Apparitions

Apparitions

Apparitions

By JD Zephir

We stood on the sidewalk facing the house. It had been empty since before I was born. The wood paneling had turned gray and rotten, most of the windows were either shattered or cracked, and pieces of the roof’s shingles had crumbled and fallen to the ground. The grass was overgrown and dead, and weeds had broken their way through cracks in the rotted wood porch. There was a wrought-iron gate to the left that was an entrance to the house’s driveway. In many spots, the gate had rusted, and holes burned through. To the right was a wooden gate leading to the side yard. Our entrance onto the property.

“I have a terrible feeling about this,” Jack said as we approached the house. I could feel the fear vibrating off him. It was a warm, summer evening. Dusk was coming. The sun gave a golden glow, and I could already see the clouds turning into a cotton candy pink.

“Don’t be such a baby,” I told him. “We just need to get the baseball that you, might I add, fouled so hard that it landed into the house’s backyard.”

Jack didn’t respond.

“Let’s get this over with,” I said.

“Wait, Nathan, can’t we just get another ball?”

“We don’t have another ball. This is my last one. And if I tell my mom I lost another baseball this week, she won’t let me hear the end of it. Apparently, ‘I don’t treat them with respect’, and we have been tight on money since my dad left. Look, if you’re too chicken then just wait here.” The thing about Jack was that he believed that ghosts were real. I did not. Jack told me that when he was about four years old, he had an encounter with a ghost while he was staying at a motel on a family vacation. The memory still haunts him bad enough that he can’t even form real sentences when explaining what happened. Ever since then he has been terrified of anything spooky or remotely related to ghosts.

I stood on one of the gates broken hinges, testing its strength to make sure it could hold me. I reached over the gate to see if there was a latch, only to have the gate completely crumble underneath my weight as the hinge I stood on gave way. I fell to the ground and picked myself back up immediately, groaning.

I made my way toward the backyard, thankful that the gate didn’t give me any splinters. Making my way around the house, I saw that the dead grass became more overgrown, and heard the sound of my and Jack’s footsteps crunching it beneath our feet. The side yard of the house was filled with garbage; candy wrappers, chip bags, cigarette butts, and what I thought was a balloon filled with yogurt. We rounded the corner into the backyard, and we stopped. There was an old, rotted swing set. The wood, like the house, had turned a dull gray, the plastic on the swing’s seat had chipped in many places; one swing’s chain had come off its hinge at the top and hung from one side. The chain that hung loose looked like it was stained. I walked up to get a closer look when Jack said, “Nathan, let’s just find the ball and go. This place is giving me the creeps.” I didn’t respond. “Nathan,” Jack whined. I heard him jog up behind me as I examined the chain. “Holy crap is that blood?” he asked in a panic. Here was Jack’s classic “ghosts are real” personality. He always thought the extreme was happening.

“Oh, stop. It’s probably just rust.” Though I wouldn’t dare touch it. The reddish-brown stain was only in one spot and did look ominously like blood. Interesting, I thought. Interesting, yes, blood? Probably not so likely. This swing set was older than I was so rust was the most reasonable explanation.

I looked around and found the baseball to our left covered by pieces of dead, overgrown grass. I walked over to it, picked it up, and then stared up in awe at the house. I used to find stories about haunted houses like this one fascinating. I enjoyed the history lesson of the creepy things that happened, and loved that people thought ghosts were real.

The history of the house was known to everyone in town. There was a family of five living here in the 1940s; the Johnston family. They never said much more about why the murders happened, just that the eldest son, Marcus, had murdered his parents for the inheritance and then looked after his twin sisters, Natalia, and Sarah. And by look after, they meant he spent years torturing them, ending in their death. No one wanted to step foot in the house since. It had only been put up for sale once that I had been told. Apparently, the couple that was going to purchase the house got such a terrible feeling just by standing in the living room that they backed out. My mom told me the house was owned by the government now. Every year as a dare, the seniors at the high school would come here on Halloween night. They claimed to have heard noises; moans and groans, floorboards creaking, doors slamming, inaudible words mumbled in the night. Some said they even saw shadows. Did I believe any of it? No way. But I also thought that it would be hard to tell for sure if I didn’t go into the house and see for myself.

“Hey, Jack,” I said.

“Oh, no,” he answered immediately. “I know what you’re thinking. I am not going into that house.” Jack was always on high alert.

“Come on. Don’t you want to know first-hand if the story and rumors about this house are true?” I said with some sarcasm.

“No, actually. I am quite okay using my imagination.”

“Well, I’m going in. You can go home if you want, but I want to explore the house really quick.” I started toward the back porch. The steps creaked as I put my weight on them. To my right was an old wooden rocking chair. The wood was rotted like the rest of the house and covered in cobwebs, a black widow spider dead center of the chair’s seat. I made note to stay away from the chair.

The back door was worn down in many spots, but still holding up in its place. I put my hand on the rusted knob and twisted carefully, making sure I didn’t cut my hand on it. I let it unlatch and the door crept open with a high-pitched creak. I stepped inside. A chill went down my back, making my entire body shiver. That was when I realized how much colder it was inside the house.

The stairs had visibly loose boards. To the right of the stairs was an old dining room with a single chair at the head of the table. Rolling the baseball around in my hand as I held it, I made my way to that table and noticed another ominous stain on the table’s wood. The dark color of the table made it hard to distinguish the color of the stain, but my first thought was paint. Someone must have thought it would be funny to bring some paint and mark up areas in the house, I thought. I mean, this house had murders in it, so it could have been blood. But I would have to think that someone came in and cleaned the place before they put it up for sale long ago. A reason for everything.

I started to get an unsettling feeling – a shiver running down my back again. I passed it off as the chill in the house. The back door slammed behind me. I jumped and turned to find Jack. “Jesus,” I whispered. “You scared me. I thought you were going home?”

“I hate this house, but I won’t let you die in it. At least not alone.”

“Oh, please. We are not going to die in this house,” I said.

We stood in silence for a moment, taking in the sights in the old house. Somewhere upstairs the floorboards creaked, the faint sound of footsteps behind those creaks.

“There has to be something else in here,” Jack whispered.

“Hello!” I shouted to see if I would get a response from whatever made the floorboards creak. Jack smacked my arm. “Hey, what the hell!”

“Don’t shout. That will only lure the thing to us.”

“Quit being such a baby. There is no thing. It’s probably just an animal wandering. A raccoon.” A gust of cool air blew past us, making our spines chill again. A door slammed to our left. “C’mon. Let’s explore. Maybe we will find the raccoon and can help it out of the house.” I made my way to the staircase, stepping carefully. There were old portraits, probably from when this house was first built. Women in one: the ladies of the family I guessed. Three women to be exact. The mother and two daughters. They appeared to be the twins told in the story, around the age of twelve, not much younger than I was. In another portrait were two men. A man who appeared to be the father, and a younger man in his twenties. That must be the is the eldest child that killed his family.

Portraits lay across the wall up the stairs. There was one portrait of the twins that looked like it had been splattered with something. The spot on the portrait was a deep, dark red. It’s paint. It had to be. This must have been from the same person who marked up other places in the house with paint. It was strange though how the paint was not anywhere else but on the portrait. Different spots on the portrait had only small drops of paint, except these drops had more of a brown hue to them. Interesting, I thought. As I looked at the wall a little closer, I saw other spots of the paint. The color blended in well with the wallpaper, making it almost impossible to see. Suddenly, I got this intense feeling. Someone else was in the house. I heard a deep groan come from somewhere inside. I turned, to see if I could find the direction it was coming from. As I turned and looked toward the bottom of the stairs, I saw another person coming from the living room. But not just any person. It was Marcus, the son in the portrait. I felt my heart leap in my chest. Something I had always passed off as nerves, not fear. He was looking around for something. Someone. His dark hair stuck to his forehead with sweat, and his brown eyes were wide and dark with something evil. His white button-down shirt was undone at the top, revealing some dark chest hairs, and had dark stains all over it, untucked from his black dress pants. Part of me felt like he was going for the stairs to get to the second floor, so I hurried back down the stairs and toward where Jack had been standing so that I wasn’t in the way. It was clear that Marcus couldn’t see me, though.

“Nathan, are you okay?” Jack had asked, but I did not answer.

A woman came running out from the kitchen. She looked terrified, like she was trying to get out. Her wide set eyes were pooling with tears, fear held in them. Her hair, blonde and hanging in loose curls, flew behind her shoulders as she tried to make a run for it. That’s when I saw the chef’s cleaver in the son’s hand. He was blocking the door, so she made a break for the stairs. His mother, I thought. She was not quick enough, though. Marcus ran after her, snatched her hair in the hand that was not holding the cleaver, and then sliced her throat open. She screamed, but that scream was drowned by the bubbling gurgle of her blood. The blood spewed from her throat and splashed onto the wall, and onto the portrait of the twins, and down the front of her sky-blue dress. Then I screamed. I felt the scream pull through my body and out, filling the room, yet I somehow felt it vibrating in my head. I felt something hot land on my arms; something thick. I looked down to find the blood had spewed onto me. I panicked and wiped it off only to have it smear and cover my hands and staining my striped shirt. It felt warm, but there was no stale smell that usually follows blood, which was weird. And then, as if it never happened, the two bodies on the stairs disappeared, nowhere to be seen in the large room we were standing in. The blood on me was gone too. I still wasn’t fully sure what exactly had happened. I felt something sitting deep in my gut. It was something I had never really experienced before. A cold sweat beaded on my forehead. There was no way that was real because ghosts aren’t real. And Jack is not freaking out more than usual, which means he didn’t see what I saw. It must have been a hallucination. Yes. That’s what it was. It was a hot day and I thought that sandwich I ate earlier tasted weird. Between the heat and the possible food poisoning it had to be a hallucination. And as far as the feeling in my gut. . . the best response would be fear, but how can I be afraid of something that wasn’t there? And even though the event seemed to be over, I still had that lingering feeling that something else was here with us.

“Nathan, what happened?”

I didn’t know what to say. But knowing that what I saw was probably just a hallucination, I said “Nothing’s wrong. Just thinking about how things went down in this house.” It was a lie, of course. But I didn’t want to deal with one of Jack’s mental breakdowns. And he didn’t say anything about my scream, so that made me think that maybe I didn’t scream out loud. And so, I did my best to shake it off and pretend that nothing happened.

“Did you see something?” Jack asked.

“No,” I said. “Nothing real anyway.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I was just wondering how the house became ‘supposedly’ haunted.” What happened wasn’t real and the only way to shake away this thing in my gut was to just get over it and not think about it. And despite what I saw, and even though I had the ball in my hand, I still wanted to explore the house. Something inside of me was lured to this house after what I saw. And I didn’t know what it was, but it made me want to explore more. “Now let’s go upstairs and have more of a look around.”

With that, I started up the stairs again, still rolling the baseball around in my hand, my curiosity taking over again. The hallway stretched left and right. There was a table in the hall that had, with no surprise, rotted wood. On the table was a white cloth table runner, a black candelabra with melted candle stumps, an old phone, and a bible. Everything on the table had age’s wear and tear on it except the bible. It looked like it had been perfectly preserved. That unsettling feeling, the one I had earlier, came back and became stronger as I entered a bedroom. The bed looked ordinary, but as I looked closer, I noticed something off about it. I saw more stains on the sheet, another set of deep red spots and found wrist and ankle restraints on each corner of the bed. This had to be one of the places Marcus tortured his siblings in. Across from the bed was a table with a mirror and what looked like old make up brushes. I think I heard my mom call these ‘vanity tables’ before. The mirror was old with brown spots all over. It was cracked, as if something had been thrown at it. Spider webs covered not only the broken mirror but the vanity table too. Unlike the rocking chair on the back porch though, these webs had no spiders in them.

I turned back to look at the bed and noticed a teddy bear. I slowly walked closer to the teddy bear and found that one of its black, beady eyes was missing. It looked creepy with only one eye, and the more I looked at it, the more I felt that it was actually looking back at me, burning a hole into my soul. I was being watched in this room. It was too intense for me so I looked away from the bear, whipping my entire body around so I wouldn’t be tempted to look at it again. I felt a cool breeze across my face. I turned to the window, found it was also cracked, and thought the breeze was coming through the c***k. I found that strange though because of how warm the day had been.

The night was dark now as I looked out the window. The stars were out and were the only source of light for the night sky. I saw my own reflection in that window. And next to my reflection was the distorted face of a young girl. Panic set through me as I looked upon the creature’s face. It had to be a creature, right? It’s left eye was missing; the same eye missing on the teddy bear. There was a gash on the right cheek, and the top half of the right ear was missing. That feeling of fear became very noticeable. A flash of heat rose in my body, and the cold sweat became more intense. I screamed. As I screamed, so did the creature’s reflection, the mouth gaping so wide that stuffing spilled out; stuffing that looked like it came from the teddy bear. I turned and ran for the door, the baseball in my hand fell, rolled on the floor and under the bed, only for the door to swing shut just before I could make it through. The knob was locked. I pulled and twisted but the door wouldn’t budge. The knob was rusted, just like everything else in this place. The rust was sharp and cut me on my palm as I tried to open it.

“Jack! Jack, help me! I’m stuck in here with something! Help!” There was no response. I turned to look behind me. I could no longer see the reflection in the window, but I could feel its presence circling around me. I felt it tug on the collar of my t-shirt, trying to lure me back toward the bed. That feeling in my gut was ever stronger. There was no way that this could be a hallucination. It felt too real. Is this proof that ghosts are real? And if so, why was it attacking me? The door’s wood was just as rotted as everything else in this house, so I kicked at the door until I made a hole big enough to crawl through. I ran down the hall, grabbed Jack, who had just been standing there at the top of the stairs landing, completely unaware of what was happening, and dragged him down the stairs, out the back door, out of the backyard, and as far away from that house as possible. Jack was running along with me, but he had the weirdest look on his face. It was straight and his gray-blue eyes looked glazed over as if something took over him. I had to wonder if he was attacked too.

We made it to the end of the street. I finally let go of Jack’s wrist. I was out of breath and dizzy. And this time a wave of a hot and cold sensation run from my body’s core all the way out to the tips of every limb. My mouth went sour and then I threw up. And because I threw up, so did Jack. It was violent and I knew it could not be from the heat or whatever I ate. Whatever that thing was. . . it got to me. Once Jack and I had settled down, I turned to him, and said, “What the hell, Jack! I was yelling to you for help! Why didn’t you come!”

“I couldn’t move! I heard you and I tried to holler back but as soon as you walked into that room, I was paralyzed. I couldn’t move or speak no matter what I did.”

I looked at Jack. “It... It tried to get me.”

“A ghost?”

“I guess it would have to be. I came up with a reason for everything in that house. Even the hallucination on the stairs—”

“Wait, that’s what that was? You said you were just imagining what happened! Not that you actually saw something! Even when I asked you if you saw something you said no!” Jack was hysterical. “They were putting those images into your head!” And as if I thought his hysterics couldn’t get worse, he began to hyperventilate.

“I can see that now,” I said even though a small part of me wish I hadn’t. Looking at Jack, I noticed that his eyes were still glazed over. “Are you all right?”

“Yes,” he said. It did not sound convincing at all, but I ignored my suspicion, understanding that the house was traumatic for both of us. “What happened in the bedroom?”

“I was being attacked. One moment I am looking around and the next this thing started pulling me toward the bed.”

“I told you they were real. I told you and you didn’t want to believe me!”

“I’m sorry, okay!” Part of me still didn’t want to believe. But how could I not after what just happened?

“Okay,” was all that Jack said. His eyes were still glazed over – no change, like he was still trapped by the house’s hauntings. But part of me had to wonder if something else was wrong with him. Rather something was trapped inside of him, not the other way around. I passed that off though. I probably only thought that because of what just happened.

As we walked the sidewalk back to my house, I patted my pockets searching for the only thing that prompted me onto that haunted property in the first place.

I looked down at my hands and sighed as I realized what happened to the baseball. “I dropped the ball in that bedroom,” I said, my voice hallow. “I guess I’ll just have to tell my mom I lost it and do a couple chores to pay for it. Like I said earlier, it’s been hard for her with money since my dad left.” And we walked in silence back to my house.

So, the stories and the rumors were true. Had anyone else been attacked by the ghosts in that house before? Or were these ghosts bothered by the fact that a non-believer stepped foot inside? If they wanted me to believe, they did a good job at that.

I had many questions after that day; most were some I wouldn’t have an answer for. And as much as I didn’t want to admit it, the one thing I knew for sure was that ghosts were real.

.