Wanna read something REALLY scary?
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GREY GHOSTS
What follows, is true….
As a child, I lived for a time in a hundred-year-old house in North-Western Virginia that was surrounded by Civil War battlefields. When the States went to war in 1861 and the blood flowed, my town was the spot where much of that blood ran.
And you could feel the psychic residue of all that bloodshed wherever you went. Our town had been the stomping grounds of a famous Confederate General named Mosby. The Union Commanders he’d faced had given him the nickname “The Grey Ghost” for his ability to strike at Union targets and then disappear, along with his men, back into the Virginia wilderness.
A lot of men died around John Mosby, on both sides of the conflict, and the land was thick with their ghosts.
You thought about them when you were digging in the yard and found a musket ball. We heard their whispers the summer we dug up an old chunk of concrete we found beneath a hedgerow and revealed a short tunnel full of ancient glass bottles, hazy with age. But it was worst in our basement. There was an unassuming wooden slat door in our kitchen that opened on twenty wooden stairs leading down into a stone-walled basement. And down in that basement, the dead sang.
I was terrified of that basement. It felt older, somehow, than the rest of the house. Any request from my father to run down and grab something from that place felt like a death sentence. There was something down there. Something hungry and fast. To stand in that basement was like standing next to a powerful exposed electrical current… the skin on my arms and legs danced with it. Once I’d gotten whatever it was I’d gone down there for, I would climb back up the steps backwards. Yeah sure, it took longer that way, but it was the only way I could keep an eye on all the dark corners and piles of junk where I knew it… whatever it was… was hiding and waiting for the right moment to pounce.
The year I turned ten my Grandparents sold their house in New Orleans and moved to Virginia to be closer to my siblings and me. And with both my parents working long hours, we quickly fell into a routine where “Nanie and Popie” would cook dinner for us three or four times a week. Their house was a little over a mile away, on dark country roads, and every night we would pile into the family car and drive on over for a home-cooked meal.
One particular Fall night, as the Summer was just getting around to releasing its grip on the weather, my Dad was running unusually late. By the time he got home from work it was already full dark and we were rushing to get to Nanie’s house on time. As we hurried to our beat-up old mini-van, my Mom suddenly realized she’d forgotten something. Dad paused with his key already in the car door. He might’ve rolled his eyes, too. But my Mom waved him on. We were late. “Go”, she said, “I’ll be right behind you.” Mom had her own car, a sporty red two-seater.
We piled into the mini-van with all the chaos that comes with three young kids and a harried Dad all trying to get buckled in and out of the driveway fast. As we backed out into the street I glanced back at the house and saw my Mom keying her way back into the house, her red jacket like a splash of blood under the porch light. We pulled away just as I saw the light come on inside the entryway.
She was inside.
I was sure of it.
A few minutes later we were knocking on my Grandparents door, giving Nanie a quick hug, and dashing for the couch and reruns of Taxi. Mom would be along soon, and then we would eat.
Except she wasn’t. And we didn’t.
Five minutes became ten. Ten became fifteen. And a half hour later, my Dad was concerned and growing more and more agitated. He tried to play it cool so that he wouldn’t worry us, but after a call to the house went unanswered, he decided that somebody needed to do something. He looked at me. “Come on, let’s drive back home and see if we can find her.”
“See if we can find her…” Jesus.
We drove the entire route, so slowly it was agonizing. But the roads were dark in that part of Virginia and we had to carefully scan every inch of roadside for a disabled vehicle… or worse. Surely if she wasn’t at home, she must be at the side of the road with a flat tire or a busted radiator. But she wasn’t. My Dad must’ve wanted to race home at top speed, but to his credit, he kept the pace slow and steady. He didn’t want to miss anything critical even more than he wanted to hurry.
Eventually, after what seemed like hours searching the route, we made it home. And there it was. My Mom’s little two-seater. Still sitting in the driveway. It hadn’t moved an inch. In fact, nothing at all had changed since we’d left. Except for one thing.
All the lights in the house were off.
“What the h—” my Dad had been about to ask when he opened his driver side door and was interrupted by a rhythmic pounding and the muffled sound of my Mother screaming.
We looked at each other, then sprinted for the door, my Dad reaching into his pocket for his keys. They caught on his pants pocket as he pulled them free and he fumbled them. I saw them for one brief moment, spinning over and over, glinting in the moonlight, and then they were gone. Down in the tall grass somewhere. We both dropped to our knees, fumbling around in the yard as, somewhere, my Mother continued to scream and scream and scream.
“Got ‘em!” he shouted, and we were up again, my Dad stabbing at the front door lock with the big brass key and missing at least twice in the darkness.
And then we were in. Dad slapped the twin light switches just inside the door, and the lights on the porch and in the entryway popped on, flooding the space with comforting light.
“Where are you!?” He asked the empty house.
“The basement!” we heard her shout, and I shivered uncontrollably as we stumbled over each other racing into the kitchen.
She wasn’t crying when we got the door open, but it was a very near thing. She pushed past us and ran out onto the porch. And there she stood for some time, hands on her knees, breathing hard, like she might throw up.
Suddenly she started to make sharp snorting noises. “My god… the smell”, she said. And I saw she’d pulled a handkerchief from her pocket and was aggressively blowing her nose into it. “I can’t get it out of my nose.”
“What smell?” Dad asked.
“It smells like blood down there…” she said through the handkerchief. There was fear and real disgust in her voice.
When she could speak clearly again, she told us what had happened. She’d gone back for a hat that had been hanging on a nail about halfway down the basement stairs. The minute her hand had closed on it, the basement door had slammed shut. She’d tried the door, only to find it locked. And then the lights had gone out.
She didn’t know how long she’d been screaming.
My Dad must’ve seen the terror on my face because he tried hard to find a reasonable explanation. “Must’ve been a draft”, he said.
But of course, it wasn’t. And all three of us knew it. Oh, I’m sure there are a million reasons why the lights might’ve gone out at that exact moment. A freak power outage, maybe… or a couple blown fuses. Though if my Dad ever checked for evidence of either, I am not aware of it. I think he didn’t check because it didn’t matter. He knew what had really happened just as well as I did.
I’ve thought a lot about what my Dad must’ve been thinking as we drove the route home without seeing her car. She’d said she was running in to grab something. She should have been right behind us. I wonder how scared he must’ve been. I’ve wondered if the relief he felt when he heard her voice was the reason he never thought much about what really happened that night.
Because there was nothing at all that could explain away the fact that the basement door had been locked.
The lock on the basement door was on the outside of the door… the kitchen side. And the lock was a heavy bar lock that could only be engaged by a human hand first lifting it up, then sliding it into the hole drilled in the jam, and then rotating the bolt back down. I don’t care how many times you tested that lock by slamming the door, it would never lock on its own. Not ever. It was simply impossible.
Wait, did I actually say only a human hand could have locked that door? Well…
My mother and my father and I all know different. Even if we’ve never said so out loud.
We slept at Nanie and Popie’s house that night.
I don’t know what happened to my Mom while she was on those stairs in the dark. She never spoke of it. But she never went down into that basement again. Not ever.
And whatever ghosts were (are?) down in that basement never bothered us again.
Except in my dreams. And in the occasional acrid copper smell of blood on those basement steps.
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If you enjoyed GREY GHOSTS, here’s a quick reminder that one of the ways I keep this blog financed is with my fiction writing, all of which is available here, at Riot Tales. I recommend starting with another of my short horror stories, called VINE WORLD. It’s a bargain at only 99 cents… you’d be crazy NOT to buy it!