Happy Halloween

Here’s a spooky tale for everyone on Halloween. And what makes it scary and creepy was that it really happened, as in, it is based on actual events.

My friend Tom (here I often call him Glom) I’ve known since we were about 5. My friend Trace, I met when I was a junior in high school. For years, along with Jase, we were all pals for quite a few years. My parents loved all of my friends, but my late mother had quite an admiration for Trace, as well as our friend Jamie. These chicks were all tits, makeup and clothes and I think my mother felt their presence kind of “classed up” the rest of my dirtball circle of friends.

My parents had a cottage in central northern Michigan, a beautiful little place on a lake in the middle of the woods, up on a hill. I hated going there as a kid, but loved it as an adult. The latter was mainly because my folks would let me and my friends up there for uninterrupted weekends of what 19-year-olds do. Had they known we were tripping our minds out, smoking down and getting blown out on booze and beer, they might’ve thought otherwise. Some weekends were downright toxic, others kind of mild and mellow, more like a serene getaway.

The place was fabulous. It had a huge stone fireplace, nice deck, cable TV, but no phone, which, I felt, made it even more attractive. Nobody could reach us and we kind of liked it that way. My parents bought the place when I was about 14, after owning the joint next door since about 1976. The new place was in disrepair we spent long weekends up there renovating it: new deck, new plumbing, new ceiling, the whole deal. We washed dishes in the bathtub while my dad and brother blew out the kitchen. That kind of shit.

My mother would pass away in January of 1990. She retired about eight months before that and spent about six of them up on the lake. About a year or so later, Tom, Trace and I decided to head up there for a weekend of relaxing. All we ever did up there was eat, drink, loaf, smoke, watch TV, and otherwise goof off. It was perfect. So we went this weekend, got there about 9 p.m. on a Friday night and, upon entering, claimed our rooms.

Since Trace was the lone female in the group, she took one of two single bedrooms on the main floor. Tom and I took the two single beds in the loft, directly above her room. The other main floor room was my parents’ master bedroom and with my mother’s funeral a year behind us, I wasn’t sleeping in there. We crashed early the first night, got up Saturday and lounged all day long. Saturday night we would do what we did best, tossed a bunch of beer, turned joints into roaches and basically fucked off, watching TV and wolfing down as much food as possible.

It was about midnight when we decided to go to bed. We were definitely in a different state of mind, but nobody was positively wasted. There was no stumbling or slurring. We were just beat and buzzed and looked forward to slumber. We met at the bottom of the steps. Trace said good-night and me and Tom went upstairs. I could hear her door close. Tom got into his bed and I sat on the edge of mine, smoking a cigarette before bed and kicking off my socks. We made quiet small-talk for a second before we could hear Trace’s voice coming from her room downstairs. It was faint. It wasn’t like a “Hey, shut the hell up!” or “Can someone turn out the hallway light, please?” Nothing like that. She said something else and I called to her, “What?” And then she said nothing else. Tom and I looked at each other and kind of shrugged. Whatevs.

We then fell asleep.

I got up first and went downstairs to start making some form of breakfast. Tom came down about 10 minutes later and then Trace opened her bedroom door, joining us in the kitchen. She had a smirk on her face.

“OK,” she said, “which one of you was it?”

Tom and I kind of looked at each other, like, “what in the fuck are you talking about?”
Her question made no sense, so I kept doing what I was doing. She pressed.

“Which one of you was it,” she asked, still kind of smiling.

“Which one was WHAT?” I asked. We had no idea what in the world she was talking about. She kept on with the vague questioning before I put the pan down and said “Trace, what? What are you talking about?”

“Which one of you came into my room last night?”

We laughed. “You wish,” Tom said. The three of us were friends and had, at one time, fooled around with our good friend. But we remained friends with no hard feelings and our boy-ish desires, at least for Trace, were well behind us. It was a respect thing at that stage of our friendship.

“Seriously,” she said, “which one of you was it? One of you came in my room, now who was it.”

The smirking had stopped and it was short of terse, like, “enough already with the games.”

The stairs to the loft were narrow and short, and made of wood. To negotiate them, you had to walk sideways, at an angle. And they creeked noticeably. All of the floors creeked. Had Tom gotten up in the middle of the night to go downstairs, so much to even piss, it would wake me up. And last night, it didn’t.

“After I went to bed last night, one of you came in my room,” she said.

Tom and I looked at each other.
“Tom?” I asked.
“No, man,” he said. And I believed him. I totally would have heard him and vice versa.

“We said good-night at the stairs,” Trace said. “And I went into my room, changed clothes, turned off the light and got into bed. About five minutes later one of you came into my room.”

“Trace,” Tom said. “We did not come in to your room, we swear.”
Meanwhile, I’m recounting the moment we went to bed, how I saw Tom up there when I went to sleep, how he was there when I woke up, and did not venture from the loft between that time.

We all had the same “oh fuck” look on our faces.

“One of you guys came in to my room last night after I turned off the light and sat at the foot of the bed. I called out to you, I said “Tom? John?”

I turned to Tom, “That must’ve been the talking we heard from her before we crashed. Trace, didn’t you hear me? I was upstairs and called out “What? As in, what do you want? I thought you wanted us to stop talking.”

“Wait a minute,” she said. “You both heard me from my bedroom and you were both upstairs at the same time?”

“Yeah,” we said in unison. “We were both looking at each other like, what the fuck does she want now.”

“That’s really creepy, you guys,” she said, almost freaked out. “If you guys are fucking around you better tell me now! This isn’t funny!”

“Trace,” I said, and she cut me off.
“Someone came in that room, in the dark, and sat at the end of that bed and stared at me for about three or four minutes. They didn’t say a word, but it could feel like someone was staring at me. I wasn’t scared because it didn’t feel scary, that’s why I thought it was one of you tw-“

And she stopped, putting her hand over her mouth.

I looked at Tom and he at me, and then us at Trace.

Holy shit.

I believe in spirits and energy and a small amount of the supernatural, superphysical or whatever you want to call it.

“You know Trace, ma always liked you quite a bit,” I said.

She slapped me on the arm and we all kind of changed the subject. I would make it up the cabin about a dozen more times before my dad sold it and I never felt anything strange. But I know where I was at that moment and I know where Tom was. And according to Trace’s timing, at the moment she spoke, there sure felt like someone sitting on the end of the bed. And it wasn’t me. And it wasn’t him.

Happy Halloween.