A Bag Of Tricks

...a John Carpenter's Halloween bag, to be precise, full of tricks and treats (including an autographed copy of Mike Mayo's Horror Show book and one bona fide trick - a Mr. Hankey doll from South Park) went to the winner of our story competition, describing a real life version of a horror film!

Steve

When I was a young lad I had a friend who was just plain crazy. He was wild, and would do anything and take any chance.

Lot of kids don't necessarily pick our earliest friends. We become friends with those who live in our neighborhoods. This is how the two of us first became friends, but in this case we stayed close through early adulthood.

It wasn't until years into our friendship that this guy was diagnosed with Cystic Fibrosis. He was not supposed to live much past his early teenage years. I think he figured he had nothing to lose, so he just "went for it" no matter what. I only found out about a year and a half ago, by asking around, that he had passed away six months earlier. That means he lived up until his late 30's. That's increasingly possible with CF patients, though still a rarity.

This is sort of a long and maybe sad prologue to a fairly silly story, but that's how I like to remember this guy. Explaining who he was sort of sets the stage.

I can't remember how old we were when this happened, but we must have been pretty young and not allowed to stay up too late. We were certainly not let outside much after sunset.

Somehow my mom let me sleep over this kid's house. I am pretty sure there was a least one other friend also, I just can't place who it was. "Sleep-overs" were fairly common in my neighborhood while I was growing up. As I remember it, though, I had never been allowed to stay at this particular house before. Of course we stayed up late. Somewhere very, very early in the morning my friend suggested we go out to get something to eat.

Now we were certainly not going to wake his mom, so our choices were pretty limited. At this time Howard Johnson's still had a franchise on the Garden State Parkway rest areas, which all stayed open 24/7. The Parkway passed pretty close to the neighborhood. The closest rest stop allowed access from the city streets as well as from the Parkway. It was pretty far, but walkable.

I have to admit I was really scared to go out that late/early, but the third friend sort of goaded me on. I did not want to be the wussy. So we all went.

The story has nothing to do with getting there or eating. Getting home was the problem! There were two ways to get home from HoJo's. We figured if three young kids were walking on the main streets we would probably get stopped by the cops, so we took the zigzag route.

By then it was vaguely getting light, so it must have been 5AM or so. We were on this beautiful, tree-lined road. I mean tree-lined. This was one of those really old streets where the houses were built in the 20s or 30s. Trees had been planted up and down the street on both sides. After so many years, the trees pretty much grew over the street to form a canopy.

We are sort of strolling down the street, and as we get about halfway down we start hearing a noise. Sort of like birds. But nothing any of us could say is definitely birds. As we turn around to look, the noise gets suddenly louder.

We can see that starting from the beginning of the block and working its way towards us, tree by tree, there are hundreds - it seemed like thousands - of birds relieving themselves one after another! I mean we could see it all come down in sheets like a rainstorm. We take one look at the road and it's white with this stuff. It's all coming towards us fast and we have a long way to go 'til the end of the road.

Needless to say, we started running as fast as we could down the street and just barely made it out before we ended up covered in crap!

Like I said, it sounds funny now but we were all young. To me this was pretty scary...

I like telling this story because it gives me a chance to think about my friend. I would have liked to see him again before he passed away. He was crazy, but deep down he was really, really a nice person. I do not think that might have come across to a lot of people who didn't know his situation. [Top]

Mei Ng

The movie that I felt like I was in was Stephen King's short story "Cat's Eyes".
My cat Frankie look just like the cat who play the cat in that movie.
He sleeps with me every night at the end of my bed.
One day, my mom came over to my house for vacation. She does not like the idea that my cat is sleeping with me because she believed that my cat would suck my breath day after day, until one day, he becomes me. So whenever my mom sees my cat on my bed, she would push him away. One night, I heard my screamings coming out of the guest room where my mom is sleeping. I hurried up and went to see what happened. I found my cat standing there fiercely, where my mom was sitting on her bed, shaking. She left our house the next morning without mentioning what had happened the night before.
Later that day, we found a dead body on the yard. It was like some kind of animal but is unidentifiable.
Recover from the incident, my mom finally told us what had happened that night. The cat had sneak inside her room that night without her knowing. However, in the middle of the night, she felt like she could not breathe. She woke and saw that monster sucking the breath away from her mouth. The cat jumped up the bed and eventually killed the monster by pushing it downstairs to our yard. [Top]

Denise

Remember the first Chuckie movie? ok, now remember the "My Buddy" doll? well...
My kids and I were watching the first Chuckie movie on video right after it was released and my son, who was 4 or 5 at the time, had just gotten a My Buddy doll for his birthday. Everyone ooohed, and yuched at all the appropriate scenes and of course he was "scared" but I kept my eye on him and he seemed ok.
When i tucked him into bed that night instead of saying "Night, Night, don't let the bedbugs bite," I told him "Night, Night, don't let Chuckie bite." And instead of a giggle, i got absolute dead silence. Ooh, ooh... about 5 minutes later he was wailing his head off... we had to ceremoniously take Chuckie and put him on the back doorstep, lock the door and all the windows to his room before he would get back in bed.
To this day and, he's 14 now, he has yet to watch another Chuckie movie. [Top]

Brenda Boone

…felt like we were in Amittville Horror: When I was fourteen yrs old, we moved to another home in another town. The home that we moved into was a nice home but the walls of the home were all painted very dark colors, it did not give my sisters or I a very comfortable feeling even the first night we stayed in the home. This was a split level home with two sets of stairs. Within a couple of weeks foot steps could be heard at all hours day or night going up and down the stairs. My father would often ask "who is there?" Doors could open or close by themselves, the dog (a big golden retreiver) would not go into the rooms when this would happen but would bark at the doorway often with his hair bristled on his back. Objects such as glasses, or watches or hats were found in different rooms of the house even though they were always put in a stored in a certain place or were placed on kitchen table at night. There were times that you would actually walk through a chilled area even!
Though the house was not old, and was well built. My father didn't have a whole lot to say about all the strange occurances happening in the home, until his bed started to shake one night. The clergy was called in and the house was blessed. The people that we had bought the house from moved only a few blocks away from the old one, I went to school with one of the girls, was later found that she had been playing with witch craft, and a Ouji board in the house while they lived there. After the blessing of the home there was no further incidents, but I learned not to play around with somthing I had no knowledge about and what could happen. [Top]

jackie young

we live on a small farm, in mo. one day my hubby noticed the hound dog chewing on something---he went up to the dog and took it away from him, it appeared to be an animal paw--we took it to a local game warden to see if we could find out what kind of an animal it was from--he told us it was a---MONKEY PAW!!!we are really freaked! where did it come from? where's the rest of the monkey? most of all-why did our old stupid dog feel the need to bring it into the yard? [Top]

Deidra Cox

A cross between The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween, for an obvious reason--my birthday is on Halloween. So my family in their warped, twisted way always try to make it memorable for me. My husband likes to hide in the garage, put on his gorilla mask, wait for middle sized treat or trickers and chase me and them around the house with a chain saw! OK, the saw is broken, and smokes and only makes a loud noise, no moving parts, but oh, you should see those kids run! [Top]

Jessica Koepl - The Winner!

The following is a true story. It really happened to me. I guess you could say that I felt like I was in any number of slasher/horror flicks. The ghost stuff, howeever, reminds me of certain 50's era haunted house movies- The Haunting, etc.

It happened the summer between the 5th and 6th grade. I was at a science camp at Eastern Oregon University in La Grande. The week-long camp gave kids my age with an interest in biology, physics, chemistry and geology a chance to stretch their brain muscles doing fun experiments and going on field trips. But even though most of us were brainiacs, we did allow ourselves to get carried away when some strange things started to happen.

The weird stuff began when a girl staying in the dorms with us told us that this week was the anniversary of the Texas Tower Shootings (when a guy went crazy at a college, climbed up a belltower, and started picking off people in the square below.) She said that the guy who did this had died, and that his ghost had come back to our campus. This of course got all of us 10-12 year olds riled up and spooked.

It didn't help when some of the boys decided to hold a mock seance to communicate with the spirits of this murderer's victims. Soon, there were reports of hands coming out of the walls, blood dripping from the ceiling, and silhouetted figures on the roof opposite our hall. I even got into the swing of things and said that I had found a pair of devilish looking eyes on my drawing pad (which I had.) As the week progressed, more and more people from our camp caught the ghost bug, and the professors had to break up groups of kids conversing about evil, demonic beings.

The peak of this paranormal fever, however, came when we went on a field trip to a nearby hot springs. On the way, we stopped at the site of a geyser in the middle of the lawn of what else, but a closed down mental institution. (I'm not kidding!) While our excited geology Prof. explained to us about natural gases and plates and the sort, a few of us went and talked to groundskeeper of the institution, questioning him about the place's history. He might have just been trying to scare us, but he told us that the place had shut down in the 70's after a bunch of the patients had died of unexplained causes. The place was still open for tours and the such, but the top floor was closed off because that's where all the people had died.

As we drove off to see yet another one of earth's natural wonders, a few of us looked back at the old hospital and saw, in a top-story window, a white figure, clothed in what looked like a bathrobe. Although we had been scaring ourselves all week with ghost stories (which we knew weren't true), none of us wanted to believe what we had seen. We tried to explain it (to each other and ourselves) as a curtain or a piece of medical equipment, but when we drove back the same way later that evening, there was absolutely nothing in that window, and the lights were off on that floor, when they had been on earlier.

When given an idea that is strange or off the wall, a group of people (especially grade-schoolers) sometimes can let their imaginations get carried away with them and see what they want to see. Of course there was no blood dripping from the walls or mysterious floating hands. The shadow on the roof? A summer repairman. The eyes on my notepad? My roommate had drawn them, then erased them, leaving a faint imprint. We wanted something spooky to happen, and so it did. If there had been no murdering ghost stories, we wouldn't have noticed these things at all.

But I still haven't been able to explain the strange figure in the window. [Top]

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Last updated Dec. 29, 1998.

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