“I don’t know about ghosts. If I was a gambling man, I would bet on there has to be something, whatever you call it. I don’t believe everybody who tells of some creepy thing that has happened to them is telling the truth but there are some stories that just resonate. Every now and then, something happens and you can’t explain it. Even if you dismiss it, it makes you start asking questions. That’s how I felt. I didn’t consider ghosts to be anything other than fun stories. I still can’t confirm whether ghosts are real or not, but I know what I saw and I know I’m not crazy.
I had moved into my first apartment. Being on my own was more of a relief than it was scary. Coming from a large and loud family, I had been looking forward to the quiet nights to complete my studies. Only another year and I would be an official college graduate. I was ready to complete that chapter of my life. What I wasn’t ready for was what showed up on my doorstep.
Halloween had eaten the towns people’s energy and money. The cold was settling into the empty streets as the holiday season was sneaking up on us and I was studying for my neurobiology exam. Some comedian rambled through my TV speakers in the background. As I flipped through my vocab cards, I heard a knock at the door. Not expecting company, I opened the app for the doorbell cam.
There stood a young boy with a soft round face under a dark wool hat. I watched for a moment. He stood. Silent and still, he stood with his eyes fixated. He stared. I waited as the moment slugged into an eerie uncertainty. The young child’s form against the dark background had struck a nerve. I glanced at the time. 11:17 PM. The boy appeared to be no older than ten and there didn’t seem to be anyone with him. As I was forming questions in my mind, he knocked again. It seemed to echo throughout the apartment and my heart near jumped out of my chest.
I decided I wasn’t going to answer. If he needed help, he wouldn’t be so calm. I tried to return to studying but couldn’t avert my attention and my eyes kept shooting back to the video feed. After a couple more minutes of this game, I glanced back and he was gone. I peeked out the window behind the couch I where I was sitting and nothing was there except the cars in the driveway.
Strange as it was, I shook it off. Life went on as normal and classes were starting to get intense. I spent most of my time either at school or at home studying. What little time I had left over was spent at the diner, waitressing for scraps. It was barely enough to make rent but I enjoyed the work. The other options around here or the weekends were to be cooped up alone in my apartment or partying with the rest of the college kids. That scene was never my cup of tea. I preferred to make money rather than spend it. My mama always told me that would bite me in the ass one day.
I did learn that lesson, but that’s a different story. For the time being, business was picking up at the diner. Holiday shopping brought out patrons from all areas to Main Street and the customers were starting to pour in. Thankfully, the diner closed at 10 pm, which meant there was still time to wind down when I got home. Sundays were for reading and the next two chapters in my Advanced Chemistry text looked really heavy.
It was a Saturday night. The streets were still busy and it took longer than I wanted to get home. Walking through the door to a safe quiet space inspired a hefty sigh of relief. I was starting to look forward to the long Thanksgiving weekend when the last thing that would be on my mind would be work and school. A couple more weeks to get through and I will be able to breathe for a minute. For the moment, staring at the television until I fell asleep seemed the only plausible thing my brain could muster.
I don’t know how long I had been sitting there. It could have been minutes or hours; I wouldn’t have known the difference even if someone told me. I had finally reached a quiet lull where my body could melt into the couch, casually drifting to sleep. Then, rapping at the door startled me to full alert. I opened the camera app to see another kid staring at my front door. Just like the last one, he wasn’t more than ten and never spoke a word. Just stared. His body remained motionless. I considered answering this time but there was a tug in my gut that questioned if that was a good idea.
Another knock. I stared at the door, pondering my next move and starting to feel guilty for not answering. I looked back down at the video feed. His eyes were peering directly into the camera, as if he could see me through the lens. My stomach made a fist and punched my heart out through my chest and I dropped my phone. I threw my hand over my mouth to stifle the scream stuck in my throat. Surely, he heard the commotion of my phone smacking against the kitchen tile. When I was able to collect it back up, the feed showed only an empty porch. You could see the cars in the driveway and the small gnome statues the neighbor decorates the yard with. There was no sign anyone was ever there.
Something was unsettling and it became a little harder to shake off. The more I thought of it, the stranger it was that young kids were knocking on my door so late at night. Perhaps, they weren’t. Perhaps, all the stress and lack of sleep had just caught up with me.
The following week confirmed my descent into madness. My nights were plagued by knocking children at my door. Every night for over a week; every night a different face of another young boy. Every night, the same eerie chill would wash over me as they stared with their blank expressions. Every night, there were two sets of three knocks followed by a set of empty eyes staring at her through the camera. The knocking echoed so loud the walls shuttered along with each knock.
What little sleep I had been getting had started to dwindle, sacrificing my sanity to nightmares plagued by the faces that were appearing on my porch. In my dream space, they were all gathered around a circular table in a dark room. They all stared into the empty space between them, their cold lifeless eyes fixated on the darkness in front of them. Their small innocent faces surrendered no sign of any emotion. Then I realize what they are watching is me as I levitate above the table where they sit, blood dripping from my fingers. I look back down to see blood dripping from their tear ducts and down their round pale cheeks.
I woke up to my lungs heaving for air and my pillow case was drenched in sweat. I couldn’t make heads or tails of the situation but I knew I had to get a grip on how much stress I had on my plate. There was too much research on the effects of stress on the brain to not connect the dots to the amount of pressure I felt under.
The next day, I skipped classes and called out of work. I felt guilty for it but decided I wasn’t going to waste the day anxious about it. Taking that Friday off was meant to rest and recharge my batteries so that I wouldn’t fall completely into madness. That morning, I slept in. I woke up just in time to watch ‘The Price Is Right’ while I enjoyed French toast sticks and frozen sausage. After that, I paced around the apartment for a bit, forcing certain thoughts from my mind. It took a few minutes but eventually I snapped out of it. I grabbed my laundry and headed to the basement where the landlord kept the washers.
It was a dingy room with several washers and dryers sets surrounding a large table. I was surprised to find someone in the room. The neighbor stood at the table, folding towels. She was a short, stout women covered in crazy brown curls. She wore a smile, as if it were freshly washed, that widened when I entered. I had no desire to strike up a conversation but after we had completed our pleasantries, there was a nurturing in her voice that I found calming. Quickly, we got beyond how-do-you-do’s and she was telling me about her long residence at this address. For 15 years, she had watched college students come and go. Some of them were better than others. A couple of them were terrible neighbors and terrible people.
“That’s why he only rents to upperclassmen, now.” She explained of the freshmen that managed to break every window in the building with their speakers.
“Have you met the girl on the other side of you, in apartment 3?” She asked.
“No, I didn’t know there was a third apartment,” I said.
“There are four, actually. The last one emptied years ago and has been vacant since.”
“Why?” The question surprised me because I didn’t so much care but something about that information intrigued me.
“I don’t know,” she said. “The last guy moved out and no one else moved in. His name was Raymond. He lived there forever until he couldn’t live alone anymore. He ended up at the Heritage Center at the other end of town. The new girl’s pretty cool though. She’s um…what did she call it?” She scrunched her nose and touched her fingers to her chin. “Oh yes, witches and shit. She’s a…a…a…wiccan. But I guess like the gothic type. She wears all black and a pentagram necklace. I don’t know. My only point, don’t be scared, she really was a doll.”
I let out a chuckle and smiled at her. She was filling the air with a bouncy and playful vibe and my nerves were finally starting to relax after their ordeal the last couple of weeks. We talked all the time the clothes washed and then talked more all the time they were in the dryer. It was like conversing with an acceptable stand-in for Mama. I wasn’t surprised to find out she had several daughters of her own, her youngest a senior in high school. The Mama hat seemed to fit her. By the time the laundry was finished, I wasn’t so wound tight. For the first time all day, I was looking forward to doing nothing all night.
I didn’t fold anything. It felt empowering to leave it in a pile and set the basket in the bedroom to be forgotten. The rest of the night would be spent in front of the tv. After a shower and some dinner, I threw myself onto the couch with my blanket and snacks, ready to cash in on boredom. The tv flashed on to an image of the local news anchor.
“This year marks more than a decade that the infamous Baltimore Boogey Man has haunted Halloween and the streets of Baltimore. Parents here don’t just worry about candy. Every year, since 2001, several children go missing the weeks surrounding Halloween, only to have their bodies found weeks later. Unfortunately, the Boogey Man has added 3 more victims to his list of atrocities.”
Three photographs popped onto the screen. Three small round faces with bright innocent smiles. How could anyone hurt these poor kids? I had no plans on watching the news, but my heart couldn’t look away. I had lived in Baltimore for several years and I had no idea that this guy had been out there, doing grotesque things to the most sacred part of humanity.
“Carlos Ramirez, Dayton Grover, and Timothy Walker have all been found in Patterson Park in the same eerie fashion as the others. They were all bound to the base of a tree. What’s strange about that, police say, is that they were clearly deceased when they were placed here. So, why they are roped together is not understood. What that can say is that this year, they were able to confirm that the Boogey Man has a distinct pattern. The first child goes missing the 24th, the second child on Halloween night and then the third is taken on November 7th.” The reporters face remained neutral. I wondered if sharing stories like this became easier or harder as time passed.
“Do the police think that this could be linked to some sort of ritual or cultish behavior? That seems like a specific routine that could allude to there being nefarious purposes behind the death of these children.” The anchor said.
“The police have not mentioned there being a cult involved or if this is the result of some sort of ritual sacrifice. Personally, I could see why one would make that connection. Right now, I think they have to focus on gathering any evidence at all that could link them to a suspect. In past years, there has never been any evidence collected other than the bodies themselves.”
“I can’t tell you how much this story breaks my heart, as a parent. We’re going to take a minute to remember those we have lost over the last decade.”
More pictures flashed across the screen accompanied by names. By the third one, I noticed that the faces were familiar. Then, a dark-haired boy with dark eyes filled the screen with a wide tooth bearing smile and a dark blue wool hat. My eyes almost bulged out my sockets. That was the face that had been staring into my camera. Each photo showed the happy versions of the children that had been taunting me for several weeks. By the time they were done, they had displayed thirty-three different pictures with thirty-three names of those who had fallen to the sadistic pleasures of some lunatic.
I didn’t know what to think. My head was spinning and I was trying to find some logical explanation to why I had been seeing these kids. I knew without a shadow of a doubt, those were the same faces in my camera. I opened the recordings to confirm this. When there was nothing to be seen other than the driveway and the cars that filled it, my nerves froze. I had reviewed these photos many times, hoping the faces had always been there and I just missed it. They weren’t there, though. Only the picture it took when the alarm was triggered. It knew something was there, it just didn’t capture what it was.
Confusion and terror flooded my body, my racing heart setting the pace of my thoughts. I didn’t know what was happening but I did know that I couldn’t ignore it. I rubbed my heavy eyes with my sweaty palms as I tried to catch my breath. I just wanted to watch tv and relax. My brain was not going to let me do that. At that point, I realized I should have just gone to work.
I let out a sigh. I didn’t want to say the word ghost. That was impossible. Weird was a good word to start with but I couldn’t form an explanation without admitting there was a reason it was the missing kids I had been seeing. If I wasn’t crazy, it meant I was seeing the spirits of tortured children. I tried to think back on what little scary movies I had watched. Why do ghosts haunt a specific place? Then, it hit me like steel rod in the back of the head. Bam! I thought of the empty apartment that my neighbor mentioned earlier. I couldn’t go over and just start rambling off questions about some old guy who used to live here. If there were more missing kids though, it couldn’t have been the old guy. Who else had access to this house consistently for that long? The landlord didn’t seem like a serial killer but I guessed that was the point. If there was any truth to the things I was experiencing, the evidence must be in the empty apartment.
Plans to watch tv and do nothing impulsively changed to my need to investigate the oddities that were eating away at my sanity. I grabbed my coat and a flashlight and found my way to the side entrance beside the basement door. It was just an entry hall, but I didn’t want to alert anyone of my presence. Me having to explain to someone why I was sneaking around my apartment building scared me more than the idea of ghost kids knocking at my door in the middle of the night. I still wasn’t convinced that’s what I was seeing, anyway.
My little flashlight barely penetrated the dusty black air. I was relieved to find the hall much shorter than I had imagined. At the end was another door to the outside and a door to my right adorned with an aluminum number three. To my left was a set of stairs, leading to, what I assumed, to be apartment number four. What greeted me was not pleasant. A window hung over the small ledge at the top of the stairwell. I pressed on, inching closer to the door while every step released a groan from the flooring that echoed in the emptiness. The air was thickening. My lungs were heaving as they begged for more oxygen. My flashlight caught the rusty ‘4’ hanging over a chipped brown slab of wood with a handle. Nothing about the atmosphere matched the rest of the building and I couldn’t help but feel like I was intruding on someone else’s nightmare.
A jiggle of the doorknob confirmed my suspicions. As I stood, staring at a locked door and no idea how to pick them, I wished I had thought through an actual plan. I walked to the window and peaked out. It felt like luck to find the fire escape within reach of the window. That was, until I climbed into it. It moaned in protest under my weight. It enjoyed my jamming the window open even less. It wasn’t until my feet were on the floor of the gutted space that I realized I hadn’t thought I was going to actually get inside. A tinge of regret hardened in my throat. I swallowed it, then raised my flashlight. The floors looked sturdy enough to move around, despite the free hanging wires and drooping sections of drywall coming down all around me.
I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. Perhaps, I assumed I would know when I saw it but there wasn’t much to see other than why the apartment was likely condemned. The mold taking over the baseboards would be the beginning of reasons why not to live there. I pulled my t-shirt over my nose to relieve my nostrils of the monstrous odor that grew stronger the deeper into the rooms I explored. It had begun to make my stomach churn and I started to second guess my choice of adventure. There was nothing to see. I wasn’t a detective. I was some silly college kid with a strange story and a strange imagination. As I was deciding that I had done adventuring, the bedroom closet flung open and slammed against the wall behind it. My startle lifted me off my feet. The floor caught me with a bang, and I jousted myself up to scan the room. Every part of me shook. Seconds stacked up like minutes while my lungs forgot how to breathe.
I don’t know how long I sat there, paralyzed by the thought of what could come out of the dark I stared into. When I was certain nothing could be there, I turned and darted to the window. I tried to slow down. My fear kept pushing my feet with more haste and when I reached the fire escape, the momentum and gravity teamed up against me. I will say, hitting the ground was not nearly as bad as the terror I felt inside that apartment. I was just happy to be out of there. Whatever happened is beyond me. I do know that I have never experienced anything so terrifying since then.”
“That is a very fascinating story,” said the reporter with the mic in my face. Halloween always brought these types out. The writers look for the next big scary story and ghost hunters looking for more internet fame. I don’t mind talking to them, though it never ends quite the way they expect.
“So, you fell off the fire escape, here.” She points at side of the apartment building.
“I did and it sucked.”
“That’s crazy because that’s exactly how that college kid died. That’s what led to Victor Osborne’s arrest. Hang on, let me find my notes.” She turns to her camera man and hands him the microphone. She shuffles around in a bag full of notebooks and folders full of more papers, pulls out a manilla folder and opens it to read its contents.
“Yeah, its right here. Jim, here,” she said, handing the camera man a slice of paper displaying a picture. The pairs jaws fall to the ground as chills shoot up their spines. They both look up and their interviewee is gone with no trace that they were ever there.
“That wa-wa. Th-, I-, uh,” Jim stutters and shakes his head.
“Tell me the recording worked!” She grabs the camera from Jim’s hand and frantically presses the play button followed by rewind. No footage. The last thing the camera recorded was them searching the back yard. That’s when they ran into…whoever that was. The two of them have an idea and if they were gambling men, they would venture to say they cannot explain their hairs standing on end and the goosebumps covering every inch of their skin. The only thing they do know is that no one is going to believe this part of their story.
Bio
Winter Summer is he elf-published author of Molly's Misguided Adventures, found on Amazon. She runs a small farm with her family in Western Maine where she spends her time as a teacher and an artist.