Happy Halloween

[David Lantrip MCPF GCF]

Every year I look forward to the annual spooky story thread on FARK. I can usually count on not getting much work done on October 31 because of it. I consider myself a quite rational person and I don't put any stock in the supernatural, but I can suspend disbelief for a day and ignore that little voice whispering "It's all a crock" in my ear. Let me a share some of my favorites:

I was driving a shortcut from Twentynine Palms, CA to Albuquerque, NM. Twentynine Palms is located in the desolate high desert east of LA. The shortcut was all two lane road through total nothingness, except for passing through Amboy, CA. Amboy is a nearly abandoned town nearly as far below sea level as Death Valley, with a dormant volcano and lava field on one side and a salt flat on the other. It was also, at the time, a hotspot for satanic group activity.

So I was driving by myself in the afternoon. I stopped in Amboy and snapped a picture of the city sign, just to prove I was there to friends who dared me to take that route to I-40. I got back in my car and proceeded to drive up into the mountain range between Amboy and I-40.

Once I reach the top I am driving north through a canyon with high grass on both sides of the road. Up ahead I see some stuff in the middle of the road. As I approach I slow down to see a red Pontiac Fiero stopped sideways across both lanes, a suitcase open with clothes scattered everywhere and two bodies laying face down in the road, a man and a woman.

I stop a hundred feet or so away and the hair on the back of my neck is standing up. Being a Marine, I reach under the seat and pull out a 9mm pistol and chamber a round. Something seemed very wrong, it looked too perfect as if it were staged. An ambush? Was I being paranoid? Something was just wrong. Getting out of the car seemed unthinkable, it was the horror movie move.

As I scanned the road I saw a line I could drive. Pass the guy in the road on his left, swerve to the right side of the woman, behind the Fiero and I'd be on the other side. I dropped it into first gear, punched it and drove the line I planned.

I passed the back of the Fiero without hitting it or either of the bodies in the road. I continued forward a couple hundred feet and slowed down so I could breathe and let my heart slow down. As I looked up into the rearview mirror I saw that the two bodies had gotten up to their knees and twenty or so people emerged from the tall grass on either side of the road by the car and bodies.

At that moment my right foot smashed the gas pedal to the floor and did not let up until I had to slowdown for the I-40 east onramp.

I will never know what would have happened to me had I gotten out of the car to check on the bodies or stopped my car closer to them. Somehow I do not think it would have been good. Sometimes real life can be scarier than a movie.

 

[David Lantrip MCPF GCF]

Psychosis or ghost story, I don't know.

When I was little, probably about four or five years old, I had an imaginary "friend" (I think.) It was yellow and about four feet tall (taller than me at the time), bipedal, and had oversized eyes that always looked straight ahead otherwise, relatively human and naked. I called the thing "Fishy." The wierdest thing, though, was it scared the hell out of me. I didn't want anything to do with it, and I couldn't imagine, as a child, that it was coming from inside my head.

It "walked" (more like skated along) on the walls in the rooms of our house, and apparently could not leave those surfaces. I knew that if I played outside, it could only follow me to the limits of the garage. It always followed me, too, even though I often told it not to. I had difficulty concentrating on drawing things or reading because Fishy was always standing somewhere on the wall, looking over my shoulder. It did not ever sit down, it didn't have facial expressions, and it never made any noise.

The only times I ever interacted with Fishy were when I was sick in the middle of the night or when I woke up panicked from nightmares. Those times, if I looked at it intently, Fishy would methodically start drifting along the wall towards my parents' bedroom; around the corner, out the door, and down the hall. As soon as he was out of sight, I'd start calling for Mom (as in: "Mooooom, I'm gonna barrrrrf...") and she'd show up quickly (god bless ya, mom) to help me through it. Fishy would come back, though, as soon as I'd recovered. Then it would stare for the rest of the night, two days, or longer, in the direction of my parents' room.

It finally vanished when my sister was born in 1992. I was almost 8 years old by then, and I'd been ignoring Fishy for about a year, but not so much that I didn't notice it had learned to fly off the wall and visit the floor from time to time.

There was one instance, in the last two months of Fishy-ness when I saw it at someone else's house; a new home that friends of mine, two sisters, were moving into. Their father walked into the room where we were playing with the moving boxes to give us another one, and in the darkened laundry room behind him, filling the entire doorway at many times it's normal size, was Fishy, staring down the father's back. It wasn't scary, so much as irritating.

We moved away from there less than a year later.

 

[David Lantrip MCPF GCF]

I was 15 years old and it was the first summer where my parents decided to take a weeklong vacation to visit my grandmother. This was great for me for two reasons, the first, I was allowed to stay home alone for the week, and the second, my mother had left me a 4 gallon tub of bubblegum ice-cream that she had told me to go wild on.

I stayed awake every night late, watching Japanese anime, drinking root-beer and eating the heck out of that bubble gum ice cream. I was in 15 year old boy Heaven. On the second to last night of the week everything was going the same. It was three o clock in the morning when I finally finished the last episode of "bubblegum crisis" (which I'd loved watching while eating bubblegum ice-cream) and decided it was time to go downstairs to bed. So I did.

I'm not sure what time it was when I woke up, my room was dark, I was laying in bed facing my wall and I could tell that if I didn't get out of bed my bladder was going to burst. As I started to turn over in my bed so that I could climb out, something happened that to this day (34 years old now) I'll never forget. From right beside my head, almost like a breath away from my ear I heard as clear as day a voice. The voice was strange though because it was devoid of all inflection, all tone, all emotion. It only spoke three words to me...

"Don't turn around"

That was it, nothing more, nothing less. But I didn't question that voice. It was so clear, so close to my head and so flat and inhuman in its substance that held my bladder and did not turn around to get out of bed until I could see the second rays of sunlight peaking through my curtain the next morning.
Just... "Don't turn around."

 

[Mikki Kavich MCPF]

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO...those were good!

Here is mine...

I lived in Puerto Rico for a year or so twice when I was 9-11 years old. Both times we lived in small block houses. The second time my mother and her husband went to look at a big house on the beach. The day was beautiful and the house we ended up at big and white stucco and was vacant and in need of repair. A lot of the walls had graffiti and the floors were covered with trash and leaves.

We went up to the second floor and on the landing there was a window missing the glass and the window faced the beach and the view was beautiful.

After standing there for just a second I got very upset and started crying, the adults had gone on to look into upstairs rooms and had left me on the landing.
When my mom heard me and came running back and by then I was hysterical and wanted OUT of the house. My mother's husband was not pleased as he was not done looking but I was getting out of there.

My mother tried to calm me down and in the end she left me in the car while they looked around a bit more.

I can't explain what happened the the moment between looking out that window and scared as hell but later when they thought I was asleep in the back seat they started talking about the "party" that had gone on in that house and the two teens that had died falling out of that window.

All I know is that was the only time I have felt so strongly that there was something bad that I could not see.