Friendly Campfire Stories 1

 The current assignment is to make general posts on the blog for the next three weeks. While working as a substitute and dealing with horrible high schoolers, I've had trouble thinking of what to do since I didn't want to do just another cryptid breakdown till a friend made a suggestion tonight. Why not find some stories from others from the places they're from or their hometowns. I have several friends from around the world, so surely there are a couple of creepy urban legends they've either experienced or heard from their grandpa on his third glass of whiskey at the kitchen table while the mother who forbid it is off in another room doing laundry and this is his one drunken chance to freak out his grandkid. 

Now it's too late in the night to go interviewing for stories and there's only an hour and a half left on this deadline. So, with the help of my own alcoholic energy, I'm going to recount one from when I was little about my aunt's basement and the tales my uncle would say to freak me out about it. Is it spooky? Maybe not. But it scared the **** out of 11-year-old me. 

When I was young, my dad would take me and my little brother on trips back to my home state of Kentucky. I loved the drive there. Not so much the heights which my dad would scare me with as he'd get way too close to the cliffside that didn't have rails just so I'd see down the Appalachian cliffs (Which was quite heart-attack inducing for young me), but more for everything else as soon as we hit the Kentucky border. The rolling hills and farmland with the occasional dilapidated barns with quilts on the sides. I'd look up in awe as we passed through the roads that went through blown-out sections of hillside revealing the layers of stone underneath. 

Eventually, we'd arrive in Winchester, Kentucky where my aunt resides. She had a pretty two-story home in the middle of a nice neighborhood. Hers was the home all the family congregated at. I'm sure everyone has such a family member. Every time the family met there, we'd all gather 'round at her dining table. At the time, my little brother and I would have to sit at a little plastic table along with our young cousins while the adults had the big table for dinner. But when it wasn't mealtime, the big table is where we sat. 

Anyway, not one bit of that has relevance to the story. What does matter was this one day when I decided to explore the basement. My uncle had sent me down to the basement to the ice chest to fetch him an ice cream cone. The one with the chocolate syrup and the nuts. Can't remember the name. Anywho, as I was down there, I got distracted by the washing machine to the left. See, the layout of the basement is like this. You open the door and you have to walk down a decently steep set of cheap, wooden stairs down into the basement. I say cheap cause they always had a loud knocking sound to them with every step you took. However, I have a rather... hefty family and it's supported them and their cold desires for decades so who am I to judge? Well, you get down the stairs and you're met with the initial rectangular room. Basic plaster walls with some shelves used for storage. All looks well to you look to the left where it stops being a carpeted room and just a concrete area with some high garden windows. Underneath which were the washer and dryer. The walls connecting to the first room were bare like they started construction and then just quit. To the right was a very small raised bathroom with a singular, non-working toilet. Besides that, you find the other side of the wall from the first room is a huge empty space of just darkness. The lights feeding into there didn't work and my aunt never got them fixed. I Never touched that area. Never had a desire to. 

But the area that spooked me the most was to the left of the washer and dryer units. It turned off to the other side of the first room. Beyond the wall under the stairs was just a long hallway dimly lit with dying white bulbs. Ending in another dark room. I let my imagination get away from me that day as I stood at the entrance to that hallway. I could hear scraping, gurgling, and walking in that dark room. Felt like something was watching me from the darkness. I was so transfixed, I hardly felt the hand sliding over my shoulder. Once I noticed, I leapt in fright. I screamed and cried all while my uncle laughed. While the man usually looked like a ginger Santa Claus, at that moment he was every nightmare I felt looking in that hallway rolled together. 

Once I calmed down, he knelt down and told me never to go down that hallway cause that's how my parents lost their first kid. He disobeyed my parents and went into that hallway. So the man in the darkness took him away forever. I had always had an overactive imagination. And that set me off deeply. Looking down the hallway, it was like it shrunk till the darkness met me face to face, and that man my uncle described loomed over me, waiting for me to touch the blackness so he could take me. After that, I never left that first room whenever I went into the basement again.