Thursday, October 6, 2011

An Early Halloween Tale

I know it is still several days until Halloween, but I'll get an early start with my own spooky tale:

When I take my walks I stay on the farm; our road is graveled, a little isolated in spots with thickets where one could be picked up by strangers, and so I play it safe. I walk over to the south forty, past three barns where Popa keeps his tractors and equipment since we don't put hay in them anymore.

On one particular day, as I approached the first barn, I heard what I thought was someone talking and wondered if someone had come to look over a piece of equipment Popa was going to trade off. But I hadn't seen anyone drive past the house. Then I heard music coming from inside the barn.

Oh, Popa must have forgotten to turn off the key and the radio is playing; I really should turn it off or the battery will run down. Instead of taking the time to unfasten the chain on the gate I will just climb over.

When I lifted my leg over the top of the gate, the music stopped at once! Fear swept over me, for you see, this was only a few days after Katrina had struck New Orleans and we had heard that perhaps prisoners had escaped. Besides the two tractors inside the barn, there was an old truck; maybe someone was using the barn to live in.

No, surely not and if it was just a key I needed to turn it off, so I went on into the barn. The new tractor didn't have a key in it and the older tractor had a key but it was turned off. Now I began to feel like someone was watching me, so I climbed back over the gate and quickly walked back to the house, turning now and then to see if anyone was following me. I locked the doors and waited for Popa to come home.

Of course he was afraid too, and when his brother came, they got the shot gun and drove over to the barn to investigate. They found nothing, not even so much as a footprint. The person must have left.

The mystery continued to puzzle us, until a few weeks later. One morning when I went outside, I heard music. This time the new tractor was parked in front of the shed behind the house and the music was coming from it. The key was off; why was the radio playing? And many other times afterwards, when I was feeding the cats in the shed, the radio would just start playing as if my movements triggered it. Popa finally decided the radio must have an alarm set to go off. But whatever, it gave me shivers just to think about the first time it happened.

Boo! ! ! Charlotte

16 comments:

  1. Good story, Charlotte. I couldn't wait to see what happened!

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  2. Great story of the ghost who loved music...'just my kinda spook!!! Heeehehe!!!

    God bless ya and have a wonderful weekend sweetie!!!

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  3. Oh shivers, I enjoy spooky little mysteries like this, but it would drive me buggers if I were you and couldn't figure it. I hope you'll figure it out soon. Thanks for sharing this curious mystery. It's perfect for the season. :)

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  4. This is a good one Charlotte, makes you wonder though what it really is, that's scary.. I'm scared to walk the road that goes by my house anymore and I used to walk it all the time. It's a paved road and has been for years but the reason for my fear is so sad but true. A couple of years ago, a woman was kidnapped walking along the road by her house. It was on the news, big time. Her name was Christi Cornwell.It was a little over a year before they found her remains. They were burned and hidden a little piece from the road. That road happens to link into my road, which would have been about twenty miles from her home. The suspect killed himself in Atlanta, after the law chased him down for yet another crime, raping his stepdaughter. The irony is I knew him and the fact that he was in my door is scary enough for me to never walk alone.. I know this is a windy post but I just felt like sharing ..Susie

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  5. I am such a scardy cat...your story gave me chill bumps...

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  6. I wouldn't have gone on into the barn!!!

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  7. I'm with Augustina Peach...no way would I have gone into the barn! I am glad to know how this scary story turned out.

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  8. You are much braver than me; I would have hightailed it back to the house as soon as I heard the music. Thanks for sharing this story with us!

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  9. Hmm... the mystery of the music. Very interesting. I really enjoyed it.

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  10. Oh, you had me scared with this!! LOL Have a good week. blessings,Kathleen

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  11. creepy, good story. That would give me the willies too.

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  12. Oh I would have been scared! How funny that things that can be explained scare us anyways, our mind just keeps going!
    Excellent tale.

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  13. Great spooky story! Thats the kind I like-the kind where you figure out it was something simple all along : )

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  14. It's a good time to start telling spooky stories. This was a good one.We told ghost stories around the campfire over the weekend, I'm glad a lot of us were there, or I would have been spooked a little.

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  15. That was a good one. Mysteriously spooky

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