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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