The haunted cemetery

My brother Steve will deny this, which is to be expected; but this is how I've told the story to my children for a few years. You'll have to decide for yourselves where you stand.

The Old Stone Church is about 5½ miles from where we grew up, in the heart of Monroeville, Pa. It's on Monroeville Boulevard and Stroschein Road, right across from the Eat 'n Park diner and a quarter-mile uphill from the Miracle Mile.

It's the site of a former Presbyterian church that's more than 150 years old, which a while ago sold the property and moved to another location. It still gets used for photo ops, and for weddings; and of course for funerals, because it has a large open and active cemetery. (I mean active in the sense that it's maintained and in use, not in the sense that every Halloween the dead all get up and throw a head-banger of a party, but if you know differently than I do on that score, please feel free to share.) The place employs a caretaker who cares for the lawn meticulously, watering the grass and raking things when needed, among other responsibilities.

Like most other cemeteries, Crossroads Cemetery has accumulated a few ghost stories over the years. The land once belonged to a farmer named Robert Johnston. As the story goes in the spring of 1799 when the winter's snows melted, Johnston found the body of a small boy in his woods. Unable to locate his parents, Johnston decided to bury the boy by the spot where he had found him, which happened to be near where he had buried his sister-in-law three years earlier. In 1800, he dedicated that small piece of his land to be a cemetery.

Supposedly on some wintry nights you can see the boy struggling to find shelter. There are a few other stories associated with the place, much of which are bollux, like the supposed "Monroeville strangler" buried there, whom teens claim to have seen while they were walking through the cemetery at night, or Caroline Cooper, who legend says hated kids when she was alive and will pull you down into her grave if you walk on it. Standard stuff.

I tell you this not because I think it's particularly credible, but because it helps you to understand what happened back in July 1984.

My brother Steve was 12, and like most boys that age, was determined never to let people think of him as a chicken. And if you must know, he wasn't. When he was 15 and we went skiing for the first time, he dived headlong into it and was swooping down the intermediate slope before he had figured out how to brake or steer, because he was determined to enjoy himself and the beginner slope was too dull. (I pretty much stayed on the beginner slope the entire time I bothered trying to ski, and was ready to go far sooner than he was.) Maybe because he's the youngest of four brothers Steve has always been one to jump into things with both feet.

So when we dared him to walk through Crossroads Cemetery, he wasn't about to back down even after we'd been telling stories about Caroline Cooper and the Monroeville Strangler, especially once Bill started egging him on.

Blair and I were worried about getting trouble if our parents found out, but Bill was enjoying watching Steve squirm too much to let that stop us. We were soon all loaded into the car, with Bill at the wheel, on our way down Saunders Station Road and headed toward Monroeville.

Along the way, Bill spelled out the terms: Steve had to walk through the graveyard, from one corner to the other and back, right through the middle both times; and then had to repeat the process with the other two corners, while we watched. If he did this, Bill would give him ten dollars.

We got to the church parking lot, and after a little stalling, Steve got going. The moon wasn't out, and it was a little cloudy, so although we were doing our best to keep track of him, we kept losing him and then finding him again a minute later. After about ten minutes in, we were getting bored, and wondering if Bill would let Steve out of the bet early, when Blair noticed that Steve was slowing down. Then he stopped moving, and disappeared completely.

Later after he had recovered, Steve told us that he was actually a lot more frightened than he had let on. He'd been thinking of Caroline Cooper's ghost, and wondered where her grave was; and kept thinking of all the times he'd heard that story or others like it. And then there was that serial killer. But he'd pressed on, telling himself "There are no monsters, and there are no ghosts."

He was about five minutes in when he felt something brush his ankle. But he steadied himself, and kept going. "There are no monsters and there are no ghosts."

Now in the dim light, there were plenty of shadows, and plenty of places for things and people to hide, and we'd been feeding his imagination with plenty of stories earlier that evening. So it shoudn't be a surprise that when something actually grabbed his ankle, Steve started to panic.

"There are no monsters, and there are no ghosts," he told himself again, out loud this time, and he took another step.

Whatever was holding his ankle tightened its grip. He pulled harder, and so did it. After a moment, it gave way a bit, but only a bit. Something caught his other ankle, and slowed him down further.

"There are no monsters and there are no ghosts," he said, even louder, and he admitted by this point he didn't care if we heard him or not. He was getting that panicked.

He took another step, and something lunged at him from out of the darkness and knocked him out cold. He had time to scream, and he went down.

Back in the church parking lot, we heard him scream, and the three of us ran down to find him. I think we were all starting to wonder if there was some truth to the ghost stories, or if someone was hiding there to waylay people or just avoid police. We were worried about our brother, and we were worried what we were going to say to our parents to explain what had happened.

We found him almost on the other side of the cemetery, by Caroline Cooper's grave. His feet were wrapped in a garden hose, and he was out cold from being hit in the forehead after stepping on the caretaker's rake.


Copyright © 2018 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Attending School on Halloween

Malcolm attended the charter school in New Brunswick back in 2005, making him one of the kids who enrolled in the charter school the year after it finally had moved into its own building on the south side of the city. What happened to the kid is a damn shame.

Malcolm was a quiet and unassuming kid, all things considered. One of his teachers, who told me his story once we were at the school and I had joined the board, remembered Malcolm as someone who followed directions and did what was expected of him without complaining. Sometimes he was a little too compliant and didn't advocate for himself, but when push came to shove, you could count on him to find a solution to whatever problem he was faced with.

Malcolm was from North Brunswick, but transferred to the charter school when he was in second grade, thanks to the enrollment lottery. Nowadays that would be harder to do, because the school is established and its lottery fills up with students from its three home districts; but at the time the charter school was younger and never filled up its vacancies with local students. There were even a couple students from the Oranges who attended.

Anyway, back to Malcolm. Being as his family was new to the school and unfamiliar with its calendar, his mother (understandably) assumed that it was open the same days as the schools his older sisters and brother went to, and so that Halloween she packed him a lunch and dropped him off as usual since it was a Monday morning, and everyone had school on Mondays.

He got to school, and when he didn't see anyone running around outside, he just assumed he was late, so he went in. It wasn't quite what he was expecting. There were teachers there, and there were students; but none of them was anyone he knew. Feeling very confused and unsure what to do, he walked to his classroom and sat down.

Now when people think of schools that are closed, particularly on holidays like Halloween or Christmas, we usually think of them as empty. They're not. They're always filled with the ghosts of students who went there and the teachers who led the classrooms. Some of them died there, and others just had nowhere else to go, but they all come back. How could they not? When they were alive that was where they spent half their time. The school remembers, and it pulls them back.

So Malcolm sat there in class with a classroom full of 20 other students, all of whom were dead. The teacher? Also dead.

About halfway through show-and-tell, he realized he was the only one in the room who was breathing. This made him feel very awkward.

Not long after that they went to gym class, where the teacher had them play dodgeball. He felt he was at a disadvantage because the ball actually would hit him,whereas it went through the other students.

He had always loved music class but this new teacher played everything in a minor key and had them enter and leave the room to Chopin's funeral march.

When they returned to class and started their personal education packets, Malcolm started to feel that the other children were pointing at him and laughing. By the time it came for circle time and everyone gathered on the carpet, no one wanted to sit next to him and he was ready to cry.

The teacher noticed how sad and lonely he looked, so she encouraged him to sit next to her. She was pale and it was very cold next to her, but Malcolm didn't want to be disrespectful so he sat right next to her, criss-cross the way he had been taught.

"Now I know if you're here, you're probably still feeling upset about how you died and that's why you don't want to cross over," the teacher said. Her voice was calm and matter-of-fact, and it took a moment for Malcolm to realize what it was she just had said.

"Let's take a moment to talk about how we died, and share with each other how that makes us feel, and what we've been doing in all the time since," she said in her reasonable teacher voice. "Malcolm, why don't you go first?"

"But I'm not dead!" he protested. "I'm a live boy."

There are moments in every school when the entire classroom is focused on one student, and that student does something inappropriate. Maybe the student farts, or breaks the desk when they sit down, or just says something unrelated to the class activity. Whatever it is, it's something that turns the entire classroom on its head, wrests control from the teacher and leaves all the other students laughing.

That was what happened to Malcolm. The entire class burst into laughter and even the teacher had a hard time stifling back her giggles. His ears burning, Malcolm ran from the classroom while shouts of "Live boy! Live boy!" followed him.

He ducked into bathroom to escape the taunting, but in his hurry, he failed to realize it was the girls room. A girl ghost shrieked when she saw him, and her face melted away until he screamed and tried to run away, only to find that the door had closed behind already.

"Live boy! Live boy! Go away, live boy!" The taunts followed him out into the hall and all the way to the office. There he discovered that the door was locked, and the receptionist wouldn't let him out until school was over for the day. It was only 10 o'clock.

"Go back to class, live boy," she said.

Heartbroken, defeated and dreading the thought of eating lunch surrounded by a bunch of ghosts, Malcolm started shuffling back to class, when he found himself staring at the large trash bin the custodian was getting ready to take outside. Malcolm climbed inside and burrowed his way in until he was completely covered with paper towels and other trash. A moment later, the bin began to roll down the hallway, and ten minutes later he was free.

Alas, the story does not have a happy ending. When he made it home an hour later, pale and weak in the knees from his ordeal, his mother would have none of it.

"No son of mine is playing hookey," she said. "Your sisters are at school, and your brother is at school, and you are going back to school this minute. Ghost teachers and ghost classmates. The very idea!"

She took him back to the charter school and watched from the car as her son, defeated, walked back in.

On Tuesday, the education director came to school after a three-day weekend and found a disciplinary note on her desk with Malcolm's name on it that said he had been found truant and was being held after for punishment.

He has never been seen since.


Copyright © 2018 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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The haunted park

A block away from our house is Feaster Park, a neighborhood playground with all the amenities kids these days could want. There's a sandpit, there are slides and monkey bars, swings for little kids and swings for big kids, basketball courts and picnic tables to sit and chill with one another.

We've taken the girls there many times, especially when they were younger and we didn't have the playset in the back yard that we eventually got a year or two before the Youngest came along. We've had good times there, even though the place isn't perfect. There's graffiti sprayed on the playground equipment, I've heard reports of drug paraphernalia in the sand, and there was one time I found a used condom on the slide.

"Also," I told Middle Daughter's friends Tanner and Isabella on the morning of Halloween, as we celebrated her eighth birthday party, "it's haunted."

I pointed across the street at Pittman Park, which looks and acts like an annex to Feaster Park. "That used to be a cemetery," I told them. (It did.) "After the Civil War, New Brunswick took the soldiers from the city who had died in the war, buried them there and dedicated the park to their memory." (All true.)

"So why is it haunted?"

"Ah," I said. "The soldiers saw some horrible things in the war, and died violent deaths. After all that, they found it hard to sleep, and when they moaned and walked at night, it disturbed the people who lived nearby, which is why they were sent back to New Brunswick. The people hoped that if the soldiers were sent home in honor, that they would finally rest and go to their final sleep."

That's how it worked for most of the soldiers, I explained. But there was one soldier who was especially restless, and even a quiet place like Pittman Park couldn't calm him. His ghost kept walking, and started disturbing the spirits of the other soldiers buried at Pittman Park with him, until finally the city dug up his body and moved him across the street to the corner of Feaster Park, where they buried him again, away from the other soldiers, and planted a tree on top of him to keep him still.

It worked, of course, but only for a while. The tree grew, and its roots held him in place, but he was awake and restless and being held there against his will just made him angrier. But the years passed, and without any new sightings of the ghost, people forgot about him and moved on.

Until one day, of course, when a boy saw the tree and decided to climb it. He walked up the tree and grabbed a branch and the wind shook the leaves and he thought he heard a voice say "Boy, don't climb my tree." But what did he care? He held onto the branch with his right hand, and he planted his left foot on the trunk, and he swung himself up into the tree.

The branches shook as he got his footing, and the leaves rustled, and he thought he heard a voice say "Boy get down now, and let me sleep," but he was only 8, and trees were meant for climbing, so he stood in the tree and he grabbed a higher branch — and his foot was stuck.

The boy tried to pull himself up, but it was no good, his foot was caught. And then for a moment he thought he was in luck because it seemed like the branches where he was stuck were giving way a little, and then he realized his foot was sinking into the trunk.

He gave a start and tried to push himself free with his other foot, but then it got stuck too, and in a moment he was caught up to his knees in the trunk.

"Somebody help!" he cried but the other kids were all playing in the middle of Feaster Park, and he was here by himself in the corner, and now he had sunk in up to his waist.

"Help, please!" he screamed again, but by the time anyone came he had sunk into the tree up to his neck and he couldn't grab onto anything to get loose, and no one else could help him either, They just watched as he sank lower and lower.

"Tell my mom I love her" was the last thing he said, and then his face disappeared into the trunk and his arm too, and he was gone.

"People have avoided that part of the park ever since," I told the kids, "but they say that if you walk past the tree on days like this, you can still hear the boy calling for help."

The girls were quiet, wrapped up in the story. It was Issa, the lone boy at the party, who spoke first.

"Yeah, right," he said, and he led them off to find something else to do.


Copyright © 2018 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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The ghost of Ma Kirby

Back when I was in college, I belonged to a men's living group called Kirby House.

Originally just a men's residence hall, Kirby House incorporated and became an alternative to the Greek fraternity system, I think sometime in the late 1960s. There was no pledge period and no hazing, just a common affiliation around the group we had joined and the building we lived in.

The building had been deeded by one of Lafayette College's wealthier alumni families, and was named after Allan Price Kirby. There was a plaque with his image on it in the hallway, and a giant painting of his mother hanging in the main living room. (Every year on her birthday, a confused-looking floral delivery person would show up, put an expensive arrangement of flowers on the table under the watchful eyes of the painting, and then leave, trying to figure out what was going on and realizing that he probably wasn't going to get a tip.)

That picture of Allan Kirby's mother dominated the living room. We'd have our aftergame parties there, and people unfamiliar with the history of the house would ask who she was. Parents and relatives would come to visit, and as we showed them around, invariably they would ask who she was.

"That's Ma Kirby," we would say.

A year or two before I arrived, in the mid-1980s, there was an incident. I don't know the details, but if any other Kirbs who read this want to chime in with a few particulars please do.

Apparently ano5ther student had tried to get into a relationship with one of the Kirbs, only to be rejected. As many of us do at that age, she wouldn't take no for an answer, and kept trying to push the issue. As I heard the story, one Saturday in November during an aftergame party, when the alcohol was flowing, things got heated and there was a scene. A big one.

That night, after things had calmed down, she fell asleep on the couch facing the portrait of Ma Kirby. From what I'm told, she woke in the middle of the night and ran screaming from the building. She later claimed that Ma Kirby had spoken to her and told her to get out and never come back.

She never did.

Tormented with a creepy doll

Oldest Daughter went away to camp about two years ago with Concordia Language Villages to study Arabic in an immersion environment. It's stuck with her. She learned the Arabic alphabet while she was there, learned a few songs and chants that she immediately taught to her little sister when she got back from camp, and started taking classes in Arabic once she got to college.

Concordia has its language villages in a remote part of Minnesota called Bemidji, around a small and irregularly shaped body of water called Turtle River Lake. The idea is that students can attend the camp for two weeks or for four, during which time they can receive formal instruction in the target language. They share cabins with other campers, and during the daily activities they're expected to complete the learning experience by speaking only in the target language, which again, in her case was Arabic.

Because they're away from home for so long, the campers bring things to keep themselves from getting homesick: favorite foods, some pictures, games to play, an age-appropriate toy or two, just nothing that violates the spirit of language immersion.

One of the campers, a 16-year-old named Marcie, brought a doll.

It wasn't a Barbie doll or something made of cheap plastic. It was made with moving parts: arms and legs that swiveled and bent at their middle joints, a head that turned, and hands and feet that moved at the wrist and ankles. It represented an impressive amount of engineering for a cheap toy, but a lot of the kids thought it bordered on the creepy side. The eyes, instead of being painted on the surface of the face, were recessed into the face a little, the way real eyes actually are a little farther back than the front of the forehead. The effect was that, if you moved across the room, it looked as though the doll was following you with its eyes. That, combined with the sly Mona Lisa smile that had been painted on its face, was enough to creep a few people out. It was like the doll not only was watching you, it was smirking at you the entire time.

This one poor girl named Alexi was really bothered, and she made the mistake on the third day of camp of telling the other girls in her cabin how much she hated that doll. They started taking the doll with them to the mess hall,where they would place it on the table facing her; and every time she looked at it, they would wave its arm and have it say "Marhaba!" They made camp miserable for this poor girl. Alexi would go to class, and find the doll seated at the desk next to hers, its head turned toward her with those creepy eyes and that hollow smile. I'm sure she tried to be a good sport about it, but when something bothers you and everyone knows it but keeps on rubbing it in, it's going to get to you after awhile.

Around Day 10, Alexi went to the staff counselors to complain that the other girls in her cabin were bullying her. I'm sure she felt stupid when she explained how they were bullying her, but the staff handled it professionally. They talked to Marcie, who owned the doll; and they talked to every other girl in the cabin individually, and that night around the evening campfire, they reminded everyone without naming any names the sort of behavior and community spirit that campers were expected to uphold.

Oldest Daughter woke up that night to a contained riot in the other cabin. One of the other girls had thought it would be hilarious to take the doll out and put it in Alexi's bunk, next to her. Alexi had woken up when she rolled over and got its limbs tangled in her hair like the doll was trying to attack her.

There was a big to-do, and when no one would own to the prank, especially after the staff had just addressed the bullying that afternoon, the entire cabin was given disciplinary kitchen duty. Staff took the doll away, locked it up with all the cell phones and personal electronics, and told Marcie she could get it back when it came time to leave camp. Alexi got to sleep in the medical cabin the rest of the night, and was allowed to sleep in past breakfast, usually a big no-no, but I guess they considered this to be special circumstances.

Camp the next day was rough. The staff weren't putting up with anyone's crap, and everyone was trying to figure out who had it in for Alexi so bad. A few of the kids who shared the cabin with her thought they had an idea, but they couldn't prove it. For her part, Alexi stayed off by herself, crying and miserable and even the kids who weren't from her cabin weren't able to get her to do things with them. Marcie tried during dinner, when Alexi was sitting off by herself, to make it up to her by sitting with her and trying to apologize that things had got so out of hand. A couple people saw that as proof that Marcie was behind the hole thing, but she denied that, and it just stayed ugly. My daughter told me that that if everyone weren't on edge about the bullying and how upset Alexi was, it was the sort of prank with a doll that everyone would have thought hilarious.

They went to bed around ten, and then there was a new outburst. Someone actually had got into the lockbox. They hadn't stolen any phones, but Alexi was screaming at everyone when she started to get into bed and found that freaking doll waiting there for her with a knife taped to its hand, like it was waiting to stab her.

Alexi snatched the doll up, walked over to the dock at the edge of Turtle River Lake and threw the doll in, as far as she could.

Another big fight ensued. Marcie cried; the doll had been a gift from her grandmother. Alexi screamed; Marcie had it in for her and had been tormenting her for almost two weeks. The head counselor was yelling because someone actually had broken into the lock box. This was the worst group of campers they'd ever had. Everyone was at everyone else's throat. It was impossible to avoid taking sides in this fight.

The next day the campers who were there only for the first two weeks packed their bags and left. Talk was pretty subdued, but there were dozens of angry looks exchanged.

The day after Marcie came home from camp, a package arrived. Figuring it was something she had forgotten to pack, she took it to her room and put it on the bed then went to grab a snack.

She came back to her room just in time to see the package open from the inside, and to see a small doll step out.

Copyright © 2018 by David Learn. Used with permission.

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Burger King and the little boy's ghost

I took Youngest and one of her best friends to Burger King today so they could play on the indoor playground. As we were eating our fries — because you have to get fries when you're at Burger King, even just for the playground — I explained that the playground was haunted.

"A little boy died there a few years ago," I said. "He didn't tell his parents he was going there, and when he climbed to the top, he got too scared to come down."

The girls listened quietly, hanging on every word. Who doesn't love a good ghost story, after all?

There was nobody else in there, and since his parents didn't know he was there, he got locked in when the Burger King people turned off the lights and went home. He died up there that night, and it was two days before anyone found him."

It was a perfectly morbid story, and I was going to share an example of how the haunting worked, when Oldest, who was along for the ride, decided to cap it off.

"His body is still there," she said. "Kids won't touch it because it's gross, and none of the adults can get up there."

The girls cracked up, and so did I. For the next 30 minutes while we hung out, they would do things like climb to the top, pick up one another's arms and wave it at us through the window.

"Look, I found him!"

So that story didn't stick, that time. But you know, there was another family there, so who knows what their kids overheard and what they believed…

Copyright © 2018 by David Learn. Used with permission.

Encounter in the woods at dark

Back when I was a kid, there was a giant wooded area nearby that we loved to visit, especially during the summer. Sulfur Creek ran through it, with a bend where the water was deep enough to swim; there were trails up near Macelroy Drive where people rode their ATVs; and of course when hunting season came, it was the place to scout out deer. My brothers and I would go there a lot during the summer in the morning and come home for lunch, covered with dirt and sweat, only to return right afterward and stay away until it was time for dinner.

The area was vast. It started out a block away from our house in Penn Township, and it went down to Trafford, and ran all the way to Monroeville and probably farther. There were a few abandoned structures in there that had been built as part of a logging effort more than a century earlier, a railroad that had fallen into disuse, and God only knows what else.

As you may have gathered, this was back in the day when it was fairly common for parents to let their kids run around outside without immediate supervision. It was a time to build forts, to explore, and to navigate the physical and social world on our own, without the constant helicopter presence of our parents. In fact our parents had only one rule about playing outside Be back on the block by dark.

This one summer evening when I was 12, my brother Steve and I were playing in the woods with his friend Kevin, who was visiting from Forest Hills. It was after 8:30 in June, and the shadows under the trees were getting dark. As the responsible older brother, I started to remind Steve and Kevin that we had to start home soon.

"Only if you can make us!" Steve said, and he and Kevin took off, their laughter trailing after them.

This was one of the ways Steve went out of his way to annoy me. He knew I was worried about getting in trouble for breaking the curfew, and he knew that him flouting the rules was just going to make me angry. He's two years younger than me but he's always been stronger and faster, and he's always enjoyed getting the better of me physically. He loved it when people thought we were twins, and enjoyed it even more on those rare occasions when they thought he was older, like the summer he got to ride the more advanced rollercoasters and I didn't. Getting at me by running ahead was just sauce for the goose, as far as he was concerned.

So he and Kevin ran ahead, and I ran after them, getting angrier with each step because there wasn't anything I could do about it, and then they stopped so suddenly that I almost crashed right into them.

"Are you stupid?" I asked. "We have to get home or mom's going to kill us!"

"Shh," he said, and he pointed at an oak tree nearby. At first I thought there was someone up there, and I was amazed at how far up they had climbed. I usually got about 8 feet before I stopped climbing, and Steve had been known to make it 15, but this person was easily past that.

And then I realized there was no way this was anything human. It was about seven feet tall, with long and spindly arms and legs, and it was thin like something that never got enough to eat. There was a bird sitting on one of the branches, and as we stood there watching and listening, the bird opened its mouth and made its final song of the day.

The creature crawled out on the branch as quickly as if it were walking, opened its mouth and mimicked the song it had just heard. It didn't mimick it perfectly; it sounded like what you might hear from the other end of a tunnel, but it worked. The bird walked closer, and this thing snatched it and swallowed it in one smooth motion.

It was too much. Steve made some sort of scared noise, but I'm the one who said the sort of thing out loud a 12-year-old would say, and as soon as it heard that noise, the creature stopped, and looked right at me. It had no eyes and no nose, but it had something that looked like it could be a mouth. That's what twisted into something like a smile, and it started to climb down the tree headfirst toward us.

We took off running, all three of us, crashing through the ferns and other plants that grew all over the floor of the woods. The whole time, I heard this thing crashing along the ground behind us, and it was getting closer.

Now the Shades grew up around Sulfur Creek, and the result is that the ground slopes quite suddenly in a few places. It's the sort of place you need to be careful even in daylight so you don't fall, but in the dark when you're running scared? Things went the only way they could. We fell down the slope, rolling on the trails we'd thought we were so clever for sliding down earlier. Kevin landed right by the creek, Steve tore his pants on a tree root, and I landed hard on one of the rocks beside the creek bed.

And then we heard it at the top of the slope, trying to find us. I don't know if it could look for us, without eyes, but it was doing something. We got up as quickly and as quietly as we could, and moved down the stream a little. Steve and Kevin made it to the other side of one of the big trees that had fallen, and hid behind its root ball. I hid behind one of the large rocks that stuck out from the side of the slope we had just fallen down, and looked around for something, anything I could use to defend myself. There was a branch nearby that must have fallen from one of the maple trees. It didn't have any leaves on it but it wasn't rotted and frail either. I picked it up and held onto it for dear life.

I heard the rustle of the undergrowth, and then the soft pad of feet on the ground. And then, horrifyingly, I heard it speak.

"Guys?" it said. "I think we lost it. Where are you?"

It was my voice.

It took a step past the outcropped rock and I saw it up close. It looked at me. It looked *like* me, and as our eyes met, it smiled this terrible, lopsided smile that made my stomach fall away. I screamed, and hit it as hard as I could on the head, again and again, and then it started screaming too, but in a voice that was high and shrill; and then it ran away, back up the creek.

Steve and Kevin came out from behind the fallen tree where they had been hiding, and we booked it back to my parents' house as fast as we could. I held onto the branch the entire time, in case we needed it.

We got home, and my mother didn't need to ask a thing. She looked at us, and she knew. My dad hadn't held a weapon since he'd left the Army in 1968, but that night he went next door to the neighbors, and borrowed a shotgun. My mom set candles in each of the windows and left the lights on in our rooms so we could go to sleep, and all night that night and the next she and my father kept vigil to make sure it hadn't followed us home.

And from them on, we made sure we were back on the block before dark.

Copyright © 2018 by David Learn. Used with permission.