I guess I WAS terrifying?
There was a few instances when I was a child where I made up stories that would potentially frighten the other children in my school class; in fact I wanted them to be scared.
The first time was when I was 5, or maybe 6 I can’t remember. I was the popular kid in my class (I guess that changed a lot) so I had a lot of friends, and the only ones I weren’t friends with were the ones who had only just started.
So, our school ran across the railway, where trains zoomed passed every 20 minutes or so, and between the fences and that was a line of trees, bushes, and weeds; which in the summer made it so you couldn’t see the trains which travelled by.
It was summer when I told my best friend, Megan, that a monster resided in there. There wasn’t any trains, it was all just this beast which roared when it got hungry. In search of food, it would travel into our school field and look for children to devour. It worked well, because on our field was quite a few holes caused by rain, and the three-hundred pupils which trampled across it twice daily.
From there, the story escalated into teachers being accomplices and when they’d send children to the headmasters office it was to decide whether they were suitable food for their “master”. After a week or so, the story was circulating around school, and at that same time one of the quiet kids in our class left. Her father got a new job, so she has to transfer. Within days it was going around school that she’d been eaten. This story circulated for a month at least, before Megan’s mum told mine that I had to stop scaring her because she was having nightmares. I was 6 at the most, my mum had never let me watch horror movies, or hear ghost stories. I was innocent - she thought. (It’s worth mentioning that I wasn’t a strong reader at this point so there’s also no way for me to have read it in a book).
Then 4 months later (I remember that because it was just before Halloween), I again started a rumour. I told everybody in my class that an old Sailor had become stranded here (there was an old fishing boat put on our field for us to play on), and when he realised he had no way to get home he killed himself by hanging from one of the trees. At this particular tree there was a blue rope put there by people who’d created a swing from it. So again, everybody believed it. He would lure people to the fence, and kill them if they dared disrupt his final resting place, because apparently the only person that found his body buried him underneath the tree. Refusing to mark his grave so nobody would ever know he was there.
6 months later, and the buzz had faded. Nobody was talking about my story, and nobody really cared.
By this time I’d learned about Bloody Mary, her supposed “Blue baby”, and the Grey Lady. Mix that with every creepy pasta ever, that nobody else in my class had heard about and I had the perfect way to frighten them all again.
So I convinced my best friends - Emily, Megan, Millie, and Abby to go into the bathroom one by one and turn the lights off. I told them to recite the words “Grey lady, grey lady, I have your blue baby”, now maybe I had heard that before - if so please send me the link because I’d love to know its origin; I, however, found nothing during my extensive search. Millie -the youngest, and most frightened- said she saw something, which prompted everybody else in our class to try it. Once again as with the Monster in the woods story; the entire school started talking about it. They tried it, and more than one person said they saw something in the mirror. I even did it once or twice, and one time my cat had scratched me, nobody at the time had seen the scratches so I pretended that had happened because of the “Grey Lady”.
It was only a couple of months later that I had to move school, due to falling asleep in class because of the long commute from my new house. In the new school everything was pretty dull, and the stories stopped. I made new friends, and then the rumour went around that the school was haunted. This time, it wasn’t created by me, but I contributed.
Things returned to full effect 3 years later, after three school changes, two house moves, and the inability to make new friends. Some boys I was sat with had been teasing me because I would tie my hair in knots (something I still do 10 years later) and then cut it out with the scissors around us (that stopped, thankfully) so I told them that there was a ghost of the farmer in the school garden our classroom looked out onto, he had a hook for his hand, and was shot in the head. I told the boy, Aaron, that this ghost was ready to kill. It frightened everybody on the table, and eventually circulated around the class within a day. It made everybody fascinated with me - the girl who could see ghosts - and they asked me questions about it. What I could see, whether they spoke, what they said, etc. I became popular again. Until I got tired of the lies after six months, and nobody had stopped believing. The kids in this class didn’t get bored as quickly.
So when one of the boys said to me “What’s he saying now?” I told him I didn’t know, and he’d gone away.
A year later and people hadn’t forgotten, but they were older now and had finally started exploring horror stories. They realised I had been lying 18 months ago.
Thinking back, I guess it’s no surprise that for the three years before I moved from the area, I was known as “creepy” or “scary”, and the playground gossip revolved around “She’s the one obsessed with ghosts”.
Rest assured, my stories progressed from terrorising my classmates and friends to actually becoming stories on a word document, stored away on my laptop.
