True Ghost Stories and Hauntings 3

by Simon Murik

  “What do you think, boss? Thirty stories?”

  I looked over at Matt, the show’s cameraman. “That’s probably about right,” I said. I took a puff of the cigarette and blew smoke towards the gray sky. “All those poor suckers that took the express train off that thing. Now that’s what you call a death cult.” I flicked the cigarette onto the ground and smothered it with my shoe. “The dum dums will love this one.”

  The dum dums was my pet name for the show’s audience.

  I turned toward Chad and Goldie who made up the rest of my crew. They had set everything up about thirty feet from the tower. “OK, guys, let’s get this thing going; I want to be out of here before dark.”

  I walked to where Chad was holding the boom mic and stood with my back to the tower. Goldie positioned the light and Matt got behind the camera. I zipped my leather jacket up halfway and nodded. Matt did the “three, two, one” and pointed at me.

  “Hello, everyone. I’m Blake Cross and this is Ghost Trackers. In the late 1920s a death cult formed deep in the Nebraska heartland. It’s founder and leader, Maxwell, a former welder and charismatic man from Oregon, believed that experiencing intense fear was the only way to truly find yourself and bring yourself closer to God. In just over a year, he had recruited over a hundred members to his cult and it is reported that they came from all walks of life: bankers, doctors, soldiers, factory workers, political activists, and the terminally unemployed. However, despite their variance in backgrounds, these men all had one unique thing in common: a desperate desire to find inner peace.

  “And they believed the teachings of Maxwell would be their path to this peace.

  “Unfortunately though, for the followers of this particular cult, Maxwell’s path would bring many of them here. To Death Tower.

  “Now, join me today as I climb the tower’s twisted stairs to its peak where between the years 1927 to 1929, some sixty-seven people either jumped to their deaths from the tower’s window or were thrown out by Maxwell himself.

  “But it’s not the deaths that occurred here that we’re most interested in, but what has remained here since then. What causes the screams and bizarre chants that can be heard from this place late at night? Is it just the wild imaginations of those who live within earshot of this place? Or is it something more—something dark and sinister? Because as we’ve witnessed so many times before on Ghost Trackers, while the body may die, the spirit lives for eternity.

  Welcome to Ghost Trackers.”

  Matt made the “cut” sign with his hand and I pulled a pack of Bubbleyum out of my pocket and tossed a piece in my mouth.

  “Great opener, boss,” Goldie said.

  I nodded and looked up at the tower. “Yeah, the hicks in the sticks will love it. No doubt about that.” I let out a little chuckle. “Master’s degree in English and journalism from NYU and now I’m doing this shit.”

  “Still better than the garbage most of television puts out these days,” Chad said.

  I popped a bubble and spit the gum onto the grass. “Ain’t that the truth. OK boys and girls, it’s just me and the mini-cam from here on out. Give me an hour and then we’ll get the hell out of here.”

  Matt walked over and handed me the black Sony camera. I then walked up to the tower’s door and put my hand around the handle. It was cool to the touch, chilly actually, and a good place to start filming.

  I hit record. Showtime.

  “I’m entering the tower now and I’ll tell you, the handle on the door here is surprisingly cold. This is interesting because as we’ve seen so many times on the show before, ghostly activity is often accompanied by a significant drop in temperature.”

  I pulled the door open and was hit with the sight of a spiraling stone staircase and a smell like rotten potatoes. The staircase spiraled all the way to the top.

  “Wow, this is something,” I said as I raised the camera. “As you can see there’s a tight, spiraling stone staircase that runs to the top of the tower. It looks like it loops around a good six or seven times before you hit the top. It’s also as chilly in here as the door handle was. A good—or bad—sign, depending on how you look at it.”

  Ha. The dum dums would love that.

  I put my foot on the first step. Nice and solid. I started walking up.

  “No one’s really sure who built the tower. Some stories claim that Maxwell contracted the work to a private construction company while other believe he built the entire thing himself with the help of his followers.” I rounded the first curve. “I’ll tell you though, this tower was fantastically built. Extremely solid structure.”

  I rounded the second turn.

  “One thing that’s interesting is that while there are no windows until you reach the peak, there is ample light coming from the top to make it easy to see. I’ll tell you though, while the tower is a good thirty feet wide, this is no place for you if you’re suffer from claustrophobia. It’s just staircase and wall in here. Almost like you’re being squeezed upwards because there’s nowhere else to go.”

  As I rounded the third and then the fourth turn the air seemed to get thicker and my breathing got a little heavy. “Phew, this is a better workout than I was planning. No wonder people wanted to take the fast way down after dealing with the climb up. OK, I’m rounding the fifth spiral now and it looks like I’ve got one more to go. I’m going to sign off for a bit until I get to the peak.”

  That was the first time I’d said something like that. This climb was no joke and the bleakness of the place really sucked the wind out of your sails. But it was easily worth it. The show was doing great in its midnight slot and over 70,000 people had signed up to our website. Besides having to do ridiculous stuff like this, it was a profitable gig.

  And then I was at the top.

  The stairs ended at a round room with a smooth stone floor. The window was a lot bigger up here than it had seemed down on the ground—a good seven or eight feet wide and it looked like ten or so feet in height from the foot high ledge to the ceiling. I panned the camera left and saw strange markings/writings that looked scratched into the wall.

  “I’m at the top and this is very eerie,” I said as I panned the camera around the room. “I would by lying if I said I didn’t want to go back down those stairs right this second.”

  I bit my lip. No, I wouldn’t be lying. I had just spent fifteen minutes hauling my ass up those stupid stairs and I was staying here until I got the dum dums some good ghost tower footage and caught my breath. I held the camera towards the window.

  “And there it is. Sixty-seven men and women either jumped or were thrown to their death from that opening. Let me tell you, folks, I’ve been to the haunted slot canyons of Utah and the spirit infested swamps of Louisiana, and they don’t come close to the isolated, death-riddled gloom of this place.”

  That’s right, lay it on nice and thick.

  “You can literally taste the fear and suffering of those poor souls in here. What Maxwell Borath must have done to their minds is beyond anything I can imagine,” I said as I walked towards the window. Through it I could see the miles and miles of boring green Midwestern plains that stretched out from the tower.

  “The view is both spectacular and chilling,” I said, stepping up to the ledge and putting my foot on it. Farmers around here say they can hear the ghostly screams coming from this place almost every night and I believe them. What a sight.”

  I felt a finger tap on my shoulder and I spun around.

  The room was empty and an icy shiver ran up my spine.

  But I’d be damned if I hadn’t felt that. Maybe my own imagination was getting carried away on this one. Might as well run with this.

  “I swear something just tapped my shoulder. But again, as you can see, no one is up here with me. I’m going to take a closer look at the markings on the wall.”

  I walked over to the far wall and held the camera close to the writing. It was a little freaky. The letters were backwards, slanted, and upside down. The
y almost seemed to spell out words but it was all gibberish—like the scribbled rantings of a crazed three-year-old.

  “Well, they weren’t joking around when they named this the Wall of Madness. I think that—”

  I felt a tap on my shoulder again.

  I looked back but again saw nothing. Maybe I was due for a vacation after this one was over.

  “I just felt a tap on my shoulder again and it feels like the temperature just dropped five degrees. I’m not a betting man but I’d wager a lot that I’ve gotten the attention of something up here—something dark, something empty.”

  I snickered quietly. I really came up with some good shit sometimes.

  Turning back to the wall I checked the power level on the camera. It had about fifty minutes of juice left, not that I needed it, I’d be out of here in a couple of—

  A scream shot across the room that was so piercing it felt like a knife had been stuck in my spine. I spun around and my legs froze, my hands went numb, and the camera slid out of my hand, hitting the floor with a light thud.

  Wisps of what looked like they may have once been people stood in the room staring at me. Their faces were nothing more than blurred traces of eyes and mouths and they quivered like they were barely able to be visible, almost like a TV program with a really weak cable signal.

  But even without the details, their faces were drenched in sadness. And my heart suddenly felt like a heavy, cold stone.

  After thirty-seven shows I’d finally found a location that was the real deal.

  A ghost man floated to the window, jumped out, and his scream was like getting hit in the ears by lighting. I dropped to my knees and covered my ears as three more of them jumped through the window. It was like the tower itself was an amplifier of misery and with each ghost replaying its own death I began to feel the cold urge to plunge through the window myself.

  I stood up and staggered towards the window. The blank faces watched me with what could only be described as dead curiosity. As I got closer, they started making silent clapping motions with their blurry, pale hands and it felt like I had liquid lead flowing through my veins instead of blood. It would be nice to jump through to get rid of this feeling.

  I got to the window and stepped up on the ledge. Would it hurt when I hit the ground or would I feel nothing and instantly join my new friends in the afterlife? I looked through the thin streak of cloud at the soft green grass below.

  I’d know soon enough.

  One, two, three—

  A pair of hands grabbed my shoulders and tore me off the ledge. The room spun around as my new ghost friends stared and shook their heads.

  “Grab the camera!” a woman’s voice shouted.

  “Got it,” a man’s voice responded.

  “OK, carefully now, Chad put his arm over your shoulder. OK, good. Just take it one slow step at a time.”

  I felt myself start to descend and after a few steps my head started to clear. The farther away we got the warmer and better I felt. It was like breaking out of a horrible drug hallucination.

  “You’re damn lucky we heard you screaming, boss,” Matt said.

  We got to the final rounding of the stairs and then a minute later we were back outside. I took my arm off Chad’s back, breathed the fresh air in deeply, and walked to where the equipment was set up.

  I put my hands on my hips and looked up at the tower.

  “Hope you got some good footage,” Goldie called out holding the mini-cam up.

  I popped a piece of Bubbleyum into my mouth as I stared at the tower’s peak. “Nothing but the best for the dum dums. You know that.”

  I then turned around and jammed my hands into my coat pockets. “Nothing but the best,” I said again quietly and began the half-mile walk back to the Ghost Trackers van. But as I walked across the flat, grassy plain I swore I felt a cold, invisible hand on my arm. Pulling at me to go back to the tower.

  “You don’t want to go back to your silly show. Stay with us. Forever,” a voice hissed in my ear.

  I stopped walking. It had felt good just before I jumped. Like I’d been on the brink of finding the same peace that the others who’d jumped had dreamed of.

  A gust of wind blew across the plain and a raven landed on the grass a few feet away from me.

  It’d be nice to find peace.

  I looked back at the tower and bit down on my lip.

  With a sharp crack the cue ball knocked the eight ball into the corner pocket and the game was over. “God damn it!” yelled the 300-pound slob the other bikers called “Fat Willie.” He’d waddled over and challenged me to a game out of the blue and if he wasn’t the worst pool player I’d ever seen he was pretty damn close.

  “Double or nothing, big guy?” I asked.

  Fat Willie shook his head and took his wallet out of a pair of jeans that Jabba the Hut would find too loose to wear. I rubbed my chin. That had to be one strong Harley he was riding around on.

  “I’ll get ya next time,” Willie muttered as he tossed a hundred-dollar bill on the table.

  “Anytime, fat man. But I don’t know when I’m going to be back through here again.”

  Sunny, our bouncy little blonde waitress, appeared with a pitcher of beer and set it on the high-top table next to Fat Willie.

  “Thanks darlin’,” Willie said as he grabbed the pitcher and took a long drink. When he set it back down a third of it was gone and I shook my head and took the hundred off the table.

  “So you don’t know about this place then?” Willie asked.

  “Know what?” I asked, slipping the money into my wallet while watching Sunny go up to the skinny bartender with short gray hair wearing sunglasses. Fast Eddie’s Bar was just another dive bar like the million or so I’d seen during my riding and I couldn’t imagine what there was to know.

  Fat Willie smiled and looked over at the two leather-clad bikers that he’d been shooting pool with before he came over to me. The bronze-skinned one was around 5’6” and built like a power lifter while the other was his polar opposite: six-two or six-three, pale as snow, and looked like a good gust of wind would snap him in half. “Carlos! J.J.! Should I tell our new friend here about the robber who won’t quit?”

  The power lifter—I was guessing he was Carlos—flashed a set of bright white teeth and set the bottom of his cue on the floor. “I don’t know; he looks the nervous type. What do you think J.J.?”

  The other biker looked me up and down and shrugged. “Sure, why not? Ain’t like it’s a real secret.”

  Eddie Money’s Shakin started to crank out of the jukebox and Fat Willie rubbed his thick hands together. I leaned against the pool table. “I’m listening.”

  The giant man sucked down the rest of the pitcher and waved at Sunny. He looked at me. “A little over a year ago some guy comes in here to rob the place. He knocks out Fast Eddie’s son who was working the door that night with the butt of his gun, grabs one of the girls, cuts her face, and then tells Eddie to give him all the cash in the place.”

  “Did he do it?” I asked.

  Sunny brought over another pitcher and Willie took a giant gulp of it before she could even turn back around.

  “Oh, he gave him the money,” Fat Willie said wiping beer foam off his chin. “And when that robber ran out of here, he gave him something else as he rode off on his hog.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Two shotgun blasts in the back.”

  I nodded and checked my watch.

  “They actually buried him out there in those woods somewhere and since then Mr. Robber has been prowling up and down this road like he’s waiting for his next big score. Terrorizing anyone who happens to cross his path,” J.J. said.

  “Ah, hence ‘the robber who won’t quit,’” I said with a smirk I couldn’t keep down. “Very good. Got it.”

  Fat Willie looked over at Carlos and J.J. and they walked towards me.

  “You making fun of us, boy?” Carlos hissed rubbing his fist against his open hand.<
br />
  I stood up from the pool table and walked up to him. “I don’t believe in ghosts and I sure as hell don’t fall for lies by back-road half-wits.”

  Carlo’s eyes narrowed and his muscles tensed. “You want to try laughing at me outside?”

  “Come on, Carlos. Let it go,” J.J. said.

  Carlos glared at me like he was trying to see what my skull looked like and then his body relaxed and his mouth curved upward.

  “You’re right, J.J.” He patted me on the shoulder and he grinned. “We got ourselves a smart boy here.”

  Carlos turned around and went back to his table. He grabbed his jacket off the chair and put it on. “I’ll be seeing you, son,” he said. “You coming, boys?”

  J.J. walked off with Carlos and Fat Willie stared at me. “I’d be careful out there if I were you. Six bikers been run off these roads ever since old Eddie put that boy down.” The side of the fat biker’s thin mouth curved into a half smile. “Be a shame for you to be number seven.” He pointed a finger at me and then walked over to where Carlos and J.J. were waiting at the exit.

  “See you Eddie,” Fat Willie bellowed and the skinny bartender gave them a wave. They pushed through the door and were gone.

  It was now a little after one in the morning and other than Fast Eddie, who was chatting with some woman over a bottle of scotch at the end of the bar, and Sunny examining her nails by the juke box, the place was dead. I set my cue on the table, zipped up my leather jacket, and grabbed my helmet off the high-top.

  As I walked towards the exit a scratchy voice called out to me. “You be careful out there, son. And whatever strange things you might see, just keep riding until you cross Mission Road. He won’t follow you past there.”

  I looked back expecting to see Eddie smiling, but his face was stone serious. I gave him a little solute, turned back to the exit, and walked out.

  Get me the hell out of this place.

  A chill whipped through the dark Carolina night and when I got to my black-and-gold Harley I popped open the carrying case attached to the back of the seat, took out my leather gloves, and slid them on. There was supposed to be a couple of roadside motels fifty or sixty miles from here and I could crash at one of them for the night before making my way down to Georgia tomorrow.