Since October is the month for spooks, scares and that tingly feeling that crawls up the back of your neck, I thought it would be fun to share a real life spooky story of my own.  in light of Gigi’s recent slumber party, this tale seemed DREADFULLY appropriate!

When I was a kid I loved slumber parties – at my house or someone else’s; it didn’t matter, you could count me in.  I loved staying up super late, and more than anything, I loved staying up late with my friends and no grown ups.  We ruled the tv, the snacks, our bedtime, and the best secrets, confessions and friendship bonds came out in those wee hours with only the best of friends present.  It probably comes as no surprise, then, that my tenth birthday party was a sleepover.  By the time my tenth birthday rolled around, I was a sleepover veteran.  I’d been to enough of them to know the rules – food, games, cake and presents with the parents, then they would go to bed while we watched endless movies and had giggle contests in stereo!  We were loud, we were raucous, we were having the best of times.

For this party, we had set up downstairs in my family room.  I think I had around eight girls over, and we were crammed into the room like sardines, spread out across the floor and the hide-a-bed sofa.  My family room was at the back of our house, partnered with our kitchen, and the windows and sliding door faced out to our back yard.  Because it faced our back yard, and, beyond that, a cow pasture, my parents never got blinds or curtains for that room; our privacy was provided by nature and distance.  We never really paid attention to the darkness outside, as inside was warmth and happiness.  The opaque blackness didn’t bother us one bit…  Until…

It became the witching hour of sleepovers.  That time of night when some kids are tired and beginning to doze, and others, like me, were too amped up on skittles, Doritos and strawberry soda to even consider going to sleep.  It was the perfect time for whispering spooky stories and remembering the tales that are often told around campfires.  I remember reaching the point of finally calming down.  It was, perhaps, around two or three in the morning in my remembrance.  In reality it was probably more like eleven, but staying up late stories and recounting the hours of sleep you got at a sleepover is a lot like fisherman tales – in my memory we never went to sleep before five AM and never got more than two hours of sleep.  The reality is much different, I’m sure.

Anyhow, my friend Cassandra suddenly bolted upright in her sleeping bag, pointing at the oily dark, black window.  She was pointing at the face of a man, a strange man, peering in at us through the window in the wee hours of the morning.  She shakily said to me, “Tami!  There’s a weird guy there!” Her voice started as a tremble and crescendo-ed into scream by the end of her statement.  “What do we do?!”

My answer to that was with a scream, “Mooooooommmmmm!” When I screamed, the man dashed away from the window into the darkness of my back yard, and all of the girls,  asleep or awake, startled, ducked their heads under their pillows and sleeping bags and we all started screaming for my mom as loud as we could.  We were startled, terrified, horrified and felt like our party had been invaded, our security compromised.

My mom finally came marching downstairs, mad as a hornet.  When we told her what happened, she was remarkably blasé about the whole thing.  She even opened the slider and turned on the light to the deck to see if someone was indeed out there in the darkness of our back yard, then admonished us that it was late and we needed to settle down and go to sleep.  I’m sure she thought we were either being silly or had scared ourselves with ghost stories to the point that we had a group hallucination or something!  She headed back upstairs to her room, leaving us feeling very uncomfortable, very nervous and very exposed.

We laid there, that night, for quite some time in the complete dark, daring one another to look at the window to check if ‘he’ was back, eventually drifting off to sleep among scared whispers and freaky thoughts.

The next morning it was all we could talk about, the face at the window.  We checked with everyone we knew, telling them the story of the face at the window, but no one ever fessed up to being our peeper.  As an adult, I had let it go as a sleepover story that probably existed only in my imagination, until a few years ago when I reconnected with Cassandra on Facebook and she reminded me.  At that point I knew the story wasn’t just mine, it was real, it was something that really did happen.  Not in my imagination, but to everyone at that party.


Comments are closed.