Oh, My Friends….
The Time is Near….
When Gouls, Goblins & Horrors Appear!
Come one, come all … if you dare!
It’s time to put on OUR HALLOWEEN SCARE!
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I'd appreciate your feedback so very much...
Shelfari: Sher's Bookshelf!!!
sjfreed.wordpress.com 
Are we supposed to just leave a comment to enter? Please enter me then!!
-Lauren
lauren51990@aol.com
Lauren:
I sent you an email. The contest is… share your scariest novel, book, story, or personal story by 10.22.08. You can write a post on it and link your post via a comment here…. or, you can email it to me at anovelmenagerie@aol.com.
Good luck and Happy Haunting!
Sher
It was about 1978. My husband and I had just moved into a house on a hill not far from downtown Los Angeles. It was quiet and very dark at night, very secluded, we couldn’t see our neighbors’ houses because the hill was so steep & there was so much shrubbery.
It was evening, my husband was at work (he was a musician so worked a lot of evenings), and I had been reading “Salem’s Lot” by Stephen King for the first time. When I got to the part where they were in the mortuary and it was just turning sundown and they started making little crosses out of tongue depressors and saying the 23d Psalm when the body on the table started to move, I had to stop reading it scared me so much! I decided to do something mundane to take my mind off the story, so I started to clean the kitchen.
After awhile, I calmed down. Finishing up the kitchen, I took the trash out to the side yard. The trees were rustling in a light breeze and in the undergrowth I could hear little sounds ~ probably lizards or mice, I told myself. Suddenly, the outside light went out (turned out to be a burned out bulb), leaving me in pitch darkness. I dropped the trash bag, scurried back inside, slammed and locked the door, and went to my closet where I kept a box of memorabilia. I went through the box, heart thumping madly, searching for my mother’s glow-in-the-dark rosary. When I found it, I put it over my neck and wore it every night after that for a good week or two, long after I finished Salem’s Lot, until I stopped freaking out every time I had to go outside at night.
I’ve read hundreds of horror stories before and since, but never have I been so terrified by the written word. Stephen King was a genius!
This is so fun! I’ve never been more terrified than by The Tommyknockers. Stephen King is a master!
Okay, Sher. I don’t do horror … movies, books, I scare waaayyyy too easily. I’d never be able to sleep if I read Stephen King.
The most deliciously scary book I remember reading was Jane Eyre which happens to be probably my favorite book of all time. Pretty G-rated, huh?
Storeetllr, great story. I’m sometimes afraid to go out into the yard to bring the dog in at night, and that’s without reading scary books!
You know, now that I think about it, I did watch a few horror movies in high school. Cujo based on the Stephen King novel, and also People Under the Stairs. That’s about it though.
The last time I remember being truly scared was when I read The Woman in Black by Susan Hill. I just got that feeling I used get when I was a kid alone in my playroom at my grandmother’s home (it was a screened in porch off of the living room). Totally creeped out!
From Krista in Missouri:
The Taker
They lie to us so many ways with anything they can, because they got power that way. They lie when they tell us supper is fixed with the finest home ingredients while we watch a dead spider floating to its surface and when they smile and hand me this pen and say it’s because they trust me. They don’t, and no reason why they should. The thing is—I know it—they want me to do it, to get me off their hands. Ole Sam be long gone and they will sigh relief. See, none of the prison staff is suppose to hand out things that could be used for a weapon, to themself or another man, unless under close watch, and right now I’m not.
They lie when they tell me everything is okay, Sam it was just a dream, they say, right before the black bar smashes into my face and I’m gone. They say that or tell me it’s all in my head and this is worse because it might be the very truth. Who can say. I been in the Alabama State Prison for 37 years. During that you see a lot of things you never knew of, if in your dreams or in the walls of this jail, and sometimes they are enough to make a right man go mad, and sometimes they do.
So this is a way to tell what they and everybody here won’t believe. There is a few who believe me and my rants and you should see the fear in their eyes, friend. A time or two ago I looked over a guard’s shoulder at the cell across from me and the man standing there nodded, and he was scared just like me. And some will deny it all in the day to make nice with the guards. I try to hold back like they do but in the night everything changes and I’m in the hands of nothing I can control.
They say no man lasted past his 65th year here, except one. Nobody know why. Maybe it’s the guilt or shame that works down their health, or something else. I can believe both. This place is misery. It hangs in the air and waits for the man like an infecting disease, and maybe its name is time. Lord knows we all come down with it and the man who don’t was and always will be out of his mind.
It waits all the same, but it’s got no name, or one that is shared, because in secret those who believe got their own names for It. We don’t know whether it’s a blessing that can take us before the insanity steals us in its grip or pure unknown and lost evil. Don’t matter. Something gets you in the end anyhow.
I call it The Taker if I speak aloud. Most times I don’t. The Taker’s past goes far back as the first decade this place stood, and there is a lot of versions of who It be. I’ll tell you, friend, as it was told to me.
Nobody knows his birth name or right where he came from. Story tells it he was brought in for slaughtering a lot of missing people in the area. This was around the start of the Civil War. He lived to be 92 here, and quackering about demons and angels and the Everlasting Battle and Lord knows what other up until the end. See, he was already a old man when he was found after all those years, and any other man been hung there on the spot for all to see, but they was scared of him. That was the plain and honest to God truth. They was scared to do it and they thought if they waited long enough he would die soon anyhow. During that he saw through 19 guards in about 12 years, they say, and all of them was dying with the same disease. Suffering was more like it.
So they waited and watched him waist away day after day. The morning they found him dead, well, they didn’t even know it. His skin was rosy, eyes glistening, he was sitting up against the wall and staring forward, and the only thing changed was he wasn’t jabbering to himself. But day after day came, and his dinner plates started piling up, and he be sitting up and staring forward at them, studying them. They couldn’t tell no different. It was some weeks later when the head guy found out and went in and saw the man was dead. If a man was what he was at all. There is others stories. Guards and what they say, how sometimes they could sworn to the Lord they saw his eyes move, like he was following them.
A lot of men wonder out of everything what cell he stayed in all those years. For all any of us know it could be the very one I am writing this in.
There is other ways to be told of The Taker. Some say he is our past and its justice. Lord knows It could find something in any one of us.
For me it’s my Delilah.
We met at sixteen. Well, I was sixteen, she fifteen. This was 1946. It was at what my town use to call a “cross-county” dance, when anybody from anywhere in north Alabama could come for a good time. Most times it was just the same people, but that night I broke away from a few of my buddies to use the bathroom and I saw this girl. No girl I ever saw around before. She was slim and nice in a pink dress and her hair pulled back from her face. Course she was there with her girlfriends and didn’t see me. Why should she? I never had no beauty like that, never, so when my buddies pushed me to ask her for a dance and she said yes I thought I couldn’t hold myself up on the floor. But I did. Her hands on my shoulders kept me up. And while we was swaying back and forth to the music I was looking away, shy, over her shoulder and here and there, but Delilah, she was looking at me.
There was a second and a third dance and we got talking and pretty soon I was ditching school and riding all day to her town and sneaking her out at night.
My beautiful Delilah, just like that Chuck Berry song.
She wasn’t the first girl I ever took to bed. There was one or two weekend girls me and my buddies went around with before. Sixty-two years old and I can still remember the way her eyes looked—scared and mysterious and excited all at once—and that lavender skirt she been teasing me with all day. All the time I was finding other things to look at and not her, but I could feel those wonderful eyes always on me in the dark.
We got married when she came seventeen and moved into a neighboring town south of the both of ours. Delilah was heavy with a child by then, and we were happy. Poor and happy like a couple of paupers should be. I was working at a supermarket downtown and helping people around with handwork when I could. Delilah, well, course she worked until she was along and big. Found out it was twin girls the last time she went for a checkup. The next time she went screaming and crying and they was born just the other way, four months early.
I think of Delilah to get away from here, the way we was before that happened. I don’t feel scared then.
But after that Delilah changed. Can’t say how at first. Most times she mourned. Blamed me, blamed herself, her work, what she fed herself, the neighbor’s cat, out of everything! Something about it being sick one time and might of spread it to the babies. I was sad, sure, but I wasn’t like her. It really tore her up. Called herself a murderer one night and that was the first time I ever used my hand against her.
During all that she never let me get too close to her, like she thought she was dirty and horrible or I was. I kept working and let her have her time though, and after things got a while to pass we was okay again and loving and living just like before.
Never could and never did get a child. Delilah beat herself up about it because that was what wifes did back then. Get married, bear children, nuture the family, look after the house and cleaning and what not. She felt like a failure, and that was all there was to it.
We got a little older. Worked most of the time. She was okay but that zest died in her eyes. Like bubblegum lost its flavor.
Delilah was twenty-three when I killed her.
Work was hard to get. Racism was just as bad as it’d ever been. Our little cracker box on Washington Street was slipping from us. My mother back home got sick and I spent most my time over there and Delilah didn’t believe it, said I was fooling around. Funny, friend, because I never even thought about a woman that way who wasn’t my wife. Come to find out she was the one not being true, but I tried to work past it.
It was just one little fight over all this—the twins, work, money, not being true—with some alcohol thrown in the bargain and I killed her. It was a Friday night after I came home from the bar after work. One little comment, turned into an argument turned into screaming and her, coming at me, and I reached out to stop her and had her pinned against the wall and Delilah was screaming at me, it was my fault we was doing so bad and what not and I just meant to slap her to come out of it and calm her down and it ended up harder than that, enough to knock her to her knees on the floor. I just stood there, too shocked to move. She raised her head slowly and her eyes met mine and there was only one thing there, hate, like I knocked out what was left of the woman I married when I hit her, my beautiful Delilah hated me, and I just wanted to get rid of that look in her eyes, so I pinned her under my calused, hard-working hands, hands that tried to build everything for us, and she coughed and fought and then the feeling of falling, falling, falling, and not believing.
See, maybe I got reason to be crazy.
I dreamed of my Delilah since the first night I was here. Sometimes they are the good kind, us back when, and I am happy again and I want to stay in them forever, but I wake up by the metal stick clanging against the bars of my cell. Sometimes she is lying under me, chocking, and her eye are pleading and somehow thankful. The good dreams save me from the nights when The Taker comes. The bad ones just add to how loud I scream and how hard the guards take to me.
I lay on my bunk when the day is done. I watch the ceiling and the lights go out and I feel a scream rising in me to beg them to keep them on, and I hate to see the night when I can’t hold back no more. I asked a new guard on our E wing a few weeks past if maybe he could and he laughed in my face.
When the lights are out, that is when the big battle starts, when I feel panic coming and my head goes on and on. Use to be I only woke up in the middle of the night. Those was the nights when I was first introduced to The Taker.
The first night It was standing at the bars of my cell. I woke up by a weird sound, like a slithering sound, like the janitor man bringing the mop across our cement floor outside. Graveyard shift tonight I thought and went back to sleep. The second time that night was a tapping-scratching sound on the bars and I turned over and my eyes came wide and every part of my body was prickled with gooseflesh, just like it is now.
It wasn’t no guard I saw.
A lanky black figure with hands that was claws. Smiling in the dark.
Never have saw that face, and I know I don’t want to.
That was just the first night. It came to see me more nights after that, but not every one.
Some told me in secret It visited them.
Bruce Franklin, a few cells down, was found dead and gone on his bunk just like that, a man of twenty-seven, good, fit man. I heard his hair was silver when they found him.
There was a lot of cases like that.
Second time I remember It coming It wasn’t at my cell, no. I heard that same sound and rolled over and It was standing at ole Tom’s cell across from me, and It looked to be leaning over his bunk. I wanted to scream but course I didn’t try. Wouldn’t been able to anyhow. Pretty soon I blinked and It was really gone—in the wink of a eye, like they say. But I know what I saw. Had to be true because the next morning another body was added to the list.
Name: Thomas Pattonburg, age thirty-four.
That was when I turned really scared when night came. Couldn’t sleep right after that haven’t never since.
Then It started playing with me. Played with me more than one way, and I figured them all out. Wasn’t it funny everybody who knew about The Taker and who I could talk to was going out one by one like lights during a thunderstorm? And, the other thing, It kept getting closer and closer to my cell. One night It started out of my view, but I could hear its slithering.
Then It was twenty or thirty feet away the next night when I woke up.
Then ten.
Five.
Smiling.
At my cell and caressing the bars with its claws. I can see its small but awful sharp smile in the dark and that is all.
I know it doesn’t matter if I stay awake or not. There’s going to be a night when I roll over and see It towering next to me. Over me.
Maybe I will look into the face of my beautiful Delilah once again.
What wonderful stories these are!!! I am a big scaredy cat. All noises, creeps, bumps, or creaks scare the living daylights outta me. My husband works nights so maybe this is why! There are only two novels that I’ve read that have scared me to death. The first one was Bag of Bones by Stephen King. I was a freshman in college and still came home for about a month for Christmas and the New Year. So, I bought Bag of Bones on audio cassette to listen to at night while getting ready for bed and to help me fall asleep since it wasn’t my normal room (my parents had bought a new house). So I’m in this new house all alone in a new bedroom and I’m listening to Bag of Bones being read by none other than the master himself. King’s voice was so scary that I couldn’t listen to it at night anymore. For the duration of the novel, I slept with the closet light on. The second novel I read was just recently. The Heart Shaped Box by Joe Hill. Scared me to death. I read this every night before bed because I have a ten month old who won’t let me read during the day lol. Stupid move because remember my husband works at night! So I’m read this novel one night and I get to this really scary part (don’t want to give the story away) and my son screams like he’s having a nightmare. His monitor was right beside my ear. I know my blood pressure probably went to very unhealthy levels. I slept with not only the bathroom light on but the hallway, the stairs, and the bedroom lights as well!
[…] Comments Kristina on Menagerie’s Halloween HauntLadytink_534 (Jen) on Wednesday Wrap-Up: What’s Wonderful About Wednesday & […]
The only halfway scary book that I’ve ever made it all the way through was Jurassic Park.
Here’s my scary story:
I was about 13 years old, and both of my parents worked so I had to stay at home alone until at least six o’clock every night. My dad worked the night shift, and my mom worked at a beauty parlor.
I lived in the middle of nowhere at the end of a county road, surrounded by wooded hills. Three hills away as the crow flies there was a minimum security prison nicknamed “Camp Walk Away” by the locals because so many of the inmates just walked away from the prison while on work duty.
One of the escapees had come over the hills the year before on a weekend while I was sleeping and my dad was out having a cup of coffee on the front porch. My dad knew instantly that he was an escapee from his clothes, and when the man asked for a cup of coffee and a ride to town, my dad gave him the coffee but declined to give him a ride. After he left my dad called the cops.
So this particular afternoon, I was at home alone, sitting cross-legged on the couch, my homework papers and books spread around me when I heard footsteps on our front porch. Quiet, sneaky footsteps – the scuffing of shoes on wood.
Adrenaline rushed through my body and I shoved my books aside, and tip-toed to the door. I looked at the cheap, hollow wooden door and my legs went weak when I saw that I had not turned the lock.
I stood there panicking – should I lock the door? If I do then the criminal outside will know I’m in here, and one good kick would blow through that flimsy door. If I don’t lock it, he could walk right in.
I heard a creak, and saw the door handle start to turn. The world grew dim and I lost all feeling in my legs as I prepared to meet whatever terror hid behind the door.
The door swung slowly open, and a balding head poked through. Bright laughing blue eyes dance in humor.
“You really should lock your door, you know!” My grandfather said.
Relief and anger are two strange feelings to harbor at the same time. I must have made some reply, but the only thing I remember was a desparate need to find a place to sit down, as my legs finally gave out on me.
To this day after entering my house and closing my door, I turn the lock – without fail.
Here’s alink to my post for the Halloween Haunt: http://alessandrasplace.blogspot.com/2008/10/menageries-halloween-haunt.html
From Lauren:
Okay…the scariest book I ever read is Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn. It was amazing, but not something I would have read if my book club wasn’t reading it. Definitely a bit freaky…especially b/c it involves young kids being awful!
-Lauren
[…] The link to the Contest Site is: https://sjfreed.wordpress.com/2008/10/05/menageries-halloween-haunt/ […]
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[…] Well, I’ve written and reminded about Menagerie’s Halloween Haunt. Entries are due by the 22nd. I was really hoping for more entries due to the size of the […]
Not really having a scary story to talk about…I do have a weird one.
My son Nick died almost 2 years ago but when he was young we used to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer together when it was being broadcast. We loved it. I intended to introduce my daughter to it so I bought the first three seasons on DVD.
We were lying on my bed and the first episode was about halfway through when a balloon that had been floating in Madeleine’s room came floating around the corner into my room. It floated to the ceiling and then down to the floor and then back up at the ceiling and it stayed there.
We were totally freaked out. For a start…the air-conditioner was on in my room in the window directing cold air towards the door. Madeleine’s room is directly beside my room and I didn’t think that anything floating through the air would be able to navigate around a corner that easily plus it is an odd side by side door configuration.
We calmed down and then agreed that we thought that Nicky was visiting us because Buffy was his favourite show.
This was the first of a few such incidents that offer us immeasurable comfort.
This is a story that my grace 9 Enlgish Teacher told my class.
My teacher, Mr. Teeple, said that he used to live in London with his girlfriend. When they first moved there, they were looking for a cheap house to live in, for they didn’t have a ton of money because he was in Law school and his girlfriend was a nurse. One day they were house shopping and they came across a house that they fell in love with. They couldn’t beleave that it was so cheap. I was an older looking house, but they dicided to buy it anyway. After living in the house for a couple of months, they soon reolised why it was so cheap.
My teacher said that one time when he was sitting in the front parlour, she felt as if something was watching him, it felt as if it wanted him to leave. He said that it felt evil. He said that it was so strong that he had to leave the room. As days passed by, when he was alone, it got to the point where he could tell and mark the exact couple of rooms in the house where he felt this thing. He began to wonder it he was going crazy. He was so terrified of this thing that it became rediculous.
About a week after first dicovering this thing in those particular rooms, he came home one night to find he’s girlfriend cleaning up the kitchen and crying. He asked her what was wrong. She insisted that he wouldn’t understand and that he would think that she was crazy. He promised that he would beleave her. She told him that she felt like something was watching her. She started to cry harder. He finally calmed her down. He explaind to her that he has had the same feeling lately.
A couple of days later he said that him and his girlfriend were in bed sleeping. It was about 3:00 am. Aperintly, that is the hour of the devle or something. They had a walk-in closet in their room with a light switch in it. As I was saying, one night when they were asleep, the light in the closet mysteriously turned itself on. Being a man of commen sence and logical explenations, he tried to find one. He failed. One night just to prove that there really was something strange going on in the house, his girlfriend took a peice of strong tape and taped the switch down. They were awoken that same night at 3:00 am again by the light being switched on the the tape being broken.
Like two days after that they heard someone break into their house, at lease thats what they thought. They logicly thought that because there had been robberies close to them occure recently. At first my teacher just thought that it was there dog, then reolising that the dog was lieing on the bed at their feet with the bedroom door closed. He got up and opend the door to search the house. He didn’t find anyone in it. He was releaved. Just as he was about to go back to bed he noticed that there was something on one of the windows. He could see something though the sheer curtains. He went over, pulled back the curtains to descover that there was a white stripe of paint that was still wet on the window. It looked like someone had just come by the window and literly JUST painted it there. He started to freak out. He told his girlfriend and they came to the comclusion that there must be a speiret in their house, for they didn’t have any white pant.
This whole story is COMPLETELY TRUE, I kid you not. My teacher siad that he tells this story to all of his classes every year since. One year he said that one of the students came up to him the day after he told his class the story and explained to him that back in the dark ages, with the plaeg, people who had it got a white stripe on their house panted to warn other people not to go in their and to tell him that the time 3:00 am is the devels hour.
Please excuse my horrible spelling and grammer 🙂
Books by TJBaff: Menagerie’s Halloween Haunt
My daughter posted a story here but it seems to have disappeared. She has a learning disability and posted her story before I could help her edit it.
Was there a problem with it?
Tamara
My daughter wrote this.. she’s 11. It’s not a contest entry… but she wanted me to post it!
Halloween Night of Horrors
Once upon a time, there was a girl named Sarah. Sarah was an eight year old who had brown eyes, blonde hair and a great personality. Sarah lived in Houston, Texas with her parents, Jen and Jake and her brother, Michael. Michael is eighteen years old, has brown hair and light green eyes. Sarah’s and Michael’s parents had to go on a three-day business trip to New York. They left Michael in charge and gave him $100 for food any other miscellaneous items. Michael also earned an additional $100 for watching Sarah over the three-day weekend. One of the days that Michael had to babysit was on Halloween Night.
Every day when Sarah came home, she would usually go into her room and do her homework. On Halloween Night, it was different. She ran up to her room and got changed into her costume immediately. At 5:00pm, she came downstairs all ready to go Trick-or-Treating. In the kitchen, she thought she saw Michael. She said, “Hey, Michael. Are you ready to go Trick-or-Treating?” She touched his arm. It was stone cold and hard as a rock.
“Michael?” she asked nervously.
She spun the body around and there lie a mannequin that looked exactly like Michael.
At first, she thought that it was Michael playing a trick on her so she walked into the living room. There sat another person on the couch. She was reaching to grab the person, thinking it was Michael, when something jumped on her back. She screamed. She reached around and felt something furry. It was just her little kitten.
Sarah turned to reach for Michael again when she felt a tap on her back. She spun around, jumped and screamed because there stood a man that had the Grim Reaper’s face. Frightened, she ran up the stairs. She heard somebody walking up the stairs behind her. When she turned around, she saw that it was Michael holding a Grim Reaper’s mask. They both laughed. Sarah said, “That was not funny!” Michael replied, “Yes, it was. Come on, you just laughed!” She admitted that it was kind of funny and promised that she’d get him back next year.
“Who is the person on the couch, Michael?” asked Sarah.
“Oh, it was only my friend Bob,” Michael answered.
Sarah, Michael and Bob decided to head out to Trick-or-Treat. As they left the house, they heard a deep laughter echoing through their house. Someone was in there!
The Scariest book I ever read was Stephen King’s It. I read it the summer I was old enough to hang out all day long with my neighborhood pals. We, actually, all read it that summer. Every time we passed a storm drain, we’d all move to the other side of the street.
There was a stadium down the neighborhood and if you were stealthy enough, you could get in when it was closed. I remember we actually had a pow-wow about how dangerous it would be if something reminiscent of ‘the clown’ was waiting for one of us in the stadium. We decided it wasn’t safe and the stadium was now off limits.
We also spent a lot of time that summer in the library – researching the history of our town. Well, we only looked at old pictures to see if there was any one in them every couple hundred of years.
We were in our early teens, but you would have thought we were young enough to actually believe our little town was exactly like Derry, Maine in It. There had to be some sick secret. There had to be.
I read this book at night, in bed, when I was supposed to be asleep. Before ‘It’ I didn’t mind closing my door at night. During and (for a few months) after It, I had to have my door open (I was afraid a clown was going to get my little sister and brother); and my closet door had to be closed and blocked by a chair (I was afraid a clown would come out of my closet). I would be afraid to close the book for the night, because I didn’t want it to drag on too many more days because it was just so scary that some clown was abducting children. When I finally finished, I actually threw the book away. I couldn’t stand to have it in the house.
Over the years, I’ve sort of begun a Stephen King collection. Interestingly, this is the ONLY book I’m not in any hurry to bring into the house. I’ve seen the movie a thousand times, but I’ve never gone back and re-read that movie. I also have never had a clown knick-knack in my house, at a party or anywhere near me. If I see one at a street festival, I stay away from it, and find myself walking on the opposite side of the road of storm drains.
Its sort of hilarious now, but Stephen King’s It is the one book that truly scared the bejeebus out of me!
These might not be really scary, but I’ll give it a go. Spooky things have happened on and off in the townhouse where we’ve lived for the past 8 years. One night my daughter had trouble sleeping and my husband was ready for bed early, so they went up to our room. I stayed downstairs. I heard footsteps in the bedroom and the floor creaking where it always does in certain spots. And the walking kept going back and forth, back and forth, like someone was pacing. I wondered what the heck was going on in there, so I went upstairs, opened the door, the noise stopped abruptly, and both my husband and daughter were sound asleep snoring. As soon as I went back downstairs, the footsteps and creaking started up again. I went back up to check, and nothing. I just gave up and eventually the footsteps stopped. Though I was a bit freaked out to be the only one awake, but I figure if there’s a ghost and it’s not hostile, then let it be.
When my husband worked nights, I’d say goodbye to him at the door and immediately lock the screen door and both locks on the main door. The neighborhood wasn’t that great at the time, so locking the doors was a routine. I never forgot to do this. One day I locked the doors like usual, and went to go make dinner. My daughter was only a toddler at the time, not tall enough or strong enough to manage the locks. I went to check on her and right away I noticed the doors were unlocked. I’d only been out of the room for a minute or so. I went over and locked the doors and went back to the kitchen. Came back a minute later, and they were unlocked again.
I’d put things on the kitchen table and they’d disappear. One day I got my new debit card in the mail so I left it on the table so I’d remember to take it with me to activate it the next morning, and it was missing. My husband didn’t take it, daughter couldn’t reach it at the time, and we looked everywhere. A few days pass, and I said loudly to no one in the house (hoping if it was a ghost it would hear), “Will you stop taking my things!” And the next day, the card turned up on the table.
One night while I was sleeping (hubby was downstairs watching tv), I heard a click, and the bedroom closet opened like the latch popped. I heard it and opened my eyes. I closed them again, and heard another noise. I opened my eyes, and the door was slowly opening. It opened about 6 inches or so and just stopped. I ignored it and went back to bed.
One night while reading a book, the house was completely quiet. No tv, hubby at work, daughter in bed. I hear talking at the bottom of the stairs. A woman’s voice, soft. I look out the window, my neighbor isn’t home. My neighbor was a man who lived alone and never had visitors. The unit on the other side of us was vacant. I checked on my daughter, sound asleep, and it wasn’t her voice I’d heard.
My daughter was playing in her room and saw a black shadow figure walk out of our room, past her door, and into the bathroom. She’s been telling me this story, the same story, no added details, since she was 5. I can’t verify it, I never saw the shadow figure.
The scariest thing that ever happened to me was one night I fell asleep on the couch. I tend to do that on Friday nights, and hubby will sleep on the other couch because I don’t like to be down there alone. I heard a garbled whisper in my ear, felt breath on my cheek, and immediately woke up and there was nothing there. Just pitch dark, hubby asleep on the other side of the room.
Those are just the creepiest things that have happened in my house.
I got this really cool link for an entry:
What’s Up…
In last week’s issue I made a mistake in the link for the Cool Stop Motion Jack O´ Lantern, so here is the correct link http://www.evtv1.com/player.aspx?itemnum=9474&aid=
Cool Stop Motion Jack O´ Lantern
This week clip is based off a column written by Mary Schmich, columnist for the Chicago Tribune.
Enjoy,
Steve
Here’s another groovy link for you to check out from Becky:
http://blbooks.blogspot.com/2008/09/devouring.html
Becky
Becky’s Book Reviews: http://blbooks.blogspot.com/
From Annie Girl 1138:
I live in a house that is haunted. Two people for sure have died in the house. One in the very room I write in every day. I have blogged about it and here is a link:
http://anniegirl1138.wordpress.com/2007/10/02/ghostbusters/
Serena of Savvy Verse & Wit’s Entry:
Hi: Here’s my story.
One early spring, late afternoon, my husband and I traveled to a secluded section of Silver Spring, MD., to check out an abandoned area that once acted as a hotel in the 1920s, a hospital, and a school for girls. The buildings were in disrepair, but the large building, which once acted as a hotel, was still structurally imposing. We walked onto the premises and my battery died in my camera, which I thought was odd. After watching all those paranormal shows, the experts usually say ghosts affect electronic devices first. We shrugged it off and I put in new batteries and we walked on.
We got separated for a bit as I wandered off to take photos in one direction and my husband in the other. As I rounded down the hill to exit the grounds, a young girl in a 1920s dress and shall walked past me, but she stopped for a moment to say how lovely the weather was and how magnificent the buildings were. I agreed and walked on. Not two minutes later, my husband came up behind me in the direction the girl just walked away from me. I asked him if he talked to the nice girl that walked by and he said what girl. I dragged him around the corner and she was no where in sight. He would have had to pass directly by her on his way to meet me.
That’s my haunted halloween story. Eerie, huh?!
—
Cordially,
Serena M. Agusto-Cox
Savvy Verse & Wit
Mary K. from L.A. Says:
October 22, 2008 at 3:41 pm edit
This isn’t a ghost story, but back in the 70s, when I was in my early 20s, and lived in a house on the side of a hill near downtown L.A. where you couldn’t see the neighbors’ houses because of all the foliage between the houses and the slant of the hill. One night, I was reading Stephen King’s “Salem’s Lot,”, alone in the house (my husband was at work), & the story scared me so much that I had to stop reading and find something mundane to do to calm down. I started cleaning the kitchen (that’s another scary thing ~ ya never know what you’ll find in my fridge ~ but we won’t go there now).
Anyway, I finished cleaning and decided to take out the trash. I went to the side yard & turned on the light, which promptly burned out with a “pop.” The large trash barrel wasn’t all that far from the door, so I stepped out into pitch darkness, took a couple of steps, and froze.
In the utter silence, I swear I heard rustling in the bushes, but there wasn’t a wind. The vampires in “Salem’s Lot” came to mind, and all of a sudden I just knew there were vampires creeping through the shrubbery toward me. I dropped the trash bag and scurried back inside, locked the door, ran to my bedroom & looked in my closet for my box of keepsakes and mementos where I had put my mother’s old see-in-the-dark rosary.
I swear, I wore that thing every night for a week and refused to go outside after sunset without it for longer than that! Boy that Stephen King sure did know how to write terrifying horror stories!
I got this fun boo:
bexadler Says:
October 23, 2008 at 12:21 am edit
I don’t have a story, I just wanted to say that this is the cutest poem EVER! I love your blogs…how do you come up with such creative ways to say things?
A Missouri Ghost story
The uninvited : the true story of the Union screaming house / by Steven LaChance..
very spooky.
Synopsis
Its screams still wake me from sleep. I see the faceless man standing in that basement washing away the blood from his naked body.
Steven LaChance was forever transformed by the paranormal attacks that drove him and his family from their home in Union, Missouri. When another family falls victim to the same dark entity, Steven returns to the dreaded house to offer aid and find healing.
Paranormal investigators, psychics, and priests are consulted, but no relief is found. The demon’s presence—screams, growls, putrid odors, invisible shoves, bites, and other physical violations—only grow worse. LaChance chronicles how this supernatural predator infects those around it. But the one who suffers most is the current homeowner, Helen. When the entity takes possession and urges Helen toward murder and madness, LaChance must engage in a hair-raising battle for her soul.
The Uninvited is a true and terrifying tale of extreme haunting, demon possession, and an epic struggle between good and evil.