October 1 - The First Closet Monster

October is a month of change. Summer humidity gives way to autumn dankness. Daylight dwindles alarmingly – taking us by surprise. Wasn’t it just last week there were fresh tomatoes and watermelons? Now the acres of cornstalks dry overnight. Summer’s lush blooms are gone, replaced by tightly packed scrubbers of mums. Dried up carcasses of leggy petunias and hopeful zinnias cling to their curling last petals.

In October, we watch life draining away.

October 1 hints at Halloween’s message: time is running out.

October is for frightening stories.

Supernatural? Maybe. Life threatening? Sometimes. Spooky? Definitely.

I’ll start with my earliest recollection of horror.

I was the fifth of six children. It is a Universal Truth that older siblings love scaring the bejesus out of their little brothers and sisters.

One night when my older sister got sick of my sass, she told me about the old woman who originally owned our house. She was really, really old, and didn’t want to leave the house - but she needed the money so she sold it to my parents under one condition: when she died, she would be buried in the attic.

“How could they bury her in the attic?”

My sister’s face screwed up at my idiocy.

Her bones were in a box up there.

She died before I was born, and her whole, dried up body was up there, in a box, and at night she came to life, and climbed through the access door in the ceiling of my bedroom closet so she could LOOK AT ME.

This was horrifying.

I slept with my head beneath the blankets.

I asked Mildred, the old lady who lived next door, if she knew the old lady my mom and dad bought our house from, and was she nice?

Mildred told me that SHE was the old lady mom and dad bought the house from, and hadn’t they done a nice job with the addition they built, which made it twice as big as the original house.

What part was the addition?

It was the main part of the house, with the nice bedrooms built for my sisters and me.

And the attic?

Oh yes, the attic too. The little cottage she had sold my parents didn’t have an attic.

I confronted my sister.

She hadn’t wanted to tell me before, she was trying not to scare me, but the old woman had actually lived in a cottage that used to stand on the spot where the addition was. She was MURDERED by an INSANE MURDERER, who then hung himself. The police found their bodies hanging in the closet together. And when the old cottage was knocked down, their ghosts moved into MY closet. 
She had seen them there, with their bulging eyes and bloody hands.

She was a pretty creative storyteller.

I slept with my head under the blankets.