The Halloween Monthlong Open Medium Contest, with a prize of 20 shares in SBI, can be found here!

Today's post is a two-fer...first you get a spooky short story, then you get a weird little anecdote that the short story was based on...

Me and Theresa were just 16, and we had gone from sneaking out to whisper secrets together at 12 to sneaking out to steal beer from the neighbors and make out...

A creek cut through the neighborhood, and it bit through the limestone cliffs to make a great maze of small caves (cutouts, really) and clefts in the cliffs that led up to the neighborhoods on each side. A boon to rebellious neighborhood kids and the bane of the deputies who chased vandals and school ditchers into the creek bed to lose them quickly.

Me and Theresa even had a little cave of our own in which we hid our stolen beer!

There was a local legend though...The Comanche had murdered a kidnapped settler woman in one of these clefts, back in the Civil War, as the local militia closed in on the raiding party. I admit that I often had a queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach as I walked up that particular path...during the day...

This night however, there was a full moon, or what has been called a Comanche moon in the fall season. I rapped on her window, and she climbed out carrying the blankets we would snuggle up under after we had rescued out nightly beer from the dastardly adults that left their garage doors open and their beer in the garage fridge!

As we approached the path up the cleft, Theresa began to softly cry...

Hey, what's the matter?

She didn't know, but she was scared. I took her by the hand, and almost had to drag her into the cleft...but not for long. As we entered the pathway, something grabbed me by the throat. It was cold and it was dark and I almost screamed as I dragged Theresa back into the creekbed.

..and it was gone as suddenly. I realized that what had grabbed me was an almost physical attack of fear, but as I struggled to recover I saw that she had fallen down and was clutching her stomach.

They stabbed me...they stabbed me...I'm dying

I went into a panic that felt more real than the rope of fear that had taken me just a moment ago. I fell by her side, and in the light of the full moon barely noticed that my little Mexican girlfriend appeared to be pale and blond. I gently pulled up her shirt and felt for blood and looked for a wound...nothing.

I lifted her up and carried her along the creek until there were a few football fields away from the cutway in the cliff. She sobbed hysterically and clung to me so hard I could barely breathe until the last hundred yards, when she began to relax against me and cry gently.

As I lay her down, she simply told me It's not real.

She told me what she had seen and felt as we started up that dark path. Three Indians were stabbing her in a frenzy...

It didn't return to the here and now for her until we had gotten far away from there. We went to our hideyhole and drank beer relentlessly until the dawn, when we went home the far way around and I saw her back into the window.

Neither of us ever went down the cleft again.

The true story

There is a cleft in the cliff wall down the creek from me. Two of them, in fact. As a kid I used these paths to steal beer and vandalize up and down the neighborhood. Had a lot of fun as a teenager ;> Yes, I was an asshole back then, too, and I never needed a Comanche moon for my raiding!

There was no legend about either of them, and I never felt the slightest bit of weirdness about either of them..except for one night.

I was up to my usual shenanigans as I started up the cleft. I get into the cleft, make it two feet into the pass, when suddenly a burst of fear took over my stomach. I didn't scream, but I did run like hell back down into the creek.

And just as suddenly as the fear took me, it was gone.

You know how you feel after you wake up from a nightmare? A little embarrassed about freaking out over nothing, but with a little residual fear that won't go away?

I sort of felt like that, but I was annoyed I was feeling that way while fully awake, so I put my back up, and boldly walked into the cleft again...where I ran into a wall of fear. It was literally a wall of fear. I felt nothing but embarrassment and annoyance as I walked in, right up to to the same point. It was like the fear materialized all the way up and down my guts and bounced off an imaginary line on the pathway, taking me running right back down into the creekbed.

The fear didn't leave as quickly this time. The...physical?...part of it did, but it became pretty obvious to me there was something wrong going on here. What's worse is that there was no real explanation for it either. Yes, I was really interested in ghost hunters and UFOs and Bigfoot and parapsychology and even had a bookshelf full of this stuff, but none of this stuff was even in my mind at this point in time.

I am nothing if not stubborn and a little confrontational. I set my body and went at that pathway up the cliff like I was going after a tackling dummy. I might have got a little past the wall point by sheer momentum, but I came hurtling back out of there even faster as well. Same tangible rebound as before.

And while I might be stubborn, I'm not fully committed to stupidity either. Something was wrong here, and it was time for me to leave. I went to the other cleft, steeled myself a bit, and started up. Other than the normal amount of hesitation that would be reasonable under the circumstances, no fear jumped at me, I got back up to street level, and I went home and very reluctantly went to sleep.

Afterwards

• There was nothing in my books even remotely similar to what I experienced
• I went back to the cleft (in daylight LOL) and walked up and down it until the guy whose property it backed up to yelled at me to get the hell out of there or he'd call the cops...
• ...which led to a nighttime confirmation that I could use the pathway again, which I did frequently after that
• A few trips later, and I even stopped feeling hesitant about using it
• I asked everybody around if they had ever had anything weird happen there, but nobody related an experience, or even got a funny look from me asking (as if they were hiding anything)
• I cant think of a single event that may have triggered a mental reaction like that. The only thing that has even come close were some night terrors, but these hadn't happened to me at this point in my life.

So...very weird, and unexplainable on my part...which annoys me even to this day

Happy Halloween, and I hope you got some creeps from the fiction and/or the true story!

---

Follow my curation trail, More Info

---

My Books

Home To Texas: Recollections of a Texas Badman

The Effects Of Hoover's Bureaucratic Tactics On COINTELPRO Operations

---

Join our @informationwar Curation Trail

• Our purpose is to encourage posts discussing Information War, Propaganda, Disinformation and other false narratives. We currently have over 9,000 Steem Power and 40+ people following the curation trail to support our mission
• Join our discord and chat with 250+ fellow Informationwar Activists
• Tutorials on all ways to support us and useful resources here
• My INDEX of informationwar writing