My friends, Billie, Joey and I always wondered about the story the mansion told behind its dark walls.
It was Halloween night and trick or treating was long over. We dumped out our pillow sacks filled with candy and traded a sweet confections for other treasures. Billie and Joey didn’t have to be home for two hours so we had time to kill. We left our candy sacks behind and trudged up the steep hill top to the mansion with the moonlight as our only guide. Once we got to the hill top, I felt the first cold wet drop then another. Billie looked at me with curiosity in his pierce blue eyes and we all had the same idea — we needed to find shelter. I went first and grabbed the cold, rusty door knob with my hand and turned — it opened. I tiptoed into the dark foyer as the old wood floors creaked beneath my feet. Billie and Joey stayed close behind. In the dim light, I could make out an old grand piano covered in cobwebs and dust. My finger tapped one of the dusty ivory keys and a badly out of tune note reverberated in the hollow silence. I could barely make out Billie’s flannel shirt and shaggy chestnut hair. Joey’s black shirt shirt merely faded into the pitch black darkness. I took the lead again with my dirty white sneakers creaking on the floor boards. Suddenly, I heard a loud snap and gasped in horror as the floor boards collapsed beneath me. I tumbled downward in the darkness with Billie and Joey screaming right above me. The cold concrete floor did little to break our fall and we all hit the ground with brute force. Billie landed right on top of me and Joey was laying in a crumbled heap several feet to our left.
“Hey man, are you guys okay,” I asked. I could barely make out Joey and Billie’s feeble head nods in the darkness.
A loud raspy voice broke the silence. “What are you boys doing in my house! I’m going to call the cops!”
I could barely make him out in the dark basement. He had a crude wrinkled face, with white, wispy hair and a frail frame and small in stature. The old man was wearing faded overalls and a flannel shirt. His empty charcoal eyes terrified me to the core.
I frantically searched around for an escape route, we had been caught. My eyes settled on a dirty white door in the far corner. I ran for it in the darkness, bumping into objects on the way. I grabbed the old brass knob and twisted. The door opened and my friends and I kept running until we had reached my house. We can in the door and my seventeen-year-old brother, Kyle, was standing there, with a smirk on his face.
“You guys look terrified, what happened?” Kyle asked.
I blurted out our encounter on the hill top.
“That mansion hasn’t been occupied by old man Krenshaw in years, not since he was murdered 15 years ago,” Kyle said.
“This man told us that we were at his house and he was calling the cops,” I said.
Kyle looked at me oddly. Wait a minute, I think mom might have kept the newspaper clipping because he died the day you were born.
A chill went through my spine, I knew something wasn’t right.
He came back with a large blue binder and opened the cover. there were dozens of newspaper clippings, neatly preserved in clear plastic inserts. I hurriedly flipped through them. My stomach sank as my eyes settled on the empty charcoal eyes. I had seen those eyes before, he was the man we had seen at the mansion. But, how could this be? The newspaper article said he was murdered. How could he be at the mansion?
I slammed the cover shut. I didn’t know how it was possible, but I knew that my friends and I had seen a ghost…