‘Tis the time of year for kids to scare or cower in fear. The veil between the living and the dead is as thin as a string, and once it’s snapped, trick-or-treaters will soon be filled with dread. To prepare for this unholy night, let me tell you a tale or two. So grab your s’mores, masks and courage, because it’s time to transform even the most hardened point of view.
I need to preface that not all Halloween horror stories involve ghosts or other supernatural beings. They don’t need to have jump scares to be scary, and they definitely don’t need to be cliché. Red glowing eyes, a curse, objects moving on their own. As long as it makes the reader feel uneasy, do whatever it takes to achieve it. This story is no exception to being cliché, but it will stick with me forever. Enjoy!
I don’t know if your schools did this, but every year, an organization called SkillsUSA would host a lock-in event, and it’s exactly as it sounds. Students who participated were “locked” inside the high school from around 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. The adult authority figures who had organized the event had planned a bunch of fun games and activities. One of these games was called “Ghost.” To play this game, kids would draw a card. The cards with either the king or queen on them were selected to be the ghost and had to hide somewhere in the darkened hallways of the school, while the investigators or seekers closed their eyes, never to see where the ghosts went. After a certain time, the seekers were allowed to wander the halls searching for the ghosts. The ghosts could only jump out if they were spotted, or if they intended to scare the holy spirit out of people. The seekers had to then run back to the only lit room in the building (the cafeteria) while avoiding being touched by the ghost. If they were, they’re out. In some variations, the ghosts were “killers” and their “weapons” were spoons.
Investigators didn’t get to use flashlights. Only the ghosts did until they found a hiding spot, then they needed to turn it off and wait to be found. General rules include no going outside, don’t hide in a classroom (most of them were locked anyways), and under any circumstances, absolutely do NOT go into the tunnels beneath the school. My brother and a few of his friends got to do this before that rule even existed. Lucky them. We could use the first sub-level of the school, but nothing below that.
In high school, I was one of the good kids. Actually, I was just as much a good student as I am a rule-breaker, as you will see very soon.
As I’ve just explained, one of the rules was to never set foot outside the building. I, however, constructed a strategy that would leave the seekers baffled. When no one was watching me, I slithered out from a side exit and made my way around to the cove, a little rectangular indent with cracked concrete as the ground until the very limits of the overall perimeter. Usually, this is where One Act loads their props and stage equipment for when they have competition elsewhere.
In this cove is a set of green double doors with two small and elongated rectangular windows that lead to the straightest and longest hallway in the school. I was peeking through the windows to ensure nobody was around, and when I was at the window on the right, I almost immediately noticed something that wasn’t there in the left window: a floating and blurry white object just in the corner of my view. Once I had my full attention on it, whatever that thing was, it shot directly upwards into the ceiling. I pushed through the doors and looked at where it had vanished. Nothing but the recently installed camera inhabited the corner of the hallway.
Before you ask, “why didn’t you check the cameras the next day at school?” And to that I say, because recordings disappear after 24 hours (and this was during the weekend). Another part of it was because I actually wasn’t sure what I had seen, so I didn’t want to look like an idiot.
Unnerved, I tried continuing my role as a hider, but was promptly spotted because of the short amount of time I had wasted trying to fool the seekers. I never told anyone about this and nobody knew I had broken the rules. Would anyone believe me if I had?
