Ghost stories
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I was ten years old at a sleepover with friends. We lived in Pennsylvania. Playing in the creek or the cornfield or the woods before returning for a snack inside was all that filled our summertime schedules. Those were idle, unrushed days. ​When the sun set and the air chilled, the party would migrate to the unfinished basement of the hosting house. Six or so girls would cram onto musty couches worn thin with holes and take turns telling ghost stories.
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They were all macabre and all the same:
In a darkened home, a mother puts her baby to sleep when a shrill ring of the landline pierces the silence. A heavy voice, a man's (or so I imagined), asks her, "Is your baby breathing?" The woman slams the phone into the receiver and rushes to check on her child. Still sleeping. She answers several more calls from the same man. Each time she rushes to check on the baby. With the final call, the man does not ask his question. He only laughs. The woman runs upstairs to the crib once more to find her baby sawed in half.
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Sometimes instead of a baby it was a dog, where the owner was repeatedly awakened by the drip of a faucet to eventually discover the sound was really the drip of blood from their skinned dog, hanging in the shower.
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Such stories were inspired by the imaginations of ten-year-old girls growing up in a simple country town. Ten-year-old girls who dared each other to walk through the pitch black woods without a flashlight. Ten-year-old girls who snuck out at midnight to glimpse the decaying shack we thought to be haunted, or at least occupied by some faceless, malevolent stranger. One girl would scream when we got too close (we could not have been closer than twenty yards), spooking the rest of the group and triggering an every-man-for-himself, breathless sprint up the hill back to the safety of the house.
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We took an innocent pleasure in being frightened then. The thrill was pure by virtue of our unfounded belief that nothing truly bad could ever happen to us.
Of course we all know better now. Hearts race and breath shortens at harmless triggers. Nightmares infect rest. Fear haunts us all. Ghost stories were child's play, really.
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August 29, 2024