Belated author's note:

Strangely Enough

The story about the whistling that Ethel tells was an embellishment on my vague recollection of what i remembered as an urban legend that i read when i was a kid. Since then i eventually tracked down the story, " The Whistle ,” by C.B. Colby , which was first printed in the collection, (Scholastic, 1963) a book which was itself compiled of allegedly true stories originally published in C. B. Colby's newspaper column “Adventure Today,” which itself may have been sourced from a radio program in which people called in with ghost stories. I have no idea if it's an urban legend or not, basically, but Colby's (re)telling of the story is where i got the idea from.