a fortune as well. Gilliam never needed to work a day in his life. This left him lots of time to get acquainted with the ghosts who kept him company. Occasionally, he heard his mothers gentle humming from her rocking chair. At other times, he felt the comforting hand of his father on his shoulder. Then there were times that Gilliam felt chilled to the bone. He feared for his life most of the time. Often he would wake up in the middle of the night and find a kitchen knife balancing above his head on the headboard. He also found himself unable to breathe as though someone were choking him. Surely, this was the work of the teenager.

Gilliam had had enough. He contacted a scientist back at his university who he knew was interested in the paranormal. The man instructed him to study the ghosts and suggested that he come up with a concoction to keep the ghosts at bay. Believing that there was an element that could push lost souls towards the other side, he insisted that Gilliam look towards chemistry to find the answer. After burning his eyelashes off and working for weeks in solitude, Gilliam came up from his basement with a special concoction he dubbed: Ghost Tonic. He felt he'd found his miracle potion and recalls when he splashed it on the walls, the paint would fade and run, often in the shape of the phantoms he'd seen. Maybe just because of his delirium, or maybe from the fumes, it seemed to make sense to him. He insisted to those around him that the smell of the tonic when it made contact with a surface was the smell of "Dead Ghost."

Gilliam ended up selling his concoction to another wealthy classmate who made his fortune selling paint and giving away a bottle of the "Ghost Tonic" or Paint Thinner as it came to be called, with every purchase.