Three Hauntings

Busy times here at the Pacific outpost. Working on a handful of projects and its all going smoothly, but a few weeks ago while I was tinkering with the finer points of something I was thinking. Thinking, for me, is an act of listening in many ways. Listening for ideas. And sometimes in those moments of quiet, one of the stories that haunt me will rise up and present itself. There are many of them. Here are three-

The Campus Knifing

One night years ago I was hanging out with this gal. We stopped by to visit a friend of hers and had a couple drinks. I was bored, barely listening, when the conversation veered abruptly into horror. They were talking about college. The friend, we’ll call her Becky, had been accepted to one of her favorite universities and her mother had come out to help her move into the dorm. It was day one. The question, left hanging for years, was why Becky had abruptly packed all her shit and gone home with her mother and suffered a nervous breakdown. No one ever knew what happened. The mood in the room changed. There were a few other people there by then. All of them were curious if this mystery would finally be solved that night. Becky’s face went white and her hands sort of bent into crow hands, and she finally told them.

“My mother and I had just moved all my stuff into the room and finished decorating. We were looking out the window and talking about lunch. My dorm room had a view of the campus park and there was a jogging route that led along the edge of the forest across the field. We were watching as a young man, maybe a young woman with short hair, run along with headphones on. My mom said she thought I should take up jogging too. A man came out of the woods and stabbed the jogger to death and then ran back into the trees. They never found out who the man was.”

The Train Station Man

When I was in 8th grade my science teacher was this beefy guy named Mr. March. Nice guy. It was the gifted class and we were all dorks on the way to cubical glory. One day some kid asked him about his own middle school science experience. The question stunned him. We’d just gone to visit a private school on a field trip and trounced them in a science standoff. The story he told was… haunting. Mr. March had gone to a private school himself, in upstate New York. One winter night around the holidays he’d been riding the train back to the campus. He was big for a kid in the 8th grade. His rich parents probably thought he’d be okay riding the last train of the night to a remote stop. When he got off, he was the only passenger, a lone kid with a bag of books. There was a man waiting, and Mr. March thought he was there to meet someone who missed the train. But still, he had a bad feeling for some reason. He started walking, fast, and when he looked back the man was gone. Mr. March never understood why this scared him, but it did, so he dropped the books and started running down the dark road toward the campus. He didn’t look back until he was almost there. He almost dropped out of his sprint before he looked back, but he didn’t. He turned his head just enough to save his life. The man was right behind him, three steps back, running silently. In the next month or two, a half dozen people in the area disappeared and were never found. Three of them were students, traveling together for safety after Mr. March told his story. The man was never found either.

The Hairdresser and Her Daughter

When I was in 10th grade I used to get my hair cut by this super hot middle age woman at the little place down the street. She was a chain smoker, big blond hair, long fingernails, big blue eyes and huge tits she would press into me. She winked a great deal. Her daughter looked just like her, but she was 15 and so was I. I left and a few years later I came back to that city in Missouri and eventually I ran into someone from my old neighborhood. I asked after the hairdresser and her daughter and the kid’s face darkened. “They disappeared,” he said. “Last year. Someone came over to their house and found the door open. They’d just made popcorn and the TV was on. No clothes missing, car in the driveway, just… gone. No one ever saw them again.”

There are more.