A quote: “The stones themselves are thick with history, and those cats that dash through the alleyways must surely be the ghosts of the famous dead in feline disguise.” ~~ Erica Jong
I’ll start with a story …
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“Tonight? Today is Halloween?”
“Yes, dear. Haven’t you been paying attention to how the kids have spent the last few weeks decorating for it?”
“Well, I did notice a little, but how did it get here so fast?”
“Silly, you know time just gallops for us. Blink twice and it’ll be Christmas Eve.”
He harrumphed, glaring balefully down the staircase towards the front door. “And I suspect the kids are going to want us to show up tonight.”
She laughed, “Of course! This is the best Halloween house in town. We have a reputation to maintain.”
“And you just love to see all the trick-or-treaters.”
“Oh, come on. You do, too. The little ones are so cute …”
“Then there’s the teens …” he chuckled, “When they show up late …”
She shook her head, “Last year you were just a little too eager to scare them. That was some performance!”
“Hey, considering the stuff they watch already I had to come up with something!”
“Well, be a bit more careful tonight. We’re lucky our kids are so into Halloween they let us participate … after 150 years it’s nice to be wanted. Even just for one haunting a year.”
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Now, it’s your turn and Happy Halloween!
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. featured image Adobe Stock standard license
When I was a kid growing up, the old Laughlan place was the archetypical haunted house. Everybody told stories about it, about how Old Man Laughlan had a magic tree in the center of the old formal gardens from the Gilded Age, that he’d brought it back from some place in East Asia, Loong or Leng or something like that. Some people even said that Old Man Laughlan never died, but just disappeared off somewhere and one day he was going to come back with some friends to make everyone sorry who’d ever given him trouble.
A few days before Halloween when I was in sixth grade, it caught fire and burned to the ground so fast the fire department couldn’t even get to it in time. Probably didn’t help that the lane was so overgrown by that time that fire engines had a hard time getting close enough to do any good. But I heard plenty of rumors at school, about how one or another person around town saw an unearthly light right before it went up in flames. Some of those people described it as a “slow-motion explosion,” like when you watch the frame by frame’s of the old nuclear weapons tests from the 1950’s in science class.
If Old Man Laughlan had any heirs, they’d disappeared long ago. After a number of years, the place finally escheated to the state. In theory they’re supposed to keep things open for an heir to recover it, but about a decade later, some developer bought the land and cleared it to put in a housing development. Probably a sweetheart deal in return for various favors.
Since then, there’ve been all kinds of stories of weird things happening around all those “little pink houses.” Silvery figures flitting here and there in the moonlight, polydactyl stray cats that seem a little too smart, and a general uncannyness. Real estate agents around here grumble about how much turnover there is in that subdivision, with way too many “for sale” signs and never quite enough buyers who actually settle down.
If I were still a teenager, I probably would get myself a battery lantern and go poking around the woods by the creek, out where the old formal gardens used to be, and see if there were any uncanny things like people used to talk about. But these days I’m an adult with family and a job and a reputation to think about. The last thing I need is trouble with the cops because I’m poking around places I don’t need to be, trying to satisfy a childhood curiosity.
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