Dec 29, 2019
Pregame #nottheshow #cardmonkey (at Magic Castle Cabaret) https://www.instagram.com/p/B6pC32PJ2a2/?igshid=16cr1q6v8c75m
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Pregame #nottheshow #cardmonkey (at Magic Castle Cabaret) https://www.instagram.com/p/B6pC32PJ2a2/?igshid=16cr1q6v8c75m
Home sweet home. #realtor #theoffice #nottheshow (at Hamby & Jones, Realtors with Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices)
#JustSaying #BigDudes #WeGotThatCushion #BigLove #NotTheShow
Does anyone know how to tumblr?
I'm new but not new but new.
So, this is a "scary" story for my english class. But the only reason it's scary is that all of it's real until the end scene. All of it.
My life was a cliche scary movie. I constantly had supernatural things happen around me wherever I went. It didn’t matter how many times we moved, which, by the way was seven times, things happened that I really didn’t want happening. Things moved without being touched, pianos played by themselves, people whispered in my ear… It became normal. But it being normal didn’t make it any less terrifying. I didn’t know what was wrong with me.
I’ve always been able to remember further back than most people. I have memories from when I was two, and even then nightmares happened while I was awake. Whether or not they were my imagination, I can’t say, but it started with a girl. Most little kids had imaginary friends; I had an imaginary enemy. She’d stand in my room and stare at me while I tried to sleep. She rarely spoke, but when she did, it wasn’t to say nice things. She looked about 16, and she wore black lipstick, a black and purple plaid skirt, a black shirt, spiked chokers, black hair with a purple streak, black lipstick, black biker boots, and to top off the look, a stick of eyeliner smeared expertly across her upper and lower lids. But it wasn’t really how she dressed that scared me; I thought she looked cool. It was the way she looked at me. It was her voice that I never truly heard. I remember that her lips didn’t move when she talked, but you knew she was saying something.
We lived on a hill with a creek and woods behind it. Through the woods ran a train. It only came at night. She’d stare at me until I heard the train, then she’d smile.
“You better be quiet.” she’d smirk. “The train’s coming. The train’s gonna get you. It’s going to kill you. It’ll kill your whole family.”
As I heard the words echo through my head, she’d giggle quietly.
The train was scheduled to come right around my bedtime, so my parents would tuck me in right as I heard it.
“Goodnight, Molly. We love you.” my mom would say with a smile.
“Shh! The twain’s coming!” I’d frantically whisper.
I panicked every night. Every night I’d shush them, beg them to be quiet. They thought it was a game, that I was being cute. The girl knew otherwise. She leered at me with her dark, dark lips. I’m still not sure if she was a part of my imagination or not…
Then my parents got a divorce. And everything changed. My mom, sister, Kristy, and I moved states away. At first, we lived with my mom’s college friend. The move took all of the money we could spare, so we couldn’t afford a different house for a while. Nothing happened in that house, or the next, or the next.
Then we found a run-down trailer. It was cheap, but ugly. It took quite a while for us to renovate. We tore down walls, scrubbed everything down, painted every wall, and replaced all of the flooring. My sister picked dark blues and (fake) wood floors for her room. She wanted to paint stars and a moon onto her ceiling. I, still being a child, chose hot pink and lime green. I wanted to paint a big flower on one wall. We did it free-hand and put little stenciled flowers all around it. It was just how I’d hoped. Big and happy and free. Then we found out that the contractor didn’t put insulation in my wall. We tore it down and said we’d re-paint it. We didn’t. My sister, beating me in seniority by eight years, got to choose our bathroom color. It was a bright, garish, spongebob yellow. It reminded me of a neglected fun-house. I always felt like I was being watched by an older, perverse man. I never used the restroom at night, if I could help it. Showers were the most uncomfortable. I remember hearing creaking just outside of the curtain, breathing, sometimes it sounded like a girl was crying. But of course, there never was anyone when I looked. I didn’t know why, but I was almost positive that bad things had happened in there. I could feel it.
Eventually, I hated getting changed, too. I’d throw my clothes on the floor and turn to find them in my hamper. Apparently our ghost was tidy. He watched me. I knew he did. Sometimes I’d get dressed under my blanket, but it didn’t really help.
I had a trampoline in the back yard that I absolutely loved. I played on it all the time. There was just one problem: it was near the shed. Like the bathroom, I felt like girls had been violated in that shed. Young girls. It didn’t exactly help that in the corner of the shed was a blood stain.
My sister and I both knew his name. Again, we didn’t know why, we just did. His name was Richard, and he was very old when he died. His wife had died a long time before him, but she wasn’t there. He liked to change the channel on T.V. My mom thought we needed a new remote. He also liked to trip us. Once he put a pillow over my sister’s face and held it a few seconds.
After months of living there, someone else got our attention. She was about six or so, native, and very angry. Unlike Richard, we could see her. Not all the time, but sometimes, and in flashes. She once went into my room with a knife, or so my sister says. Kristy ran in to stop her, but she was gone. Another time, a glass bowl flew off of the counter. It was aimed at my head. Kristy caught it just before it hit me.
Things like this happened over and over. I suppose these were the most extreme things that happened in my life, and they were, of course, horrifying, but they weren’t the most frightening. Well, to me, that is.
Eventually, my mom got re-married. He wanted a bigger house, so we moved again. This house was mostly quiet, in the way of ghosts, but I still see it as the house of depression. That might have to do with my emotions at the time, though. This was the house I lived in when I grew into my teenage years, and where my mother, again, was divorced. Her husband slept with another woman in their bed while we were visiting family. He hadn’t wanted to come with us. Then, he disappeared, leaving us with a monstrous house payment and $30,000 in debt. Ah, the good old days.
The few supernatural things that did happen in that house were not, thankfully, dangerous. It started small, (doesn’t it always?) with me hearing footsteps in the hallway at night. Big boots would pace back and forth every now and then, when I was alone. Then there was the slumber party. My friend told us all about a fun card trick to talk to the dead. Of course we were all thrilled and sat in a circle with a candle in the middle. I don’t quite remember what meant what, but you could only ask yes or no questions, and then you’d turn over a card for the answer. Each suit meant something different: yes, no, maybe, or I don’t know. We turned off the lights, terribly excited for the game. At first there wasn’t much sense to it, but then we decided to try and picture what they looked like before we started. The first one was a blonde little girl with spiral curls and a dress. Then we’d ask. We’d start out with simple things like:
“Are you brunette?”
*card flip*
No.
And so it would continue.
“Are you blonde?”
Yes.
“Is your hair curly?”
Yes.
“Are you young?”
Yes.
“Are you happy?”
No.
“Are you sad?”
Maybe.
“Are you scared?”
Yes.
“Is there someone scaring you?”
Yes.
“Are they mean?”
Yes.
“Are they here?”
Yes.
We exchanged looks of terror. My heart pounded. It was just a game. It was just a game. But, if it’s just a game, and this is a new deck of cards, why is it all just yes? Where are the other suits? There was no way that at this point the deck was balanced… We didn’t stop. We couldn’t stop.
“Is it a woman?”
No.
“Is it a man?”
Yes.
“Does he know we’re here?”
Yes.
I don’t know why she asked. I wish she didn’t, still, but the girl flipping the cards over decided to ask:
“Can we talk to him?”
We all stared at her in shock, in horror. What was she doing? She flipped over the card.
Yes.
“Are we speaking to him?”
Yes.
“Do you want to hurt the little girl?”
Yes.
“Do you want to hurt us?”
It had all gotten out of hand. So out of hand. Why had we done this? Why would we want to play this game? I, of all people, should have known not to do these kinds of things. Yet here we were. And there was the card.
Yes.
For some reason, in this game, we had to ask to leave, and they had to say yes. If you ran out of cards before they said you could leave, they could stay in the house or with one of the people in the circle forever. At this point, the stack was getting low, so we didn’t waste any time.
“Can we leave?”
No.
“Are you going to keep us here?”
Maybe.
“Let’s just keep trying. They can’t all say no,” the girl to my left said.
“Can we leave?”
No.
There was one card left.
“Please let us go. Can we leave?”
Yes.
We collectively breathed again. I got up to turn on the light. We blew out the candle. And we never played again.
I started worrying that the man in the game was the man with the boots, but nothing ever changed with him. What did change was who I was afraid of. As all cliché stories begin, I was home alone. I had just been practicing piano. I started walking back into my mom’s room when my keyboard started playing. I walked back in and it was off. I internally panicked and began to tear up. Then I heard a crash from my mom’s bedroom. I shakily and slowly walked towards it. Our VHS’s (yes, VHS’s) were strewn in front of the shelves we kept them on. I trembled as I picked them up. I walked back to the living room, and that’s when I did something I never did before. I tried to talk to it.
It was actually a she, or so I pictured. I said that I wasn’t scared, (a lie, of course) and that I wasn’t going to leave the house. Then I saw, in my head, a girl. She had dark, long hair. She stood there, glaring at me. I was terrified.
“I can help you,” I called out.
I saw an image of her crying. She was sitting in the corner, wet and cold, so cold her lips were purple.
“Please, let me help you.”
Again in my head I saw her. But this time she was mad.
“NO!” she screamed.
Then she ran away. After that I’d sometimes feel her presence, but never did she try to get my attention again.
We ended up having to declare bankruptcy. We moved during our 3-month eviction notice. Our new house was actually a trailer. And I don’t mean mobile home, I mean trailer. It was the smallest I’d ever lived in, that I could remember. We had to tear up the carpet because the people who lived there before us had big, shedding, peeing, indoor dogs. Even the fridge had dog hair in it. Yet again, we set out to scrub everything down the best we could. And since we couldn’t afford new flooring this time, we lived on sub-floor for two years. My room was the smallest (and messiest) it had ever been. I hated it.
This house, like all the rest, had things that went bump in the night, things that whispered to me, things that didn’t feel right. I wasn’t as afraid now. It was a normal thing that just had to happen. I figured it would continue throughout my life
At this point in time, my sister was at a trade school a few hours away. A few months after we moved in, my sister moved in. And she brought someone with. Her horrible fiancé impregnated her and left before he knew. She didn’t tell him for as long as she could, and we supported that decision. She had a premature baby girl and named her Liberty (we tried to talk her out of it), Libby for short. They lived with us for a while after that.
One night, my sister, Libby, and I were home watching T.V. We used to lay Libby down on a little play mat (since we only had sub-floor) and she’d try to roll over. We had stopped the T.V. and were talking about how cute Libby was when someone knocked at the back door. It was a little after midnight and none of our neighbors knew us. Even if they had they wouldn’t have knocked on our back door. Kristy and I froze. We were both paralyzed with terror. I hoped that maybe it was a burglar checking if we were home.
“Who is it?” I called out.
Maybe if it was a burglar and they knew we were home they would go away. Kristy shushed me. We went to the kitchen and grabbed steak knives, our best protection at the time. The back door had a window, so it was possible they’d seen us, but Libby was out of sight. We were scared to grab her in case it would draw attention to her. We called the police and our mom and her boyfriend. They said they were on their way with his guns.
We had storage bins sitting on our back porch that we had forgotten to take to the shed. They started rummaging through them and throwing things around. Kristy and I both knew it wasn’t a burglar. We knew it wasn’t human. We always knew when it wasn’t human. But this time, it didn’t feel like a ghost, either. It felt like pure evil. It kept alternating between knocking, jiggling the doorknob, and throwing our things around. We couldn’t see anything through the window, not that we got close enough to. Libby, thankfully, stayed quiet.
Finally, the police arrived, and shortly after, my mom and her boyfriend came, too. It had snowed all that day but had just stopped. As soon as we saw the lights, everything went silent. There was no knocking, no jiggling, no throwing. The policeman searched the yard but found nothing. There weren’t any footprints in the snow. There weren’t any fingerprints. The storage bins that we’d heard get thrown around were untouched.
After that, I stopped accepting the supernatural. I taught myself to fight back. I learned to find strength in myself and push them away. After that night, any time Libby saw someone I couldn’t see, I got rid of them. Any time someone talked to me, a chair moved by itself, my hair was pulled, a door was opened, you name it, I took care of it.
Until now. I don’t understand it. Maybe I shouldn’t be alone. But I was. And Libby’s rocking horse started rocking. I tried to push it away and I thought I did but I think I made it angry. Everything was quiet, for a moment. Then the cabinets smacked open. The rocking horse crashed across the room. The DVD’s flew off of their shelves. And of course, my piano started playing by itself. Oh god. I can’t do this. I’m not strong.
“You’re not strong,” someone whispered. “You’re not strong. You’re not strong. You’re not strong. You’re not strong.”
“Go away!” I screamed.
“You’re not strong. You’re not strong. You’re not strong.”
“No. Stop. I’m strong. I can get rid of you. You’re nothing.”
The couch started shaking. I closed my eyes. Oh god. I can do this. I can do this. I rocked back and forth. I sent out everything I had, all of the light that was in me. Until there was nothing left except,
“You’re not strong. You’re not strong.”
I heard them laughing. Taunting. They mocked me. Everyone did. They all came back. Everyone from my past came back. The girl in black and purple, there she was, laughing, laughing. The room started spinning. She was a blur. Something tugged at my hair. There was Richard.
“STOP! Stop it now! Leave me alone!”
I was alone. I’m not strong. I’m not strong. I’m not strong. Then everything stopped.
*knock knock knock*
No. Oh no. Please god no. It’s locked. It’s locked, right? Is it locked? Oh god please be locked.
The door swung open. I hadn’t even heard the handle turn… I don’t know why I stood up. I don’t know why I walked to the back door, trembling, crying.
“I need you to leave.” I said as tears fell to the floor.
And then I couldn’t breathe. I felt fingers around my neck. It was choking me. I couldn’t believe it. Never could this be truly happening. No. This isn’t happening. I must be dreaming. I’m dreaming. Please.
I heard a whisper, felt heat on my ear.
“This isn’t a dream, sweet cheeks. And you’re not going to wake up.”