On the South Side, 11/01
Reflections on Halloween hauntings
Well, Halloween has passed and a quick search tells me there are 10 or so places on the South Side that are said to be haunted. I don’t know if it is true or not and I am not of a mind to visit them all and verify their claims. Let’s just assume that they are.
Now, I will tell you that there were, in my childhood, many, many moons ago, two verifiable haunted houses in Amarillo, Texas where I grew up. That is where my Halloween story for this year will come from. I only have space for one house story. I’ll tell you about the other one next year.
The house in question was a dark yellow wood clapboard house and had been an old farm residence at one time in the distant past. It sat between two fields that we played at on a regular basis. It was a single story house with a detached garage. The house had a lot of windows and the shades were never opened, not even once. We did see an occasional light on inside but none of the ten or so little boys that I grew up with ever saw anybody enter or leave the house. We were told that there was a light on in the garage late at night but we ever had the nerve to look into the matter. Well, almost none of us. There was, sadly, the matter of Rusty’s little brother.
“Tommy” was, I recollect, five or six at the time. He was a quiet boy and did not join the older boys very often. We only saw him on weekends. Rusty told us he was never allowed outside during the week because he never finished his dinner. Anyway, on one particular Saturday evening we were playing baseball in the field next to the house. Gary had hit one of his well-known foul balls which bounced off the roof of the haunted house and dropped on the other side. We decided to let that ball go on the idea that none of us wanted to see just what was haunting that old house.
While we were discussing our options, little Tommy (who did not know the house was haunted) took off to retrieve ball from the other side of the house.
We never saw him again. We did a search the next day and all we found was our ball and his footsteps. The footsteps ended suddenly. We decided he was abducted by aliens.
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