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We ran back home.
So when I got back home my parents chewed me out for losing my bike. I was wholly uninterested in my bike and tried to tell them that there was some sort of monster living in the Haunted House, which they dismissed as hyperbole, as parents always do. They told me that I should go back there and politely ask if they had seen my bike, maybe they had taken them into the house for safekeeping until the owners showed up.
I never mustered up the courage to do that. But I.’s mom apparently went there herself a couple days later to ask whoever was living there about the bikes. I never heard it from the lady herself but I. told me that his mom had no luck and that when she came back from the house, she looked “sad and angry”, and told him that he should never go near that place again, and told him to tell me the same.
Of course we were kids, and while we were scared of the footprints, we hadn’t actually SEEN anything, and we wanted to go back there so bad. It was incredibly stupid even for a nine-year old but what can I say? I’m an adventurer.
So one Saturday morning we snuck out of our respective houses and walked back down that dirt path; without our bikes it was a half-hour of walking or so. It gave us a lot of time to speculate on the nature of the hellish beast that had left those tracks. Dog? Demon? Dog-demon? Our imaginations were not very agile. We decided we’d see for ourselves. Somehow.
That morning was a little clearer, almost sunny, a crisp winter morning. It subtracted some of the House’s innately sinister qualities but we were still deathly afraid of it. As per usual, there was nobody around, but there was an old Volkswagen we hadn’t seen before parked outside. The tracks were gone, by the way. And we decided we would find a way in.
The second time we went exploring, it was as though we had fallen into a nightmare. Neither of us wanted to go inside; but no one would believe us about the dog-like footprints, and we were under pressure to get our bikes back.
So we went inside.
This mansion was full of 18th century artifacts. Almost as though it hadn’t been touched since the American revolution. There were gold coins still in small jewelry chests, paintings and portraits of people in powdered wigs all over the wall, and even a musket hanging on the rack. We almost expected to find a skeleton in the closet.
We had no idea where to start looking for our bikes. Until we caught sight of the footprints again.
So this time we were focused on finding, maybe an unguarded back entrance or a child-sized hole in the barbed wire. For the most part we were unsuccessful. The sun was starting to beat down on us as it got closer to noon and we were hot and tired and urging each other to go back home; at this point we were more tired and bothered than scared. But then I heard something and I’m still not sure of what the fuck it was.
Honestly it could have been a super-heated martial dispute, if there was indeed a couple living there. It came from the “main” house, the big and pretty one in the far back of the terrain, which we were some, I don’t know, 20m away from. But we could still hear it. It was this really weird screaming, it was like scream therapy or karate or maybe even a drill sergeant yelling out orders. The same interval of time (just a few seconds) passed between each scream. And there was a male and a female voice, alternating. And it got louder and louder and then it stopped when it sounded like something made of glass had broken.
They weren’t yelling AT each other, though, they were yelling WITH each other maybe? It was weird and controlled, but at the same time really disturbing. We were paying close attention to these screams, trying to see something through one of the house’s distant windows, but then somebody started to walk out of the house through the back door and we got out of there.
Our parents never found out about this second visit. We were now intrigued and decided we would get in there no matter what. That night for some reason I remember having really bad nightmares and having to go sleep with my parents, even though the footprint episode hadn’t phased me. Something about those screams.
We decided that we would gear up for our third (and as it would be, final) expedition to the Haunted House. We stocked up on snacks, I.’s pair of shitty binoculars (they were the kind that came as an accessory along with a G.I. Joe or as a cereal box prize), water, sweaters, and flashlights. Because we decided that we were going to do this at around 5pm, when our parents weren’t around, to make sure they didn’t catch us. It was winter and it got dark fairly early. This was unbelievably stupid in retrospect.
I was still having recurring nightmares after hearing those screams. I was much more shaken up than after the stuff with bikes and the would-be demon dog. On that fateful day we took to the dirt path early and got there in the late afternoon, in the twilight actually, and the house was the creepiest I had ever seen. There were no cars parked outside, that was a first. But there were lots of those big black birds on the trees I mentioned. And there were dogs. They weren’t devil-dogs, just a couple of emaciated stray dogs fighting over a dead rat, near the entrance. They left normal tracks and they ignored us, thankfully.
So when I got back home my parents chewed me out for losing my bike. I was wholly uninterested in my bike and tried to tell them that there was some sort of monster living in the Haunted House, which they dismissed as hyperbole, as parents always do. They told me that I should go back there and politely ask if they had seen my bike, maybe they had taken them into the house for safekeeping until the owners showed up.
I never mustered up the courage to do that. But I.’s mom apparently went there herself a couple days later to ask whoever was living there about the bikes. I never heard it from the lady herself but I. told me that his mom had no luck and that when she came back from the house, she looked “sad and angry”, and told him that he should never go near that place again, and told him to tell me the same.
Of course we were kids, and while we were scared of the footprints, we hadn’t actually SEEN anything, and we wanted to go back there so bad. It was incredibly stupid even for a nine-year old but what can I say? I’m an adventurer.
So one Saturday morning we snuck out of our respective houses and walked back down that dirt path; without our bikes it was a half-hour of walking or so. It gave us a lot of time to speculate on the nature of the hellish beast that had left those tracks. Dog? Demon? Dog-demon? Our imaginations were not very agile. We decided we’d see for ourselves. Somehow.
That morning was a little clearer, almost sunny, a crisp winter morning. It subtracted some of the House’s innately sinister qualities but we were still deathly afraid of it. As per usual, there was nobody around, but there was an old Volkswagen we hadn’t seen before parked outside. The tracks were gone, by the way. And we decided we would find a way in.
The second time we went exploring, it was as though we had fallen into a nightmare. Neither of us wanted to go inside; but no one would believe us about the dog-like footprints, and we were under pressure to get our bikes back.
So we went inside.
This mansion was full of 18th century artifacts. Almost as though it hadn’t been touched since the American revolution. There were gold coins still in small jewelry chests, paintings and portraits of people in powdered wigs all over the wall, and even a musket hanging on the rack. We almost expected to find a skeleton in the closet.
We had no idea where to start looking for our bikes. Until we caught sight of the footprints again.
So this time we were focused on finding, maybe an unguarded back entrance or a child-sized hole in the barbed wire. For the most part we were unsuccessful. The sun was starting to beat down on us as it got closer to noon and we were hot and tired and urging each other to go back home; at this point we were more tired and bothered than scared. But then I heard something and I’m still not sure of what the fuck it was.
Honestly it could have been a super-heated martial dispute, if there was indeed a couple living there. It came from the “main” house, the big and pretty one in the far back of the terrain, which we were some, I don’t know, 20m away from. But we could still hear it. It was this really weird screaming, it was like scream therapy or karate or maybe even a drill sergeant yelling out orders. The same interval of time (just a few seconds) passed between each scream. And there was a male and a female voice, alternating. And it got louder and louder and then it stopped when it sounded like something made of glass had broken.
They weren’t yelling AT each other, though, they were yelling WITH each other maybe? It was weird and controlled, but at the same time really disturbing. We were paying close attention to these screams, trying to see something through one of the house’s distant windows, but then somebody started to walk out of the house through the back door and we got out of there.
Our parents never found out about this second visit. We were now intrigued and decided we would get in there no matter what. That night for some reason I remember having really bad nightmares and having to go sleep with my parents, even though the footprint episode hadn’t phased me. Something about those screams.
We decided that we would gear up for our third (and as it would be, final) expedition to the Haunted House. We stocked up on snacks, I.’s pair of shitty binoculars (they were the kind that came as an accessory along with a G.I. Joe or as a cereal box prize), water, sweaters, and flashlights. Because we decided that we were going to do this at around 5pm, when our parents weren’t around, to make sure they didn’t catch us. It was winter and it got dark fairly early. This was unbelievably stupid in retrospect.
I was still having recurring nightmares after hearing those screams. I was much more shaken up than after the stuff with bikes and the would-be demon dog. On that fateful day we took to the dirt path early and got there in the late afternoon, in the twilight actually, and the house was the creepiest I had ever seen. There were no cars parked outside, that was a first. But there were lots of those big black birds on the trees I mentioned. And there were dogs. They weren’t devil-dogs, just a couple of emaciated stray dogs fighting over a dead rat, near the entrance. They left normal tracks and they ignored us, thankfully.
