My scary story!
I am currently reading a novel called “Ghost Radio” by Leopoldo Gout. It is a spooky story of voices in the static of radio waves on dark lonely nights. It made me think of this genre. I have read Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and several others, but normally don’t view scary stories as entertainment. I am not sure why, perhaps I am scared. Perhaps I have experienced a dark scary moment or two!
Herein follows a true story. When I was about 21 or 22, a college senior, going through my first divorce, dreading the military draft and other stressful thing of a young life, it happened.
One night I had a dream, the first of many in the decades to come. I was in a disturbing dark place in my dream, a basement, graveyard, woods, etc. “It” began to come after me, darkness, deeper and blacker than the night. A maligned presence, that scarred me to wake up screaming. After a few episodes, my landlady, a nurse, who I also woke up, told me to ask it what it wanted. Huh? I could only imagine it pointing a bony finger at me as shouting “You!” in a gravely voice! What if it was Death, the Reaper? No way.
After a year of widely spaced and increasingly urgent yelling, ”It” kept getting closer to catching me. By then I had moved on, graduation was almost upon me. The draft had been settled by “winning” a high lottery number, never to be called up. I had met a wonderful girl, who eventually became my second wife and mother of my eldest daughter.
Before those nicer times, however, the strangest nightmare of all transpired. Once again, I woke in a cold sweat, strangling in my screams, my girlfriend tried to comfort me. Now fully awake, I noticed I was blind. I could not seem to see my hand in front of my face in the chill, dark room. This was even stranger because the streetlight was just outside my apartment, and normally my room was fairly light. The real strange part was that my now wide-awake girlfriend, also couldn’t see in the pitch black either. OK, I was beyond scared here; it felt to me like a “thing” was taking the light, life, and air from me. I yelled for it to go away and leave us alone. I told my future wife I loved her. Almost instantly the darkness and smothering feel was gone, the streetlight came through the windows. We never spoke about that night much after that. While many dreams of the dark shifting “thing” continued, three or four times per year, for the next 40 years, I never had one quite like that, ever again.
I graduated from college, we moved to Colorado, got married, had our daughter and was happy. On my wife’s 21st birthday, she had a sudden, fatal aneurysm and died. I became a single parent and the loneliness of those days can still be felt. I often wonder to this day, if “It” chose her instead of me. I will always wonder.