A Virtual Halloween Campfire!
A VIRTUAL HALLOWEEN CAMPFIRE!
Halloween is coming! As an author of creepy things, you might guess that it is one of my favorite times of year—a time when the imagination runs wild, when ordinary shadows take on more ominous forms, the night air crackles with ghostly anticipation, and the supernatural becomes more tangible, if just for a while. As you might have also imagined, I love ghost stories, especially the nonfiction kind. In hopes that you out there have some to tell, I am creating this virtual campfire, where we can gather around and swap goosebumps.
Do you have a story to tell? Ghostly sightings? Strange apparitions? Poltergeist visitations? Unexplained phenomenon? Well pull up a log and tell us about it! Who knows? If we get a cool enough collection of creepy tales, we may put together our own anthology!
So...anything weird happen to you lately???
p.s. If you're story is too long for one comment box, then divide it up, and make it into Part I, Part II, and so on!
Halloween is coming! As an author of creepy things, you might guess that it is one of my favorite times of year—a time when the imagination runs wild, when ordinary shadows take on more ominous forms, the night air crackles with ghostly anticipation, and the supernatural becomes more tangible, if just for a while. As you might have also imagined, I love ghost stories, especially the nonfiction kind. In hopes that you out there have some to tell, I am creating this virtual campfire, where we can gather around and swap goosebumps.
Do you have a story to tell? Ghostly sightings? Strange apparitions? Poltergeist visitations? Unexplained phenomenon? Well pull up a log and tell us about it! Who knows? If we get a cool enough collection of creepy tales, we may put together our own anthology!
So...anything weird happen to you lately???
p.s. If you're story is too long for one comment box, then divide it up, and make it into Part I, Part II, and so on!
Posted by A.M. Boyle at 10/21/2009 4:33 PM 
Categories: uncategorized
Tags: ghosts Halloween scary campfire stories
Categories: uncategorized
Tags: ghosts Halloween scary campfire stories
Part I
It was an unusually warm morning in late September when Tom unloaded the last of the boxes from the rental truck. He'd been irritated since he and Marge had arrived that morning to start moving in. It was a nice enough townhouse, with two bedrooms upstairs and the living area on the ground floor, but the air conditioning had been turned off, and a fetid odor permeated the place, as if trash had been left under the sink. They'd searched for the source of the sour smell all morning, but ultimately gave up. Perhaps a mouse had died in the wall. On top of that, the big rusty stain in the green shag carpeting in the dining nook still had not been cleaned. He would have to talk to the rental agent about that!
The day passed, and the air conditioner hummed, and the unpleasant aroma began to dissipate. As darkness began to fall, Tom and Marge hauled the mattress upstairs, into the master bedroom, harshly illuminated by a lamp that had been placed on the floor. By 9pm, exhausted by the long day of heavy work, Marge and Tom were sleeping for the first time in their new apartment.
Sometime in the deepest part of the night, Tom woke with a start to a sound like a single thunderclap. Heart pounding, he fumbled for the travel alarm near the bed. 2:14 am. As he tried to catch his breath he glanced over toward his wife. In the orange glow from the streetlamp outside, he could see that Marge was awake, her eyes squeezed tightly shut, the covers clutched beneath her chin. "You ok?" he whispered.
"Scared," she replied quietly. She unscrewed one eye. "You hear that noise, Tom?"
Tom reached over and turned on the lamp. Shadows sprang across the room, and he had a fleeting impression of something....something. There was a closet at the foot of their bed, the door firmly shut. Had the noise come from there? He was beginning to spook himself, and the adrenalin was making him queasy and uncomfortable.
"Yeah, I heard something." He twisted around in bed, and peered out the window. He saw a figure walking a dog on the far side of the parking lot, silohuette by the streetlamp. He forced himself to look at the closet again. "Maybe a box fell over. Sure sounded loud though." Warily, he got out of bed and took four steps to the closet door. He grasped the knob, took a deep breath, and opened the door, irrationally bracing himself in case something was waiting to jump out. He opened the door six inches, then all the way, and groped for the unfamiliar light switch. The bare bulbe flicked on. All of the boxes they had piled in the closet were neatly stacked.
"Maybe it was the neighbors. Everything's fine in here." He turned off the light, and began to close the closet door. As it swung the last inch, he nearly jumped as it slammed shut. Damn! It felt like someone had yanked the doorknob from the other side, and Tom shivered involuntarily. "Damn draft," he muttered, for Marge's benefit.
To be contin...
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Part II
Tom and Marge spent the rest of the night in a fitful half sleep. By morning, both of them were ill, feverish and nauseated. They reasoned that it was the cold take out they had subsisted on throughout the moving day. They spent the day huddled in blankets on the sofa in the living room. Neither of them felt inclined to go back to the bedroom. By Monday, they were feeling better, and Marge returned to her job at the dental office.
Tom worked diligently, putting up blinds and curtains, hanging pictures, unpacking boxes. He only had a few vacation days left before he would need to report back to work. He found himself avoiding the bedroom when Marge was away. Something there, that closet, gave him the willies, and he didn't know why. In the evening, they would have dinner at their dining table. The stain on the carpet was still there, under the dining table. Marge joked that it was a blood stain that could never be cleaned, likely from a murdered previous tenant. Tom didn't think that was was especially funny. On Wednesday, Vanessa, the rental agent, sent over a cleaning crew to shampoo the awful shag rug. That evening, Marge was pleased to see that the stain was gone, and refrained from joking about the curse of the murdered tenant again.
Late that night, the smell returned. Tom remembered an incident from his childhood, when an old tacklebox had been stored in a closet with a packet of bait still in the bottom. It was that smell, a greasy, almost palpable odor of decay. Tom and Marge were up half the night, opening cupboards, pulling out the refrigerator, trying to find the source. Gradually, the horrible odor dissappeared.
On Thursday, Tom had an exterminator come over to lay some traps. As he watched Art lay a trap in the pantry, Tom heard an enormous bang reverberate through the house. Even Art jumped, banging his head on a low shelf. "What the hell was that?" he shouted, rubbing the crown of his head. It sounded like it had come from upstairs. With his heart in his throat, Tom bounded up the stairs, two at a time. He rounded the corner into the bedroom. The closet door, normally shut tight, was wide open. Tom edged his way past the closet, never taking his eyes off of it. The wire clothes hangers were gently swaying, his wife's dresses looking like they were slowly writhing. Tom grasped the edge of the closet door, attempted to close it, but it wouldn't move. He shifted his eyes to the closet door, and recoiled. The door had slammed open so forcefully, the knob had embedded itself in the drywall.
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Part III
When Marge came home that night. she found Tom sitting upright at the kitchen table, a small overnight bag at his side. She looked at him questioningly. He nodded, pointing his eyes toward the floor. Marge followed his gaze. Wordlessly, she backed away.
There, on the green shag carpet, was the ugly, rust colored stain.
They spent that night at a hotel. The next morning, Friday, Tom signed a lease at an available apartment on the north side of town, rented a truck, and began to pack. On Saturday, he returned to the townhouse for the last time, and spent the morning removing the blinds and curtains, stuffing them into the back seat of his car. He walked back into the apartment and took one last cursory look around. The odor was back, fortunate in a way, as it gave him an excuse for breaking the lease. He realized he had left his toolbox upstairs, in the bedroom. He contemplated going up to retrieve it. Then he shuddered, turned around, and closed the door on apartment 7734 forever.
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When I was younger, I was very close with my grandmother. She was a very independent woman and always lived on her own, although she did not live far from us. I would see her at least once a week when my family visited her. However, at one point, when I was about 11 or so, she became quite ill. I didn't know at the time what was wrong; all I knew was that I was not allowed to see her. One night, I was awake in bed, thinking about her. Unable to sleep, I went to the bathroom to get a glass of water. When I came back to my bedroom, my grandmother was sitting on the edge of my bed! I should have been frightened, but I wasn't--I was more confused as to how she got there. I went to hug her but she told me I shouldn't. I figured it was because she was still sick. I sat down next to her, and she smiled and asked how I was, and we talked for a few minutes. I told her I missed her. I asked her why she came, and if she would be staying for a while. With a look of great sadness, she told me that she just came to say goodbye and that it was time for her to go home. Then she got up, blew me a kiss, and walked out the door. I went into the hallway to see where she was going, assuming she was leaving, and wondering how she would get home in the middle of the night by herself. But she wasn't there. It was as if she just vanished.
The next day, my parents told me that my grandmother had passed away in the night, that she had died peacefully in her sleep. She had, indeed, gone home.
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THE FLAVOR OF THE AIR
PART I
The storm was coming: a subtle change in the flavor of the air, the frantic activity of the insects, the speed of the wispy clouds as they raced through the North Dakota sky, all these things were enough clue, for folks smarter than us. For us, it took a thick, black line on the western horizon.
“You think we’re gonna get rain?” I asked, hammering another peg into the sod. The tent perched uneasily on top of foot-high grass. I had tried to flatten the thick prairie grass by stomping on it, just to level things a bit, but the thick stalks just sprang back up.
“Are you kidding?” Newman brushed a giant black fly off her bare arm. Skin So Soft repels just about everything, but these damn bloodsuckers seemed to like us well-marinated. She wiped sweat off her forehead and looked up at the sun, then waved futilely at the cloud of gnats that engulfed her. “That sun is never gonna go away. What the fuck are these things?”
“Gnats. Try to breathe with your mouth closed.” The tent was secured, more or less. I’m no expert in the whole camping thing, so it wasn’t pretty. But at least it had stopped falling over.
Newman looked around us. Miles of nothing. Or corn. Or wheat. Or whatever it was that was filling all these fields. “You think there’s a pizza place out here that delivers?”
“Would you trust it?”
“Unlikely. Not after that crap we had in Indiana.” She was reapplying her lipstick in the van’s rear-view mirror.
I shook my head. “So it’s instant soup again. You wanna round up some kindling?”
“Are there snakes?”
“Yes. Lots. All over.”
“Gee, thanks.”
The first hint of a breeze came while Newman was still out harvesting sticks. I’d gotten a fire pit dug, in the soft, sandy earth of a pit some earlier campers had made, arranged a couple small and medium sized logs in it, and was waiting for something to get the blaze started, when the west wind blew the gnats away. The black flies were a bit more tenacious, hugging the ground and biting us through our jeans, but even they gave up eventually. I stuffed the dried brush that Newman had found into the rough wooden pyramid I’d built, added some crumpled newspaper, and it blazed into life under the influence of my bic.
The wind was picking up, though, as we tried to heat a pot of water, and the fire threw sparks into the dry grass.
“Jesus,” I said, “we’re going to start a forest fire.”
“There’s no trees.”
“Brush fire. Whatever.” I stomped on some embers.
Newman was looking toward the west. “I don’t think we have to worry about that.”
And then it was dark. Like someone hit a light switch and turned off the sky. And the wind howled as it stole our tent and flung it into the air. And lightning crashed across the sky: instant clarity followed by nigh-total darkness. And then the rains came, a horizontal wave of water that crashed into us. We sought refuge in the van.
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THE FLAVOR OF THE AIR
PART II
The storm buffeted us for half an hour, and we lay in the back of the van, naked and huddled together under a blanket for warmth, feeling the fury of the storm as it shook the van, letting ourselves melt into each other and into the storm. The giant drops, and some hail, clattered and thrummed against the metal shell, splattered against the windows and moonroof.
“I’m really hungry,” Newman said, when the storm passed. We’d never managed to finish making soup, and I suspected that our pan had gone the way of the tent. And sex always made her hungry. “I’m craving bacon,” she said.
I laughed. “You’re a Jewish vegetarian.”
“Yeah, well. Sometimes you just need a pepperoni pizza. And sometimes you just need inappropriate sex. And sometimes you need bacon.” There was challenge in her gaze, and I let my fingers meet it.
“You know,” I said a little bit later, tracing an inappropriate line of moisture up her inappropriately quivering belly, “we have all these myths about the pioneers who settled the west. We idolize their bravery and perseverance.” I tugged idly at the three hairs that curled just below her belly button. “But, well, that storm really clears things up. It explains a lot about the American psyche. I mean, think about it. You’re going west in your little covered wagon. There’s not a 7-11 in sight. A storm like this comes up. Do you turn your wagon around and flee back to Europe? No. You keep going. Our country was populated by insane people.”
“Look at the stars,” she said.
The next morning it still smelled faintly like bacon.
I found our cooking pot about a hundred yards away, but there was no point trying to get anything lit, not in the waterlogged fire pit, or with the soggy wood. No, we’d be best served getting on the road and looking for an IHOP or something. I was fishing the wire cooking frame out of the fire pit when I realized that the scent of bacon seemed to be stronger there. I poked at it a bit with the shovel.
“We need to go,” I told Newman. “Now.” There was something in my voice that even she noticed.
“What? Why?”
I showed her, and then we filled the fire pit and tamped down the earth and drove west. We didn’t stop for breakfast, or for lunch. Not for food. Just once for gas and relief for our exploding bladders. We didn’t stop until we hit the badlands, until we’d put the whole damned prairie between us and the blackened thing in the shallow grave.
TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE AUTHOR, VISIT http://www.kappamaki.com/
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Don't have a "spooky" story, but we have Bob. That's the name of the "ghost" who lives here. He's always setting the alarm off a little before it's supposed to go off and bringing old lost things out into conspicuous places, like the kitchen table. He also likes messing with electronics. My husband thought I was crazy for mentioning that we have a ghost until he saw it happen himself. Oh yeah, now he's a believer.
I was in the bathroom one day (won't say doing what) when I heard this "cht" . . .; "cht" every few seconds. It was the camera on my phone taking pictures where it was laying on the counter across the room. It stopped after I noticed, but I had about six blurry pictures of the bathroom ceiling. They all laughed at me then (didn't believe me at that time). A couple weeks later, my son calls me out to the den to show me that the television was changing channels on its own. I said quit playing with the remote behind his back, but he showed me his free hands and the remote on the table. I thought the cable was doing the automatic channel programming, but the television went both up, down, and back to different channels.
Bob's not a malicious ghost. I sometimes think it's my father, who died in the house in 1992, but if it is, I'm so in trouble when I die, it's not funny. The things he would have seen me do in the privacy of my own home, oiy!
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