Tell me your local scary story, true or not!

In My Humble Opinion
41

I love scary local legends. My suburbia hometown is apparently so boring even spirits don’t want to hang around, so we had to scare each other with stories from nearby towns. These were:

A monastery where nuns went to have their babies. The babies were, IIRC, thrown down a well to keep anyone from knowing about them.

A road where a man killed his wife for having an affair. He drove her to the end of the road, killed her, and then dragged her body back down the road behind his car. According to legend, if you drive down the road, you won’t see anything, but if you turn around and drive back you’ll see blood on the ground.

(Back in the sixth grade, after we had been telling these stories all night, my parents loaded my basketball team into my dad’s Suburban and drove us out to see these places. The monastery, if it ever in fact was a monastery, is now a youth home and I don’t know if we could ever agree on which was the haunted road. The scariest thing that happened was someone puking over the tailgate.)

A haunted mansion where a rich man reportedly murdered boys. (My brother and his friends actually went out there and poked around. Scared each other but didn’t see any ghosts.)

We have our own goatman legend, though it’s really stupid. I didn’t hear it until I took drivers’ ed. The driving school owner hadn’t lived in the area long, and he was telling us some stories about experiences with student drivers.
“Have any of you heard about the goatman?” he asked.
A few people nodded. A few didn’t, so a girl explained that a man and goat were hit by a train and now haunted the stretch of road and track where it occured.
“I was driving with a girl out there around sun down,” the instructor said. “The sun hit a big piece of trash by the road funny. She screamed and let go of the steering wheel. I thought she was an environmentalist.”

42

Sorry not to have responded sooner, but I was away awhile, and was lax in catching up on old threads.

I don’t have that issue, but if you’re looking for one, I believe it’s the oldest original back issue available on the Weird N.J. website.

43

Well, they found a human skeleton in the state forest near my house a couple of years ago. And a corpse on a road nearby.

And a few different serial killers have called my part of the Bay Area “home” over the last couple of decades. Combine that with the usual stories from San Francisco, and the local urban legends can’t really compete.

…Though some scary discussions have cropped up in my family over the attractions listed on the local gay dance club’s marquee. ("What the hell is ‘bubble night’?) :wink:

44

Well, here’s my creepy story – actually two stories, but related to one another.

Many years ago, in rural Mississippi, there lived a man with a large family. They were farmers, and had many mouths to feed, so in the summer he, his children, and his wife would all go out to work in the fields together. Back in 1913, there was a new baby boy born into this family, and he was named Newton.

In the summer of 1914, the family went out to work. Thinking it was safe, the mother left her baby son under a tree on a hill, tying a dog near him to keep him safe. She then went to take part in the back-breaking labor. Somehow, nobody remembers how, a fire got started and began devouring the dry grasses. It was ferocious and fast. Terrified, the mother and her children ran towards the hill where they had left Newton and the dog. They were too late.

Both Newton and the dog had been burnt up by the time they got there. The mother wailed and wept so that her husband sent her back to the house. He found a shovel and wrapped his son’s corpse in an old blanket. He gave the bundle to his daughter and the shovel to his son, and told the children to bury their baby brother. The father then returned to work.

Several years later, the mother died. The father had nine children and no wife, so he began to court a spinster schoolteacher. The schoolteacher had become pregnant from an affair with a married man, and no-one else would have her. Out of either craziness or stupidity (probably both), she married the farmer. Her new husband beat the schoolteacher so badly she miscarried, and the farmer buried the fetus under a tree. The schoolteacher remained married to him for many decades until his death, and bore the farmer 12 children, though she treated his first wife’s children very coldly.

I know these stories are true, because the farmer was my great-grandfather, and the first wife my great-grandmother. Baby Newton is buried in a cemetary up the road from where I live, in a grave dug by my grandfather and my great-aunt. My aunt still knows where the tree is the schoolteacher’s fetus is buried under. My great-grandfather also participated in a massacre that was started near my home when a white man raped a black woman, but that story is sader still.

.:Nichol:.