The Haunted Yogurt of Wüd Grane

I had always regarded yogurt as a safe foodstuff—perhaps not as reliable as your standard whole milk or cheddar, but certainly more innocuous than an exotic cheese. If you eat something called a ghost pepper, you might reasonably expect something spooky to happen, but I hadn’t ever encountered a yogurt named after the grim reaper or a disembodied spirit.

That changed when I met the haunted yogurt of Wüd Grane.

It was an ordinary December evening. In characteristic fashion, my three-year-old son Liam solicited food, so I gave him a yogurt in the living room. I then left him alone for a few minutes to wash the single-father mountain of dishes in the kitchen.

Before I was finished, his older sister implored me to return to the living room to witness the mess he had made. I begrudgingly laid my sponge to rest, purged my irritable “grr” with some deep breaths, and walked back into the living room. What I saw was startling and intriguing.

I’m honestly not the “I saw Jesus in a piece of burnt toast” kind of guy, but I did notice a definite face in the yogurt smudged on my coffee table. My irritation disappeared and was replaced by fascination. Who was this strange beak-nosed spirit, and why was my son channeling them?

I asked Liam why he spread yogurt on the table, and he gave me an incomprehensible toddler answer. My daughter and I laughed, and had some fun joking about who the responsible ghost might be. I thought the incident was of trivial importance, so we had a laugh and went to bed.

That night, I had a dream so vivid that I woke up at 3 a.m. and journaled it for hours. I am now unable to share the contents of the dream for national security reasons, but it was extremely disturbing and occupied my mind for many days. It involved the beak-nosed yogurt face that I saw on the wood table.

I decided to share a photograph of Liam’s yogurt spirit with his mother, along with the contents of my dream. I expected a sassy scoff and laugh. She is, verifiably, a self-proclaimed skeptic. I was surprised when she was slightly more rabbity about it than usual. She did not scold me for being a gullible stooge, but instead stoked my interest further. I enjoyed our banter about the strange yogurt spirit, and let the topic ebb.

I only later realized that we were discussing a sensitive subject on an unsecured channel. How was I, a lowly Cleveland lowlife, to know that spiritual contact interests the federal government? The X-files is just a TV show for God’s sake!

I was soon contacted by federal authorities. Alphabet soup frustrates me, so suffice it to say that I was quickly being pursued by numerous unintelligence agencies, including the famous ones like the See Eye Yay and the Dee Eye Yay.

They asked me to describe the experience in detail, usually with all sorts of electrodes hooked up to my brain. My skepticism was conquered. Even incompetent bureaucrats wouldn’t spend so much money on my silly haunted yogurt if there wasn’t a good reason. I can’t divulge most of what we discussed, but I believe there are enough public clues to relate the general idea.

Corporate America seems to be inextricably tied to supernatural influences. Since his name is declassified in a public brand, I believe I can share that there is a Chief Yogurt Daemon named Dan, a French dude who enjoys saying no and playing cold mind games. If you’re a supermarket shopper, you know that the prime yogurt brands are Dan-non and Yo-Play. These are winks from the upper crust to the knowers down below.

My awe was ascendant when our professional government operatives began casually discussing the spiritual behavior of corporate yogurt. They assured me that standard corporate yogurt is not supposed to behave that way—that my cup of yogurt must have gone rogue. I asked if they were talking about “rogue-urt”, and I got a very unamused glare from several over-serious federal flunkies. In a more diplomatic tone, I admitted that it was Walmart store brand yogurt, which is perhaps subject to less stringent quality control standards. By that point, I had damaged our rapport so much that I didn’t have a chance to inquire as to whether greek yogurt might behave differently. One assumes that the gods of Olympus and the gods of the Franks might value different yogurty qualities.

To recap, our government essentially admitted to me that our businesses advertise spiritual involvement in our common foodstuffs. So the next time you put yogurt on a spoon, don’t be surprised if you hear an audible “yo”. And if you react negatively, you might hear an audible “grr”. Apparently, the name of the food means something.