Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark

13th And Elm

I always get a little uncomfortable when the topic of the paranormal comes up, particularly when some people seem to be so adamant that ghosts simply can't exist. I don't attempt to convince them otherwise. As a matter of fact, I don't share my experiences with them at all. This is actually the first time I've attempted to chronicle everything my family went through. It was only for a brief window in time, just a few months. But it burned a scar into my consciousness that will never go away.

I remember my mother and father being so excited at the prospect of all of us moving into our first house. They had been raising four young children in an apartment; just the idea of finally having our own bedrooms (and more than one bathroom) had us all elated. When we first glimpsed the house at the corner of 13th and Elm, my siblings and I almost couldn't believe it. The place seemed enormous. It was an old colonial-style house with wide-open rooms on the first floor, and all of the bedrooms on the second floor, connected by a grand old wooden staircase.

My brother and sisters and I raced through the place, exploring each room with a sense of excitement and wonder. It was my brother Tommy who first noticed the door in the corner of the kitchen that led to the basement. He swung it open and he and I stood at the top of the stairs, peering down for a few moments. We carefully descended down into the basement, unsure of what we would find. Once we got to the bottom of the stairs, we were a little disappointed with how benign it seemed to be. It was a bare room with a concrete floor, a utility sink in one corner and a single window that would have been peering out into the garden in the front yard. We gazed around at this rather boring space for a minute before Tommy noticed it. "Hey, what's with the floor over there?" He pointed to a patch in the concrete, about four feet long and three feet wide. It was a different color and texture than the rest of the concrete. It was obviously been torn up at some point and then patched up. I didn't think much of it, until Tommy spoke up.

"You know the lady that lived here died, right?" I didn't know that. I recall my mom and dad mentioning something briefly about the family that owned the house having to move out in a hurry; the circumstances behind it were never discussed, as far as I can remember.

Tommy continued. "Yeah, she died in a really bad car accident. Dad said so."

"So?" I countered, growing a little uneasy.

"Well, I bet that's where they buried her, right there," Tommy said, pointing to the odd patch in the concrete. For some reason, this ridiculous theory seemed to make sense in our child minds.

I distinctly remember right at that moment, the atmosphere in the room...changed. The air felt electric; I could feel all the hairs on my arms stand up. I was suddenly claustrophobic and felt a wave of panic and unease wash over me. I didn't even respond to Tommy; I dashed up the stairs as fast as I could. Tommy was right on my heels, chuckling at how easy it was to freak out his little brother. Once I was back in the kitchen with the thrum of activity going on, the feeling passed instantly, like flipping a lightswitch off.

The next few days were a blur of unpacking and getting settled. Tommy got his own room at the top of the stairs, and I got the one next to him. Our older sisters Cheryl and Cindy share the bigger bedroom across the hall. My dad was a long-haul trucker who would be gone for days, sometimes a week at a time, so we had barely gotten moved into the house when he reluctantly had to go on the road for a few days. The first inkling that something wasn't quite right with the house happened the next morning after he had left. My siblings and I were walking out the front door to get on the bus to school and we noticed a cigarette butt lying on the wooden front porch. Not exactly strange, but...we knew it wasn't there before. We had cleaned the house top to bottom after moving in, including the porch. A rather obvious cigarette butt lying directly in front of the door would have been noticed. But there it was. We call kind of caught each other's glances as we looked at it. We shrugged and got on the school bus and went on with our day.