It was a cool day in autumn when three young girls ventured out of their houses and on to the cracked sidewalks that lined the pot hole filled streets. The day was quit day, a light breeze blew the remaining leaves out of tree tops and onto the path the girls walked upon.
As the leaves crunched under their feet the youngest of the girls danced around ahead of the other two, with such grace that a seasoned ballerina would be made jealous by her smooth steps. Behind the blonde hair that was on the youngest girl’s head came the middle girl, her curly brown locks in tangled knots and stains on her clothing. She almost hopped along the path as they went along, just happy to be outside. Then came the oldest of the girls, her hair a light brown or dark blonde that might make passersby think the girls were sisters, but they were simply friends. The eldest seemed to walk along at a leisurely pace behind the younger girls, knowing well that she might be last in line but she was the one in charge. Neither of the younger kids would dare to go too far away from this authoritative girl.
Halloween was going to be coming up soon and the yards were all adorned with tombstones and monsters. The mouths of the girls water as they thought of all the candy they would soon be collecting from almost complete strangers. Dogs braked from behind backyard fences at the children as they strolled along, disturbing the quilt of the day. The younger girls seemed to be caught up in an animated conversation about what costumes they would be wearing to trick or treat in but the older girl seemed to not pay much attention to them. After all what were the younger girls’ princess and angel costumes compared to the oldest girl’s vampire outfit.
“I told my daddy that I wanted to go trick or treating all by myself this year! But he said I couldn’t! ” the girl with curly locks announced.
“I want to go all by myself too!” the youngest girl said, jumping up and down because she thought the idea was so great.
“You two babies wouldn’t last a second out by yourselves trick or treating,” the oldest girl told them, finally joining in the conversation. “You would scream and run home!” she said to the middle girl. “And you would scream and wet yourself!” she said to the youngest girl.
“We would not!” the youngest girl defended her and the middle girl.
“Yeah we like being scared!” added the girl with knots in her hair.
At first the oldest girl scoffed at the replies given to her but then she stopped walking. She raised her eyebrows at the two younger females and a smile that showed she had an idea, spread across her face.
“Is that so?” she asked the younger girls. “You two like to be scared?” she questioned and both her companions nodded their heads. “Hmm, I’ll try and keep that in mind.”
The walk resumed, only this time the oldest girl stepped ahead of the pack and lead them down a different path than they were on. Both of the young girls struggled to keep up with the eldest girl’s much longer stride. They walk along without saying anything else to one another and the birds that were preparing to fly south made rustling noses above them.
“Those people really need to mow their grass,” the smallest of the three girls said as they walked past the house on the edge of their neighborhood.

The lawn was such and over grown mass of shrubbery that the house its self was barely visible anymore, not that the house was anything pleasant to look at. Once the home was a lovely pail blue but now the paint was mostly chipped away and mold covered the walls. Even the roof that once protected the family who reseeded there from mother nature’s wrath, was now caving in. Both the wooden door, that use to be inviting, and the windows, that use to be cheerful, were rotting away. Nobody had walked onto the lot in years. If a child hit a ball into the yard they just lost a ball because no one was going in after it.

“No one lives to mow the lawn stupid,” the oldest girl informed her companions in a superior, know it all tone and her devious smile got even wider.

“Has anyone ever lived there?” the in between girl asked while she gazed up at the eldest girl, who intern looked down in such a way that the middle girl knew she was annoyed by the question.

“Of course people lived there once! Don’t you two know anything?” said the oldest girl as she rolled her eyes.

“Well why doesn’t anyone live there anymore?” the youngest child questioned.

“Because of what happened to the last family that lived there!” the oldest girl told them, looking down knowingly at the other two children. “I suppose you want me to tell you guys all about it.” The girls shook their head yes but the older girl enjoyed the power she held over her friends at the moment and said instead, “I don’t know the story is pretty scary.”

“Tell us! Please tell us! Remember we told you we liked to be scared,” the middle girls begged and the older girl finally relented and began to tell the tail.

She was getting the thing that she loved the most, attention. Her captive audience was glued to her every word and she could tell a story like a side show barker, only gain more attention as she went along.

“That’s right you did say you liked to be scared, didn’t you? Well, a long, long, long time ago, even before I was born a family moved into that house right there. At the time that house was the nicest house on this street. The lawn was mowed and everything! The family had a dad, a mom, a little boy and two little girls. Everyone liked them a whole lot. The dad was friends with all the dads and the mom was friends with all the moms and their kids were friends with all the kids,” the girl began here story, her eye brows raised to emphases how important what she was saying was.

The other two girls looked up at her, so far the story had been nothing impressive to them. all they wanted was for her to get to the good part of the story. They didn’t dare to ask any questions or to say anything at all. They were entranced in the spell cast by the oldest girl’s charisma.

“Then one day something changed for that family. You see the little boy was down by the river, playing in the sand on the bank. He was perfectly happy, but then he fell in!” the oldest girl announced, raising her voice when she told the younger girls of the boy’s fate.

“Why’d he fall in?” the blonde could not help but asking, which actually seemed to please the head girl.

“That’s the thing you see, he didn’t just fall in. He was pushed in!” the story teller said with a flare and the two smaller girls gasped. “No one knew it at the time of course, but I know what happened. His own father pushed him in! But the boy was a good swimmer so the dad had to hold him down under the water until he drowned. Then the dad laughed about it for a really long time before he made himself look real upset about his son being dead. He took the little boy’s body back to town and said that he had found his son floating dead in the water.”

“And no one knew he had done it?” the curly haired child asked, her eyes opened wide.

“Nope. No one would of thought he had done such a thing, I mean every on liked the dad so much. I even heard that the dad cried at the funeral, but not because he was really sorry about it but so he could trick people. The dad really liked killing his son and he thought he’d like to kill again. So he did! But this time it was his baby girl that he killed. The poor thing wasn’t even old enough to walk yet, but he killed her alright,” she went on with her tale as her light brown hair blew in the breeze.

Her friends gulped and looked at each other before looking right back up at the oldest girl, eager to hear more of the gruesome account.

“But he didn’t drowned the baby, oh no. this time he did something even worse than he did before! One day when he was home alone with the baby he took it to the top of the stairs and kicked her down them. The baby didn’t die the first time either some he went down and got the screaming baby and kept kicking her until she stopped breathing. Then the baby was all cut up and covered in blood and had this big gash in her head from all the kicking so the dad didn’t know how to explain this one,” the oldest girl recounted.

“So then they all knew he did it right?” the smallest girl asked, her voice a little tribally as she pictured a baby with a hole in the side of its head.

“Oh no they didn’t. The dad was just too smart to be caught so he thought up a plan real quick, even before the mom got home from shopping and the other daughter got home from school. First he took the baby’s body and put it in a bag and then out in the trash can outside. Then he went back inside and changed out of his bloody clothes and cleaned his shoes before he went out and through the closes away too. Then when the mom got home he asked her where the baby was,” the oldest girl said.

“But she didn’t have the baby,” the middle girl pointed out.

“I know that, and you two know that, but since the boy had died the mom had been a little crazy so she thought she had taken the baby out and left it somewhere. So the two parents went out and looked all over for the baby and even some of the town helped but of course they never did find the little girl. And a few days later the father was ready to kill his other little girl. I think she was your age exactly,” the oldest girl told the youngest girl, whose face went even paler.
As she went on with her tail the oldest girl’s speech became even more animated then when she had begun. Four eyes were stuck on her as she spoke with gruesome detail about the blood thirsty father. The smaller females looked highly disturbed but did not ask her to stop telling what happened next.
“He told that little girl to go outside and get some wood for their fire place with him. But when they got where the chopped the wood at he hit the little girl so hard the she went to sleep. Then he just chopped her head off with an axe and blood squirted out of her neck like it did in this movie I saw once that my mom told me not to watch. Then he licked some of the blood off of his hand,” relayed the elder child before she took a pause to let the information she just shared really skin in to her friends’ minds.

“He had to be caught then! He had no more kids to kill!” the middle girl said.

“You’re wrong! He wasn’t caught, he just went back home screaming that some crazy man cut of his daughters head. He cried at the funeral too. Then he really was out of kids to kill. He was really upset then, the next time he wanted to kill someone, there weren’t any kids around. Then one day he realized that he still had his wife!” said the oldest girl.

“He didn’t kill her too did he?” asked the middle girl.
“ Well he didn’t want to kill his wife because she could just have another kid for him to kill. But her was ready to kill someone soon and he couldn’t wait until another baby was born. So a month or two after his daughter was buried the mom was outside hanging clothes on the line and he just hanged her right up there too. He told everyone that she had done it herself because she felt so bad that all their kids had died. And everyone believed him again. But then he had a real big problem he didn’t have no more family to kill,” the oldest girl said but smiled. “So then one day when he want to kill again, he went out and laid on the railroad tracks and let a train run him over.”

The two younger girls looked up at the older girl in horror, but the older girl seemed very pleased that they were terrified by her story.

“But if no one known he done all that how do you know he did?” the blonde asked and the smile left the face of the oldest girl.

“Well… one day I went in that house and I found that man’s journal!” she finally told the two young children who seemed satisfied with her response but the older girl was ready to rid herself of her friends. “And you know what else I know from going in that house?”

“What?” asked the brown head child in a quivery voice.

The oldest girl looked both ways then lead in right next to her friends’ heads, “It’s HAUNTED!”

The two younger girls looked at one another then back at the house before the both screamed and ran back to their own houses. However, the older girl stayed a minute longer looking at the lot with her wide smile on her face.

“Thank you,” she said to the house before walking calmly home by herself.

Later that day when the concerned mothers of the younger girls would ask Michelle what she had thought she was doing she would simply say she was doing what the younger girls liked. She was scaring them.

Maybe the story of the haunted house at the edge of that neighborhood is a true one. Or maybe at least part of the story is what really happened. It might be that the man who once lived there with his family did end up killing them all.

It is probably a lot more plausible that the story was simply the first told by the oldest little girl, in a long line of stories to come. So as little Michelle walked home alone that day, proud that her story scared the wits out of her friends, she might had decided that the businesses of making up things to tell other people was one that she wanted to be in.