True Ghost Stories and Hauntings 3

by Simon Murik

  “There’s nothing over there, Becca,” I said.

  “He’s inside. You have to go inside to see him,” she said.

  “Becca—”

  “I swear! He’s in there!” she cried.

  “OK, OK,” I said and walked to the closet. I shivered the instant I stepped inside. It was like walking into a mid-January night. “Becca, you know how cold it is in here?”

  “Uh huh,” she said.

  I looked over the clothes and behind the racks. No one was in there. I walked out of the closet and took her hand. “Come on. It’s time for dinner,” I said, leading her out of the room.

  Dinner went by without any of the usual Zack antics and an hour after we finished my parents left for the movie.

  We watched through the living room window as my dad’s truck drove down the fifty-foot dirt driveway and onto the side road that would take my parents into town. When the truck vanished in the distance, Zack punched my shoulder. I looked at him and he dangled the loft key in my face.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  The three of us went outside. The stars in the purple-black sky seemed extra bright tonight and we walked up to the barn.

  “OK, you two ready?” Zack asked as he took the door handle.

  “Yeah,” me and Becca said at the same time.

  Zack pulled the door open and I prepared for the weird smell from before but there wasn’t any. Zack shined his flashlight over the barn and it looked just like it always did. He set the light on the door to the loft. “Come on,” he said.

  Becca and I followed him to the ladder and we stared up at the door.

  “OK, Braylan, go on up there and open it,” Zack said.

  “Why do I have to open it?” I asked.

  “Because I’m the one who got the key out of Mom and Dad’s room,” he said.

  So much for brave big brother.

  “OK, give it to me,” I said.

  Zack handed me the key. I climbed up the ladder, put the key into the fist-sized silver padlock, and turned it. The lock snapped open and I pushed the door upwards. The loft was pitch black and I held my flashlight up. What looked like an old bronze foot locker sat about five feet away from me on the wooden floor. I climbed through the opening, walked up to the locker, and knelt down.

  “What do you see up there?” Becca called out.

  I ignored her and studied the locker. There were three metal latches holding the lid down and I flipped them open. Taking a deep breath I lifted the lid. A tightly wrapped scroll sat by itself in the locker. I took the scroll out, unwrapped it, and began to read.

  I, Jeremiah Colton, and what remains of my band of fighting Rebels claimed this land when we took our revenge on the six Union soldiers who fled to this barn after setting the Mason farm on fire in southern territory. We followed these northern ravagers to this place and ambushed them in the dead of night, killing them all with our Enfeld Rifles and burying their bodies beneath this very spot. We will be gone in the morning, but I leave this message behind to let those who follow us know that the south did, in fact, conquer northern territory.

  I rolled the scroll up, set it back in the locker, and closed it.

  “What’s going on up there?” Zack snapped.

  I went back to the ladder and climbed down it.

  “It’s haunted,” I said.

  “What’s haunted?” Zack asked.

  “The barn, the house, the whole damn farm,” I said, rubbing my arms. It’d suddenly gotten really cold.

  “Bullshit. I’m going up there,” Zack said. He started to climb up and the loft door slammed shut. Becca grabbed my wrist as the smell of death returned.

  “Ugh!” Zack yelled, jumping off the ladder. The ladder started to vibrate like a big wooden tuning fork and a thunderous moan came from the dirt floor. Becca’s short nails dug into my skin and I moved towards the door.

  “Come on, we’re getting out of here,” I said. Zack stumbled to my side and the three of us hurried to the rattling barn door. The moans got louder and the powerful smell of blood, gunpowder, and even a trace of burnt flesh caused me to hold my breath.

  I reached the door and swung it open.

  The cool night air was a blast of fresh oxygen after the stench of the barn and I stumbled outside. I went about twenty feet to the edge of the driveway and stopped, resting my hands on my hips as I breathed deeply. Zack lumbered a few feet ahead and fell to the grass while Becca stood next to me silently wiping her eyes.

  A set of bright yellow headlights glowed in the corner of my eye. I looked down the driveway. My parents were home.

  My dad’s truck stopped in front of the house and the headlights went off. They got out of the truck and walked up to us.

  “Hey, kids,” my mom said. “You’ll never believe who we ran into in town!”

  None of us said anything.

  “It was Mr. Waters from the farm down the road. He told us that this barn was once a hiding spot for some Union soldiers and that there was some kind of fight here with some Confederates once! Isn’t that neat?”

  I looked over at Zack and Becca. Their faces were blank and exhausted and I imagined that mine was as well. A few coyotes howled across the pumpkin field and we just stared at each other in the dark October night.

  The back of the gray-stone mansion stretched a good fifty yards end to end. It had been vacant now for almost eight years and this was the first time that my brother Shaw and I had dared to get this close. But it was the middle of Christmas break, a foot of fresh snow had fallen last night, and on a boring Wednesday afternoon we were looking for stuff to do.

  “Do you think he can see us?” Shaw asked.

  “There’s no ghost, Shaw,” I said. I stepped off the half-mile long path that ran between the woods and connected the mansion’s football-field-sized property to our subdivision. Shaw and I might have been twins but he was a way more gullible eleven-year-old than I was. “It’s just a story people made up to keep kids off the property.” I walked onto the mansion’s arctic like backyard and I heard Shaw’s boots crunching through the snow behind me. When we got to around the center point, I stopped and looked around. We were about forty yards from the path and maybe another forty from the mansion. “This is good,” I said. “We can build it here.”

  “OK,” Shaw said, scooping up a pile of snow in his gloves. “Let’s rock.”

  I kicked some snow into a little pile and we began to create our fort.

  For the next hour we packed together the snow walls and then built an igloo-like roof. Some flurries had fallen during that time but nothing heavy, and the cold, dry air had started to make my eyes water a bit.

  “Did you ever hear the one about the Thompson kid?” Shaw asked as he smoothed out the side of the fort’s entrance.

  “Yeah. Ghost boy touches Jeffrey Thompson’s arm and Jeffrey spends the next year in the hospital with bone cancer; he recovers and then gets killed in a car accident the following year,” I said as I packed more snow on the roof.

  “I’ve heard five or six stories like that, Max. Everyone who gets touched dies or has really bad things happen to them for the rest of their life.”

  “It’s a joke, Shaw. Stupid stories adults make up.” I stopped working on the fort and looked over the mansion. “I mean, look at this place. It’s got to be worth millions and it still hasn’t been sold. They don’t want kids messing with it so they say that the family’s kid died when he was ten and now haunts the place. Also, notice how part of the story is that the ghost won’t leave the property—that it stops at the trailhead? That’s pretty convenient.”

  Shaw didn’t say anything but the wind kicked up and heavier snow started to fall.

  I walked to the entrance of the fort, knelt down, and peeked in. “Nice. Looks good in there. We can even go get Stan and Todd and they can build a fort and we can get a good snowball fight going.”

  Big snowflakes blew past my face and I looked up. The snow had started falling hard and the wind
had picked up so much I had to take a wide stance to brace myself. Shaw came up next to me, “It’s another blizzard. Maybe we should get back before the snow gets too heavy.”

  “Well, we’ve got the fort,” I said.

  “Yeah, but this thing is heavy. Really heavy. I don’t want to get trapped out here.”

  The wind and the snow kicked up even harder and everything was a blur of white and gray. I held out my arm and could barely see the thick black glove on my hand. I looked towards the mansion but all I saw was the blizzard.

  “Max,” Shaw said in a flat voice.

  “What?”

  “Look straight ahead.”

  Through the blowing snow I barely made out a shadowy boy standing about twenty feet away from us. He didn’t seem to have any features and I couldn’t tell if he was even wearing clothes. He was like a gray, featureless pencil sketch of a ten-year-old.

  “Jesus, it’s him” Shaw whispered.

  “Maybe we should get out of here,” I said. I looked at the woods but the snow whipped around us so fast and thick that I doubted we’d even come close to finding the trailhead. I looked back at the boy.

  He was gone.

  “Look,” I said, “if we try to get back to the trail right now we’ll probably get lost and we might not even be able to make it back to the fort.”

  “So what do we do?” Shaw asked, his voice almost a whisper.

  “We’re going to go into the fort, pack the entrance with snow, and wait this thing out.”

  “But what if he comes in?”

  “We’ll just have to take the chance that he can’t—maybe he won’t even be able to find it. Now come on, you crawl in first.”

  Shaw dropped to his knees and crawled in the fort. I peered hard into the storm and caught a glimpse of the side of the boy gliding through the blizzard about ten feet away. I hit the ground and crawled inside.

  The instant after I made it through the opening, Shaw started blocking it with snow. The two of us packed the snow up until there was just a sliver of space for us to peek through.

  “Good job,” I said quietly. “Now we wait and see what happens.”

  I crawled to the wall of the fort and sat with my back against it. Shaw did the same thing on the opposite side and we waited there quietly as the wind howled outside. After about twenty minutes I crawled over to the blocked entrance and looked through the opening. Nothing but blizzard.

  I went back to where I’d been sitting, and after a few minutes I heard a light scraping sound against the roof—almost like a very soft, very weak pair of hands were digging into it. Shaw heard it too and he looked up. We stared at the ceiling, the noise got faster, and a second later a few bits of snow fell onto my face.

  I crawled back to the entrance and peeked out. The blizzard had thinned out a bit and I thought I could see the open spot in the woods where the trailhead should be. Motioning to Shaw to come over, I pointed to the space in the woods and he nodded.

  “At the count of three,” I mouthed.

  Shaw nodded slightly and I held up one finger, then two, and on the third one I kicked through the snow and scrambled out of the fort. I didn’t look back but I could hear Shaw right behind me as I plowed through the thigh deep snow towards the trail.

  “He’s coming!” Shaw yelled.

  I looked back and saw the gray boy floating after us with his arms out and his wispy hands wide open.

  “Just keep running!” I shouted back over the wind.

  The trail was only another ten yards away and I looked back again and saw the ghost boy’s hands reaching out at Shaw’s neck. I grabbed Shaw by his jacket and dragged him up next to me. “Come on!” I yelled and the two of us dove onto the trailhead. I landed face first in the snow but I instantly looked back to see through my snow-blurred vision the ghost hovering at the edge of the trailhead.

  We wiped the snow off our faces and got back to our feet. The boy stared at us and we stared back. After a few seconds he turned around and floated towards the mansion.

  “That was close,” Shaw said.

  “Yes, it was,” I said. I gave Shaw a big snowy clap on the back, “but not bad for a boring Wednesday, huh?”

  “Not bad at all,” he said with a smile.

  My dream had been answered! I was now the proud owner of my own restaurant in a small mining town in the Pacific Northwest. I was in a neat old building that was almost 200 years old with a huge basement with a dirt floor. I didn’t keep much down there, but I did have some equipment and supplies that occasionally needed to be checked on or hauled upstairs. The stairs were old and rickety—barely wide enough for one person to go up or down.

  I had no problem going down there but some of my employees did. A couple of them refused to and I had to think about that one, but in the end I didn’t push them unless I had no choice. They said that it was “spooky” down there and, as I found out later, had the reputation of having a poltergeist or two that supposedly caused problems. Legend had it that they were known to tease and scare anybody who went down there.

  I kind of checked this off to vivid imaginations and the desire to keep a local legend alive and well. I had been down there many times before experienced nothing. Then one night, I thought one of my employees was playing a joke on me. Usually I was the first one in to the restaurant and had to light the pilot to our pizza oven because it took about two hours to get up to temp. When I tried to light it, it didn’t light. I checked the lines and found there was no gas coming through. Then I checked the gas line shutoff to see if someone had mistakenly turned it off. It was on and the only other shutoff valve was downstairs where the main line came in.

  I went downstairs and sure enough, it was turned off. I stood there scratching my head for a moment before turning it back on. I stuck around to see if it was leaking and when it wasn’t, I headed back up and lit the oven. Business went on as usual, but in the evening I needed some paper towels from the basement. I sent one of the employees down to get it and he came back up looking a bit confused. There were no paper towels there which was very strange; I’d just had a shipment come in the day before. We both went back down and the rack where they were kept was empty. Now I was starting to get pissed off because somebody was taking this a little too far.

  I sent him back up for flashlights because not all of the basement was lit. Only the areas that had shelving and equipment had any wired lights. We each set off in different directions into the very large basement, and after a few moments I heard him cry out my name. When I went over, all the boxes were thrown haphazardly around on the floor in a far corner of the basement that you could hardly move around in. We picked up the boxes and loaded them back up on the rack and he grabbed what we needed. Heading back upstairs, he asked me what I thought had happened. I told him I thought someone was playing a joke on us. He just smiled a little and nodded. We finished for the evening and shut down for the night.

  Two days later our soda fountain stopped working. This usually happened if the bag-in-the-box ran out of syrup and had to be changed. We checked them daily before we left to make sure this wouldn’t happen so I was surprised one had run out. I sent an employee down to change the box, which fixed the fountain, but when she came back up, she had a strange look on her face. She explained to me that two of the boxes had been unhooked and were still about three-quarters full. Fortunately the basement was large and airy; of all the carbon dioxide the machine was pumping out could have led to disaster if the area had been more confined. She mumbled something about spirits and that she wasn’t going down there again as she walked by me back to the seating area. She was one of the two that had been comfortable going down there but now I was down to one and I wondered who was pulling these damn pranks.

  I’d had enough. I called an employee meeting to see if I could find out who our prankster was. Everybody looked surprised and swore they’d done nothing. I decided to have them all go down into the basement with me where we could talk some more and hopefully some
of them would get over their fear. There was a light switch at the top of the stairs and I turned it on as we headed down. When we were all down there and standing in a group and talking about what was going on, the lights went off. A couple of people started yelling, and a few others started heading back up the stairs. I told them to stop—it was too dark and someone could get injured.

  I sent my kitchen manager up the stairs to see if he could figure out what had happened. I gave him my cellphone to help light the way and asked him check out the circuit breaker to see if one of them had tripped. He stuck his head down the stairs and told me they were all still on and asked me what I wanted him to do. I told him to check the switch and when he did, the lights came back on. I didn’t get it—we were all downstairs when the lights went off and there was no way someone could’ve sneaked back up there to turn them off. My employees were looking at me with fear on their faces and I let them go back up to the restaurant. I stayed down there with my kitchen manager after telling him to grab the flashlights again. I wanted to search the place top to bottom in case we had a squatter or something like that down there.

  We searched for forty-five minutes and found nothing and no one anywhere around. I sent him back up and sat down on the bottom step of the staircase. I had no explanation for any of this and I began to wonder if there was some truth to the legend of ghosts down here. I laughed, climbed back up the stairs, finished the day, and went home.

  The next day we needed some more to-go boxes and I sent my kitchen manager down to the basement to get some since he was the only one now who would go down there. He came back up with two sleeves of boxes but waved me over to talk to me. When I went to him, he told me that the box had fallen off the shelf just when he was grabbing for it and he thought he had heard laughter. I just stared at him and he shook his head; he had no explanation either. Like me, he didn’t believe in ghosts and that’s why he didn’t mind going down there.

  I took the next day off and put him in charge while I was gone. He needed supplies from down below but couldn’t leave the kitchen. After a fair amount of arguing, he got one of the waitresses go down to get it for him. When she didn’t come back up for almost ten minutes, he got worried. He couldn’t leave the kitchen; we were having our lunch rush, and he told another employee to call me. I hurried down; I only lived about a mile and a half away so I got there pretty quickly. While I was on my way he had one of the dishwashers go down and see what was taking her so long.