Supernatural Writing Contest: Claire K-S - Tacoma, WA
Here’s entry number five in our Why Supernatural Should Come to My Town story contest, and it comes from Claire in Tacoma, Washington. Check out Claire’s story, along with the other five entries, then cast your vote for your favorite!
I have a very vivid imagination. As a result of this, in addition to the fact that my parents weren’t big fans of the genre, I never really watched scary movies as a kid, and even now as an adult I would be hard pressed to go and see any kind of slasher or horror movie. Despite the fact that I once scared myself silly after reading a book about how to hunt ghosts and carried my teddy bear around with me for two days after, my favorite television show now features two brothers hunting any number of terrifying creatures from the darkness.
When I was about eleven years old, my friend and I invented our own urban legend about the House Across the Street. In my neighborhood it was the house with the highest turn-over rate for new occupants. Even to this day people seem to move in and out of that house far more frequently than the rest of the block. One month there would be a young couple living there, after that a family with five children who had no idea what a fence was for and came and went through all yards equally. Two months later it was a motorcycle enthusiast who would invite his ten friends over every weekend, keeping my family up late with the roar of the hogs as they came and went down our street. Clearly, the only logical explanation for these phenomena was that the house was haunted.
The house was blue, two-storied, with a gabled roof on the front sheltering a small porch. There was a small front yard facing the street, but the key feature, to eleven-year old eyes, was the wooden slap-dash tree house in the backyard. There was really only one family that moved into the house with kids, and my siblings and I didn’t get along with them so we never got to see the tree house up close but only gazed at it from afar. It was made of plywood pieces put together inexpertly in a box shape with a rectangle left open here for a window and there for a door, and tree branches it rested in were not very far from the ground, yet somehow this tree house became far more than a child’s private retreat for my friend and I, though neither one of us had ever been in it.
“A kid died there.” My friend and I told each other. “She was playing in the tree house, swinging from a rope, and somehow it slipped and hanged her.” We said. True to urban legend form, there were just enough specifics to make it seem plausible. “After the girl died, her family moved away. From then on strange things began happening to whatever family lived in the house at the time. The girl’s ghost haunted not only the tree house where she had died, but also the house itself, slamming doors, flickering lights, unexplained noises and the like. All the kitchen appliances would turn on at once. One day a family with kids moved in. Two boys, one about eight, the other a little older. They weren’t too excited about moving, but when they saw the tree house and the backyard they were thrilled to have some place to play. A few weeks after they had gotten settled, the youngest boy fell out of the tree house and broke his arm. Naturally the parents were concerned, but kids have accidents like that all the time and no one thought anything of it. Until a few months later when the older boy fell out of the tree house and broke his neck. Another accident? Sure. But why were there rope marks around his neck if he died from the fall?”
There weren’t very many deaths chalked up to the ghost, my friend and I agreed. That would be too grisly. Instead there were just numerous accidents and a general sinister nature about the tree house. “Occasionally the ghost would appear, once to a group of kids who were staying the night in it, and she looked just a like a normal kid at first, but then turned into this horrible specter dressed in white. The kids were playing with some kind of ritual that involved candles, and one girl got caught on fire and was burned really bad.”
When it was a family without kids, we knew the house was still up to its old tricks because of the way the animals acted around it. There was a Doberman pinscher who lived in the backyard when his owner lived in the house. There were some other dogs too, but he’s the one who sticks out in my mind. For the sake of the story let’s say there were two other dogs, both lab mixes. “The Doberman, would always bark at the tree house, even though his owner couldn’t see any squirrels or small animals up there. The other dogs could sense it too, but they just avoided the tree holding the tree house and its occupant. The ghost didn’t do anything to the dogs, but after one long day and night where all three of the dogs had been barking and growling and generally freaking out constantly, the owner came out onto the back porch, grabbed his shot gun, and killed his dogs by shooting them point blank between the eyes. This guy loved his dogs, and later he said he couldn’t even remember why he did it, only that he was suddenly seized by a black rage.”
The house is still there, though I think by now the tree house has either rotted to pieces or been torn down. Even so, no one seems to live there very long. A young family with a new baby moved two years ago, but they moved across town last summer. In fact, a lot of the houses on my block have been put up for sale recently. The house right next door has had at least four families move in and out within a three year period. Normal economics of the housing market, maybe. But could it be something more?
Sam and Dean Winchester would be more than welcome in Tacoma, WA, since I haven’t even told you about the ghosts of Fort Nisqually, a local living history museum. (But they’re harmless and the staff is on good terms with them.) But I would really appreciate it if they made a stop by my neighborhood first, after all, just because a spirit is spawned from a fictional urban legend doesn’t mean it doesn’t have power. (Just look at Hell House!) The House Across the Street remains a prominent memory from my childhood, and I can still look out the window at the gray-shingled roof and the blue painted siding and think back on the delicious shivers that went down our spines as my friend and I told each other stories about the horrors of the tree house and its ghostly occupant.
Claire K-S
Tacoma, WA
3-26-08
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What did you think? Cast your votes, and don’t forget to show your love for your favorite stories in the comments. The winner will receive a copy of Supernatural Season Two on DVD! Voting ends May 18.
Why Supernatural Should Come to My Town Contest.
Tags: CW, legends, original-story, original-writing, script, story, supernatural, tacoma, tacoma-wa, travel, Urban Legends, wa, washington, washington-state, why-supernatural-should-come-to-my-town, writing, writing-contest
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