We Don't Talk About Sarah

The original story can be found here.

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I always wanted a little sister...

I always wanted a little sister. I would beg my parents, "Please? Pleeeeaasssee?" and they'd roll their eyes and tell me that it wasn't as simple as I thought. That didn't stop me from talking about it every chance I got though.

When they brought Sarah home, it was the happiest day of my life. She was so cute! I couldn't wait to share my toys with her. I started going through them, deciding which ones were hers and which ones were mine. I borrowed my daddy's label maker and started putting our names on each thing so we wouldn't get them confused.

The Canister

I was 9, going on 10 years old. We lived in a small town in Vermont, in a large, green house at the crest of a steep hill. Up the street from us, the road ended at a large forest. My brothers and I would walk up there and play in the shelter of the thick tree branches. None of the trees were suitable for climbing, but enough had fallen over that we could build makeshift forts from their remains. We’d explore the pine-needle carpet for bugs, whack through the ferns with sticks like explorers, or just play hide and seek in the dense thickets.

Just beyond the edge of the forest at the top of the hill, there was a little stream. Beside the stream was the burnt-out skeleton of an old house. We had been told that the property belonged to somebody, so stay off, but on occasion we felt brave enough to explore the wreckage and find buried treasure.

The Crawling House on Black Pond Road

The original story can be found here.

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This is a place for people who can't sleep. I can't sleep. I have to share because maybe I won't feel if I share. Dr. Kirsch says to write and get it off my chest. Writing about it might release me from it. What should I title this? "Therapy"?

I'm currently seated at a computer terminal in a little, white, sterile room. There's about a half dozen other computer terminals here, all facin the same way like a classroom. There's posters on the walls with medical information. Everyone in em looks happy and complacent. Zombies. This place is called Sleep HealthCenters, just outside of Boston. It's a clinic for people with sleepin disorders.

I'm feelin a little loopy from the eszopiclone, so if my writing gets all garbled just deal with it and I can edit it when I'm clear-headed.

The doc wants me to do a little writing. He said that repetition can help with insomnia, and I gotta admit, if things were normal, this room and the clack of these keystrokes would probably make me pass right the fuck out.

Things ain't normal though.

A Game of Flashlight Tag

The original story can be found here.

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When I was ten, I played a late night game of flashlight tag with a bunch of neighborhood kids. If you don't know what flashlight tag is, it's the same as tag, but you play it in the dark, the person who's "it" gets a flashlight, and they have to yell the name of the person they see with it in order to "tag" them. It was really cloudy that night, and most people had their curtains drawn, so it was the perfect level of darkness for hiding in.

The side of the street my house was on was skirted by a broad length of woods. That was basically the boundary for our side of the game. You could run through any yard, even go across the street and run through their yards, but you weren't allowed to hide in the woods, because it was too difficult to find anyone in there, and it was very easy to trip over tree limbs or end up with poison oak. Of course, this rule was frequently and flagrantly ignored when people got too close to being caught. They'd duck off into the bushes for a few seconds, or run behind a group of trees to evade capture.

A Room of Pitch Black

The original story can be found here.

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When I was 8, my mother's mother's sister, my Great Aunt Regina, passed away. I barely knew her, but my mother took me and my brothers and sisters out to Indianapolis to attend her wake. There were many relatives visiting for the funeral and the accommodations were limited, so we ended up staying in her now empty house. Her husband, my Great Uncle Peter, had passed away a few years prior. Of course, by empty I mean that it was no longer occupied. As for furnishings though, the house was palatial. Every room was filled with antique furniture, antique lamps, all manner of extravagant decor. We (my two brothers and I) were directed to a dusty living room and a small wicker basket of ancient wooden toys and told that beyond that basket, we were not allowed to play with anything else. No climbing on the furniture, no turning anything on. Nada.

With that one rule in place, we were then foolishly left to our own devices, as everyone else left to attend a reception before the funeral itself. We were abandoned in a crypt of a living room with a basket of wooden blocks and toy trains. So, naturally, we ignored the baby toys and started exploring the enormous house. We didn't touch any of the things, we just went from room to room. The place was so big though, that we quickly got separated and were calling each other from room to room, eventually making a game of it, purposefully losing my little brother until he'd cry.

Dinner By Swamp Light

The original story can be found here.

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The events I am about to describe may sound far-fetched and surreal, but please keep an open mind. There's a reason I am drawn to horror stories and to places like this. It's because I've experienced things in my life that convinced me that the origins of horror have one foot set firmly in reality. I've only told what I'm about to tell you in its entirety to one other person, and that was only because I married her. No, this isn't a proposal. Any unnecessary embellishments are purely for entertainment value, because I've given up convincing most people that this actually happened.

When I was five years old, my family moved from Fort Wayne, Indiana to a small town in the middle of Vermont. The place we moved into was an old Victorian, turn-of-the-century house, painted an odd shade of green I can only best describe as falling somewhere between olive and pine. Many of the houses in town had titles, possibly carried down from long ago when they belonged to the local college (a military school my father had accepted the position of Dean at, which is why we moved in the first place). Our house had a small plaque by the side door that read, "Spider Hall". It was a rather daunting name, and my siblings and I all expressed our concerns about living in a house with such a title. Fortunately, the house never really lived up to the name, but it helped add to the atmosphere that surrounded that place.

The Eye in the Knothole

The original story can be found here.

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Now I don't exactly know with 100% certainty that the thing I'm about to tell y'all about was paranormal per se, but it shook me up something fierce. One of those moments that sears into your brain and you see sometimes when you close your eyes, ya know?

My family's got a log cabin, a sort of summer cottage, only "cottage" is a rather generous term for it... "shack" might be more appropriate. Rusty well water on the tap, wood stove for warmth, and a decrepit old outhouse for doin your business in. Obviously, to keep the place nice, you build the outhouse a good distance from the cabin, so people don't gotta smell it all the time. This also means that when you wake up in the middle of the night and you really gotta go, you got a good hike ahead of you-- through dark woods.

The Crystal Egg

The original story can be found here.

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When my wife and I got married, we spent our honeymoon in Honduras. While we were there, we did the usual purchasing of mementos and postcards to give to loved ones. It was in a small shop that sold curios and knick-knacks that my wife found an exquisitely crafted, crystal egg. When she showed it to me, I knew it would be a perfect gift for my mother, who had a modest collection of little crystal sculptures. Looking through the egg, most everything was a blur, but I could make out the shapes of people walking by and my new wife smiling at me.

My mother was in her eighties, under the watchful eye of a good live-in nurse ever since my father had passed away. She lit right up when she unwrapped the egg we had brought back for her. She held it up to the open window and the room was filled with tiny rainbows from the light refracting through the crystal. I felt like a good son.

The Body on Main Street

The original story can be found here.

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This happened on a Halloween when I was in high school. I say that so you can understand why some of the people acted the way they did. You know how Halloween gets. All sorts of pranks are pulled, people cover themselves with fake blood, etc. When you see a body lying in the street on Halloween, sure, you're shocked at first. But the shock quickly changes to a variety of different emotions depending on the individual. Some people laugh, some people shake their heads and roll their eyes. My friend Cindy got angry, thinking it was a mean trick to pull.

That's why it was twenty minutes to nine before anybody bothered to take a closer look.

Why I Refuse to Work Late Anymore

The original story can be found here.

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I used to work for a marketing firm located in the Back Bay section of Boston. It was a small company, but large enough that we operated on an entire floor of the building we rented, and that I was not familiar with everyone else who worked there. I started in 2007 as part of their web-based media team. For those of you who don't know anything about the marketing business, it's very client-driven. A team of producers sell our services to companies, often a little over-zealously, and the designers and developers typically have to work like slaves to meet the producers' promises. This can mean late nights, taking a cab home because the commuter rail has shut down. It also means coming in on weekends and working late then too.

It was November of 2008, and we had a big promotional site being developed for a rather important client. I'm not at liberty to give out the details surrounding the project, but it's not relevant to this story anyway. What's relevant is that the client was pushy, as most are, and the site was complex, so I ended up having to come in on a Saturday and work late into the evening to have something ready to present by Monday. If you've ever worked in an office on the weekend, you know just how different and isolated it can feel. There were other people at first, ambitious or merely driven, doing their thing but never our paths did cross.

Less Than One Night in a Dead Man's House (aka Terror Haute)

The original story can be found here.

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My parents live in Terre Haute, Indiana. They own a number of rental properties there. When I graduated from college, I found myself looking for work and having to move back home until I found a job. My parents had not been expecting this, and had converted my bedroom into an office for my father. I spent the first few days sleeping on a fold-out futon in the basement.

One of my parents' tenants passed away in his home just after I moved back. Neighbors had called the police after the newspapers had started piling up and they realized they hadn't seen him in a while. He was an 80 year old widower with no children or next of kin, so nobody came by to collect his things. My parents needed to get the house in good condition to put it back out on the market, so they told me that since I wasn't working, I should go over and try to clean the house up so that they could show it to prospective tenants. In fact, they said, why not take my things and go stay there until it's done? I'd have a bed to sleep in at least. Well, I'm not superstitious, but I was not about to sleep in a dead man's bed. I could get some nasty rash or who knows what other types of germs were all over his sheets. The thought is just repulsive. But I conceded to stay there with an air mattress and a sleeping bag and get the place looking nice.