text: Haunted House Some people swore that the house was haunted--certainly years of neglect and an assortment of decaying junk in the garden made it look the part--but it was Mrs McKinnet who transformed her run-down house into something that truly terrified the neighborhood children. She barely spoke to anyone, and had the kind of severe demeanor that could make any child wonder what she might do if she caught you on her property. And she was old--old enough that she did look rather like a corpse. That meant, of course, that we had to go. Three girls, nerving ourselves up to do something to prove that we too could have an adventure just like the characters in the books we read. We resolved to sneak into her garage after school. It was a dare, but a tame one compared to tackling the house itself. We climbed the fence at the back, negotiated an overgrown blackberry bush, and turned the handle of the door at the back of the garage. It was open. Perhaps that should have been a warning sign. We ventured inside. Inside were dusty shelves of neatly packed items; boxes of clothes and decorations and papers and discarded appliances. We filed past them silently, like we were in a museum, or in a church looking at mystical sacred objects. In the center of the garage was a 1930s Buick, perfect and gleaming like it was fresh from the showroom. I took it all in silently, the giant trunk, the shining chrome, the small rear window. And then as I moved to better see the side of the car I saw her--Mrs McKinnet, sitting motionless and impassive on the back seat. I stopped in my tracks. I thought for a moment that she was dead, but she turned, just slightly, and her eyes locked with mine. I screamed and we turned and ran. Dianne and Amy didn't believe I could have seen her. They told me the car was empty, that I had been scared, and they mocked me for it. I didn't answer. I had seen her eyes. I had seen her sadness and regret; somehow I knew that she had tried to hold on to some happy memory so tightly that it had curdled in her grasp. I can't explain why I screamed, except that it was too somehow much for me to bear. But seeing me in that moment meant nothing to Mrs McKinnet. She didn't care about anyone or anything in today's world, just some lost moment from long ago, when things were different. I had witnessed a haunting that day, not of a place but of a person--a specter of the past that wouldn't let go. I fell out with Dianne and Amy over in the following weeks. The experience had changed me and they just couldn't understand. Nothing was ever the same again after that.