Halloween
Robert-a North Shore ghost story
It was late afternoon on Halloween but there were still plenty of red and yellow leaves on the trees surrounding the old quarry. I stood up on my pedals as we biked the highest part of the rocky trail surrounding the steep-sided quarry. I always shivered a little here, thinking what would happen if my front wheel slipped and I pitched down into the water. I had never had a problem-maybe because I was so wary of it-but I still disliked that spot and was always glad to be past it.
Soon we came off the trail and onto a dirt road. This area was usually deserted but up ahead I thought I could see a figure. He disappeared as we rounded a bend then came into sight again. We drew closer, rocks flying under our tires. His back was to us, but I could see him distinctly now, tall and lanky, wearing an old-fashioned baseball jacket. His walk was halting.
We pulled even with him. I slowed as he spoke to us but didn't catch his words. I put my foot down, stopping my bike. Ahead of my husband did the same. I said "Excuse me?"
He raised his head. He was staring directly at us, but it felt like his eyes were looking sideways at the same time. He was young, probably 16 or 17. His hair was very short, and he clutched his jacket tightly around himself although the day was warm.
"I said, lots of bwanches down from the wind." His speech was garbled.
"Yes, there certainly are. Big branches down everywhere," I said politely, lifting my foot and preparing to pedal again.
He raised his hand and again I felt like he was looking in a different direction even though his eyes were meeting mine. "Be carefwul."
"Thank you." I forced a smile and we moved off. The dirt road ended shortly, and we came to pavement. For reasons I still can't explain I stopped my bike and looked behind me. I could see straight back to where we had stopped to talk to the boy less than 30 seconds before. There was no one in sight. I pointed and my husband looked back. His eyes widened. I felt an electric shock run through me.
We rolled fast down the hill, pulling up at the bottom. We stopped and looked at each other. I felt sick.
"You guys look like you've seen a ghost."
The man raking leaves in the yard opposite where we stopped spoke quietly. We both turned and stared at him.
"You've seen him, haven't you?"
I shook my head a little frantically. "What? Who?"
The man nodded back toward the top of hill. "Robert, or at least that's what people say his name was. Supposedly it happened in the 1950s. He was different and always picked on. A bunch of kids lured him to the quarry as a joke."
The man leaned on his rake. "The story is that they got him drunk and left him, thinking they would just scare him. But he supposedly fell off the steepest part of the quarry ledge, at the high point of the trail. You probably know it.
"Oh my god."
The man stared at us more intently now. "The crazy thing is that they say his body was never recovered. How could that be? That quarry is deep but it's not that big. Bodies always eventually surface, but his never did, or so they say."
We had drawn closer together. I whispered, looking back up the hill. "Have you seen him?"
"Twice in my life, though not for a long time. I don't walk up there anymore." The man stuck his hands in his pockets.
We looked at each other for another moment, and then he nodded to us and resumed raking. We pushed off, heading down the hill toward the main road.
We didn't say anything to each other, but I knew that we wouldn't be going back through the quarries. Not today.
Maybe not ever.
October 2020
In this upside-down time, when few kids will get to trick or treat, when masks are worn every day instead of once a year, I find myself thinking back to the Halloweens of my past.
The holiday was still mostly for kids in the late sixties and early seventies-it hadn't become the rather bloated thing it is now. Only the smallest children went with a parent, the rest of us paired up with older brothers and younger sisters and groups of friends. We were free spirits roaming the night, unsupervised and giddy with excitement, more than a little scared although we wouldn't admit it. The fear was delicious, better than the candy we collected.
Costumes were cobbled together from the ragbag or bought from Zayres or Caldors. Decorations consisted of carved pumpkins and homemade scarecrows slumped in lawn chairs or sheet ghosts hung from trees.
It was the first time we truly understood how different the world is in the dark. The familiar streets were black and strange. Shadowed figures, half-seen, vanished in the dark. The neighborhood that we knew so well was strange new territory. The driveways seemed longer and the distance between houses immense. The front steps and porches were welcome pools of light. We hung onto our younger siblings hands and told ourselves it was so they wouldn't be scared.
Everyone talked about the kid who got a razor blade in an apple but no one knew whether the story was true. We gorged on Sugar Babies and Milk Duds while we walked, and no one checked our candy bags when we got home.
One year, right before Halloween, my best friend and I staged a haunted walk in the woods behind her house. We made the neighborhood kids stick their hands in a bowl of Spaghetti-Os, and called it eyeball soup. We concocted a tale of a family buried alive, while we stood over a roughened patch of dirt we had dug up that morning. Everyone was terrified and one girl cried.
Another time, while trick or treating at the end of our street, a friend and I dared each other to go up the back stairs of a house after no one answered the front door. It was pitch black. The steps were steep and narrow. We got to the top, clinging to each other, and knocked on the storm door. There was a scuffling noise and out of nowhere, a cat screamed down on top of us. We nearly fell down the stairs in terror, the cat plunging through the darkness with us. Candy spilling everywhere, we sprinted away, shrieking with fear and laughter.
But something happened late one Halloween afternoon that I still can't explain, even 45 years later. I had been riding by myself at the old farm where I stabled my horse and the ancient barn was empty when I got back. Everything was quiet, and the only sounds were the horses moving in the paddock. I called out but there were no answering voices.
The sun was low in the sky and the air was cool. I shivered in my thin jacket. Where was everyone? Suddenly panicked, I got on my horse, bareback this time, and rode out again. I had never ridden so late in the day and my heart was hammering. My horse was uneasy, reluctant to leave his stall. Shadows were gathering beneath the trees and the fields were nearly dark. I shouted but still no one answered. It seemed, for one impossible moment, that I was the only person alive.
It was almost dark as I headed back to the barn, trembling. And now there were lights and people--my sister and the barn workers. "We were here, what are you talking about?" they said, when I slid off, crying, demanding to know where everyone was. "We were right here all the time!"
Spirits roaming free, indeed
The headless biker
of Harold Parker
An urban legend, reimagnined
The motorcyclist harassed people. That much everyone agreed on. He rode too fast and followed cars too closely. His bike was loud, too loud.
He wore all black from head to foot and roared around the streets of North Reading and through nearby Harold Parker State Forest almost every night. No one knew who he was, but he was a menace, that was certain.
The biker bothered everyone but he angered one man in particular. Often, just as the man was drifting off to sleep, the biker would thunder by, revving his bike as loudly as he could, and the man would leap terrified from his bed. He's targeting me, the man cursed. He's trying to drive me out of my mind.
Someone has to do something, the man thought.
I have to do something, he decided.
And one moonless night, he did.
The man strung piano wire between two trees on one of Harold Parker's narrow curving roads. He gauged the height carefully. And then he crouched in the woods and waited.
Soon he heard the familiar roar, and then the biker flashed by, going full-throttle. He hit the piano wire at neck height, exactly as the man had planned. The motorcycle skidded and careened off the road and into the trees in an explosive crash. The biker flew through the air. The silence was suddenly deafening.
The man crept out from behind the trees and stood there, his heart pounding. There, in front of him, was the biker's head, severed and bloody. His eyes were open and staring. The man shuddered. He backed away, and started to run. He reached his car and drove home, panting, his hands clenching the wheel.
Lying in bed, he couldn't stop shaking. But it was quiet. There would be no motorcycle tearing through the night, disturbing decent folks' sleep. It would be peaceful again.
But wait, what was that sound? No-it couldn't be! It was the sound of a motorcycle, louder than he had ever heard it. He raced out of house, the door swinging behind him. There in front of him was the biker-and where his head had been was there nothing, only a severed neck, streaming blood.
The cyclist pointed at the man. He pulled the bike into a wheelie and disappeared. But the noise went on. The man fell to the ground, his hands trying to block the roar that was shattering his eardrums and shredding every coherent thought.
The man was found the next morning on his front lawn, dried blood covering the sides of his head, his eyes wide open. His heart had stopped.
And to this day there are people who say that they hear the roar of a motorcycle in Harold Parker, late at night when all decent folks are in bed... and it's loud.
Too loud.
stock image
What you don't know
In the end the town councilors wouldn't allow the wooden cross to be erected on the roadside where Henry had been hit and killed, left in a state that had even the hardened EMTs vomiting in the bushes.
Owen had fought for months to get the cross put up, gone to meeting after meeting, but it was all for nothing. Something about town ordinances and no religious symbols on state highways. The cross could go nearby in the woods, off the walking trail, they said, but it couldn't go on the roadway.
Leaving the town hall, Owen had walked right behind the two town councilors, quiet as a shadow. They were talking together in low voices, smirking a little. "He's dead. He doesn't care where his cross goes. What you don't know...," one said, his voice trailing off. They both laughed loudly and parted with a wave as they headed to their cars.
Owen had stood in the parking for some time, clenching and unclenching his fists. He tried to summon up his favorite memory of his boy--sitting at a picnic table in the sun, smiling a little crookedly, handsome and whole--but it was too late.
He bent over in agony as the memory came roaring over him--the memory of a thing on a cold metal table that they told him was Henry. The coroner had tried his best, but very little could be done. The speeding car had inflicted too much damage.
The driver served five years and every day of those years felt like an insult to Owen. At least that man was alive, breathing, eating, while Henry was cold and dead in the ground with only a headstone in the cemetery and a wooden cross in the woods for the world to remember him by.
It was during those minutes of agony in the parking lot when the idea came to Owen, like a gift out of nowhere. Stunned, he accepted it. He stood up shakily. For the first time, for the first moment, since Henry had died, he felt a sense of relief. Now he knew what he had to do. Now he could wait as long as he had to; he could wait years. It was the only way.
And after those years had gone by and the time came, the act itself was surprisingly easy. The man lived alone, a few towns away. He had been out of prison for six months. Owen slipped in, quiet as a shadow. The door was unlocked--an invitation? The place stank of alcohol and worse.
Owen had pondered for a long time whether he should kill the man face to face, let him see the father of the boy he had reduced to a broken, bloodied carcass. In the end he decided not to. What good would it do? Only death would serve, and the quicker the better. He fingered the belt in his hands, Henry's belt.
At the last moment he couldn't help himself. When the man had nearly stopped breathing, Owen flung him over to look into his eyes. He saw pain, and resignation. It was almost as if he had too been waiting for this, that he knew it was the only way.
Owen let the dead man crumple to the floor. Now for the hard work. This was the part that Owen had lain awake nights dreading. What if he didn't have the strength? What if the night wasn't long enough?
But he did, and it was. Somehow it was, just barely. Digging the hole deep enough was the hardest thing that Owen had ever done. But his battered, blistered hands, his wrenched back--they didn't matter. None of it came close to the pain in his heart and the pain that Henry had suffered.
He finished just as dawn was breaking. He couldn't straighten up but he raised his eyes to the large wooden cross with Henry's name on it.
The dirt around it was undisturbed, Sticks, pine needles, broken branches-everything was as it had been when the night began. People walking by, biking by-all they would see was the same big cross in the woods, the memorial to Henry.
"What you don't know," Owen murmured, wiping his bloody hands on his pants as the first rays of sun slanted through the trees.
